Roger Sherman

His schooling stopped at the grammar school and his father's bookshelves, and he spent his early working years making shoes. A Harvard-trained parish minister in Stoughton, Samuel Dunbar, took an interest and supplied the rest of an education. When his father died in 1743, Sherman moved his mother and siblings to New Milford, Connecticut, opened the town's first store with his brother, and took the post of county surveyor two years later. Surveying bought him land. Land bought him standing. He worked out the astronomy for a run of almanacs, read law without a teacher, and was admitted to the bar at Litchfield in 1754, at 33, having never seen the inside of a college.

He signed all four of the founding charters, and no one else did. At Philadelphia in 1787 he was 66 and among the busiest men in the room, making or seconding motions 160 times against James Madison's 177. He wrote the clause forbidding the states to issue paper money, and he made the vice president the Senate's presiding officer on the reasoning that the man would otherwise have nothing to do. BriefHistory carries the compromise and the convention. This page is about the negotiator himself, who spoke so plainly that history nearly mislaid him.

The man who made the Senate possible did not trust the voters. Sherman told the convention that the people should have as little to do as may be about the government, because they wanted information and were constantly liable to be misled, and he argued that no branch should be elected directly by them. He opposed Madison's Bill of Rights on the ground that written guarantees would weaken the states' hold over their own citizens. And he opposed slavery in principle while brokering the bargains that shielded it: believing the institution was already dying and drifting south, he shaped compromises that bought him allies from the Carolinas and left the slave states with what they had come for.

He died in his sleep on July 23, 1793, after two months of an illness his biographers call typhoid, though the Gazette of the United States reported that his own physician had located the trouble in the liver. They buried him on the New Haven Green, and when the town moved the graveyard in 1821 they moved him to Grove Street. He is the earliest born of all United States senators. The obscurity is partly his own doing: a terse speaker, he kept no record of Philadelphia, so the convention comes down to us largely in the notes of the man he beat. Connecticut named a town for him, and he stands on the Jefferson Memorial pediment.

Roger Sherman's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Sherman's almanacs book
  Published from 1750 to 1761, with his own astronomical calculations from 1759 1750
• A Caveat Against Injustice book
  His pamphlet against paper currency, written around his admission to the bar 1754
• The Continental Association law
  The first of the four founding charters he signed 1774
• Declaration of Independence law
  He sat on the Committee of Five that drafted it 1776
• The Connecticut Compromise law
  A House by population and a Senate by state, carried out of the Grand Committee 1787
• Revision of the Connecticut statutes law
  Done with Richard Law, who was appointed alongside him to rewrite the state's archaic laws 1790

• 1743 aged ~22 His father dies and he moves the family to New Milford, Connecticut He opened the town's first store there with his brother William.
• 1745 aged ~24 Takes the post of county surveyor The income let him buy land and build a reputation across the county.
• November 17, 1749 aged 28 Marries Elizabeth Hartwell She died in New Milford in 1760. He married Rebecca Prescott three years later.
• 1754 aged ~33 Admitted to the bar at Litchfield with no formal legal training
• 1766 aged ~45 Becomes a justice of the Superior Court of Connecticut He held the seat for 23 years.
• July 4, 1776 aged 55 Signs the Declaration of Independence, having sat on the Committee of Five
• 1787 aged ~66 Carries the compromise that produced the Senate At 66 he was the second oldest delegate, after Franklin, and one of the most active.
• June 13, 1791 aged 70 Takes a seat in the United States Senate He had sat in the first House of Representatives since 1789.
• July 23, 1793 aged 72 Dies in his sleep at New Haven Two months of illness. His biographers say typhoid, his physician said the liver.

• James Madison 1751–1836
  Fourth President and Father of the Constitution who co-authored the Federalist Papers. opposed on representation
• Alexander Hamilton 1755–1804
  Founding Father who established the nation's financial system and co-authored the Federalist Papers. fellow delegate at Philadelphia
• William Tecumseh Sherman 1820–1891
  Union general whose campaigns through Georgia and the Carolinas helped destroy the Confederacy’s capacity to wage war. distant cousin
• Henry Clay 1777–1852
  Senator and statesman known as the Great Compromiser for his role in preserving the Union. inherited the chamber he designed
• Daniel Webster 1782–1852
  Senator and orator whose speeches on the Union and Constitution are among the greatest in history. inherited the chamber he designed