By Ken Bridges, Texas History Minute
History is sometimes made in dramatic moments in public but is often made behind the scenes. There were many important figures involved in the different stages of the American Revolution and the establishment of the nation’s system of free government. One of the most important was Roger Sherman of Connecticut. The soft-spoken, pious man was the only man to sign all three of the nation’s most important founding documents: the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution.
Roger Sherman was born in Massachusetts in April 1721. His father was a farmer. His education was limited as there were few opportunities for education in early colonial America. His father, however, owned an extensive library, which the younger Sherman studied extensively.
With only a grammar school education, Sherman learned to be a shoemaker. When his father died in 1743, he decided to move his family to nearby Connecticut. After settling in New Milford, he quickly set up a shoemaking shop and quickly became involved in the young, growing community. He studied as much as he could kills to provide for his family and to better serve the community. Within two years, he became the town clerk and then the county surveyor.
He was raised as a Puritan and stayed faithful to those ideas his whole life, often writing on religious questions. Sherman regularly spoke out against slavery, believing it was sinful. Though a Puritan, he believed in freedom of religion and believed that all Christians should have the same equal rights instead of restricting rights only to those who belonged to the state church. Sherman was eventually appointed to the board of directors for Yale College, which had been founded as a seminary. Eventually, Sherman became treasurer for the college and worked to build a new chapel on the campus. For his service, he was awarded an honorary degree.
Sherman’s success grew. He taught himself the law and was admitted to the Connecticut bar in 1754. In 1755, he was elected to the Connecticut legislature, where he served intermittently until 1784. In 1765, he was appointed as judge of the court of common pleas. Though he assumed multiple roles in government, which was accepted at the time, he played an important role in shaping not only the laws of Connecticut but of the emerging United States.
As the American Revolution approached, he joined those colonists protesting the actions of Great Britain. In 1774, he was selected to represent Connecticut at the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia. Protesting British acts against Boston, he supported a continent-wide boycott of all British goods.
In 1775, he was again selected to the Second Continental Congress. As fighting broke out between the colonists and the British across New England, he believed that independence was the only option the colonies had left. In June 1776, Richard Henry Lee made a motion for the colonies to declare independence. Sherman was appointed to a committee of five to draft a statement to Great Britain, the colonists, and the world why the colonies were seeking independence. The committee included Ben Franklin, John Adams, and Robert R. Livingston, but was led by Thomas Jefferson, who did most of the writing. As a result, he played a key role in developing one of the founding documents of the new nation and signed the Declaration of Independence.
Continuing to serve in the Continental Congress during the American Revolution, he also helped craft the nation’s first national constitution, the Articles of Confederation. Sherman signed and Congress approved the Articles of Confederation in 1777, but they were not approved until 1781. This new government would only have a one-house national congress and would not have an executive or a federal judiciary and soon proved unworkable.
In 1781, he stepped down from Congress and resumed his work as a judge in Connecticut. At the end of the war, his expertise was needed again. He assisted Ben Franklin in negotiating the final peace between the U. S. and Britain, which would become the Treaty of Paris. When the treaty was signed in 1783, with Britain recognizing American independence, Sherman, too, was one of the signers.
When the Constitutional Convention convened in Philadelphia in 1787, Sherman was again called to serve. At 66, he was one of the older delegates and worked with James Madison, who led most of the debates and established most of the ideas of what became the modern federal government, including the three branches of government, the separation of powers between the branches, and a system of accountability.
The issue of how the states would be represented threatened to derail the proceedings. Larger states wanted representation based on population while smaller states wanted equal representation in the new Congress. Sherman devised a compromise that saved the proceedings and became one of the defining features of the federal governments. The Great Compromise, or the Connecticut Compromise, allowed both sides to have what they wanted: a two-house Congress with the House of Representatives determined by population and the Senate represented with two Senators from each state. Sherman would also sign the Constitution, which is now the oldest national constitution still in use in the world.
After ratification of the Constitution in 1788, the first elections under the new document were held. Sherman won election to the House of Representatives, where he served for one term. In 1791, Connecticut legislators appointed him to the U. S. Senate. He served in the Senate for just over two years before he was struck with typhoid fever. At the time, there were no treatments for the condition, leading to his death in July 1793 at age 72.