A leading figure in the First Continental Congress and the Second Continental Congress, and author of the Connecticut Compromise at the Constitutional Convention, Roger Sherman is perhaps Connecticut's most prominent Revolutionary leader. The third of seven children raised by William Sherman and his second wife Mehetabel, Sherman was born in Newton, Massachusetts, on April 19, 1721. He moved to Connecticut when he was a young man and worked as a shoe cobbler and county surveyor before being admitted to the bar in 1754, and thereupon he threw himself into colonial politics.

Sherman was elected to the Connecticut general assembly in 1755, served as a justice of the peace for Litchfield County between 1755 and 1761, and then moved to New Haven to become a successful retail merchant. He was a judge in New Haven in 1765-66 and a superior court judge between 1766 and 1789. During those years he became an ardent supporter of independence, attending Congress from 1774 to 1781 and from 1783 to 1784. He agreed to the cession of Connecticut's western land claims, helped codify Connecticut laws in 1783, and was elected mayor of New Haven in 1784.

In 1787 Sherman was one of Connecticut's delegates to the Constitutional Convention, where he proposed the Connecticut Compromise to break a deadlock between large and small states regarding the manner in which congressional seats were apportioned. States with large populations argued for representation based on the number of people in each state, while states with smaller populations feared political obscurity in such an arrangement and pushed for equal representation for every state. Sherman proposed a bicameral Congress in which representation in the upper house (the Senate) was the same for every state, while in the lower house (the House of Representatives) it was based on population. The compromise appeased parties on all sides and proved one of the key building blocks on which the U.S. Constitution was based.

Sherman is famous for being the only man to have signed each of the key documents associated with the creation of the United States: the Articles of Association (1774), the Declaration of Independence (1776), the Articles of Confederation (1781), and the U.S. Constitution (1787). A devout Christian, committed Federalist, and father of 15 children with two wives, he was a member of the House of Representatives from 1789 to 1791, and of the Senate from 1791 until his death on July 23, 1793.

Bibliography:

1)         Christopher Collier, Roger Sherman's Connecticut: Yankee Politics and the American Revolution (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1971)

2)         John G. Rommel, Connecticut's Yankee Patriot: Roger Sherman (Hartford, Conn.: American Revolution Bicentennial Commission of Connecticut, 1980)

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