Chapter XI: Part II: The Bi-Centennial Exercises (5)

“Silas Deane, his colleague in the Continental Congress, in a frank
letter to his wife, thus paints Sherman, as he appeared at a New
York dinner party:

“‘Mr. Sherman is clever in private, but I will only say he is as
badly calculated to appear in such a Company as a chestnut-burr is
for an eye-stone. He occasioned some shrewd countenances among the
company, and not a few oaths, by the odd questions he asked, and
the very odd and countrified cadence with which he speaks; but he
was, and did, as well as I expected.’[21]

“In the same letter Deane shows his vexation at Sherman’s views
regarding traveling on Sunday:

“‘Mr. Sherman (would to Heaven he were well at New Haven,) is
against our sending our carriages over the ferry this evening,
because it is Sunday; so we shall have a scorching sun to drive
forty miles in, to-morrow. I wish I could send you his picture, and
make it speak, and in the background paint the observations made on
him here. But enough of this at present. I will have him drawn in
Philadelphia, if it can be done at any reasonable rate.’[22]

“To judge these criticisms fairly we must remember that Deane was a
man of fashion and of the world, while Sherman was neither. A plain
country lad, a hardworking journeyman at his trade, a busy
surveyor, a sagacious selectman, a shrewd store-keeper, a
hard-headed lawyer, an industrious judge, he had qualities not of a
kind that shine in polite society, but of a kind nevertheless that
count in life, in every position which a man may be called to fill.
He would have made a better figure with better manners. But a
rusticity that would have ruined the advance of most men was
everywhere tolerated in Sherman, because there was felt everywhere
an admiration for his mind and heart,--his solid sense, wise
forecast, and practical wisdom.

“While living in this town, Sherman was asked one day by a
neighbor, the next time he went to the county seat, to retain
counsel for him to bring a petition to court in a matter connected
with the settlement of an estate. He noted down the facts which he
thought it would be necessary to state in the papers prepared for
such a proceeding, and the lawyer whom he consulted was so much
impressed with the clearness and precision of the memorandum that
he strongly advised him to adopt the legal profession.

“There were then no American, and, indeed, no English law schools.
An education for the bar was commonly gained by studying the works
of some of the English judges of former generations, under the
advice of a local practitioner, but with little other assistance
from him. The system of justice administered in Connecticut was
rough and unhewn, and not a few of the judges of the highest courts
had never followed the profession of the law.

“Sherman began to read law, in consequence of the incident to
which I have alluded, when he was about thirty years of age, and
was admitted to the bar in Litchfield County in 1754. There were
then few lawyers in the colony who gained the whole of their
livelihood from their profession. Many were also farmers. Sherman
retained his interest in the New Milford store.

“Meanwhile he had been sent to the General Assembly, and made first
a justice of the peace, and then a side judge of the County Court.

“The record of one of the early justice suits tried before him well
illustrates the difference in political ideas between those times
and ours. It shows the conviction and fine of one of his
fellow-townsmen for a violation of the Colony statute in not
attending public worship in any congregation allowed by law on
January 29, 1758, nor on any Sunday in the month next preceding.

“‘Squire’ Sherman, as he was now called, brought to his new
profession the strong common sense and good business judgment which
had served to advance him in his previous employments, and which,
if added to sound learning, will always assure success at the bar.

“The late President Porter, who, in early life, was settled as a
minister at New Milford, once told me of a story which he heard
here of some wise words uttered by Sherman at this period in his
history. ‘Squire Sherman,’ said one of his neighbors to him, one
day, ‘tell me, are most controversies that come before Judges in
lawsuits decided justly or unjustly?’ ‘Sir,’ was the reply, ‘it’s
not the point whether they are decided justly or unjustly: they are
decided, and made an end of.’ And in truth it is perhaps the best
office of courts of justice that, however often they may err in
their processes, they certainly bring every human controversy that
is within their reach to a final stop. The conclusion may be right
or wrong; but a conclusion it is.

“Sherman was a deacon of the New Milford Church, the clerk and
treasurer of the society, and one of the school committee. At the
age of forty, he removed to New Haven, and connected himself with
the White Haven Church, one of the two original bodies out of which
grew the United Society and the United Church. Here again the
records show his faithful work on committees and as collector of
the rates imposed by the society.

“Five years later he was appointed a Judge of the Superior Court, a
position which he continued to hold for nearly a quarter of a
century.

“The British legislation culminating in the Stamp Act had now begun
to arouse the spirit of independence in the American colonies.
Sherman was one of those who took the most advanced ground. He
maintained that Parliament had no jurisdiction over them whatever.

“Connecticut sent him as one of her delegates to the first
Continental Congress, in 1774, and there he maintained this
doctrine with all his power. John Adams reports him as declaring
upon the floor that there was no legislative power superior to the
Colonial Assemblies, and that Americans had adopted the common law
of England, not as the common law, but as the highest reason.

“It was his thorough-going republicanism, indeed, which had carried
him into public life, and put him in a leading place among the
legislators of his State. He had been first elected to the
Governor’s Council or upper house of the General Assembly in 1766.
The Stamp Act had brought the ‘Sons of Liberty’ into existence.
They had forced, under threat of death, Jared Ingersoll, who, under
the advice of Franklin had accepted the position of stampmaster for
Connecticut, to resign the office. Governor Fitch, though with
reluctance, had taken the official oath which the obnoxious Act
required. It cost him his place, William Pitkin being elected his
successor a year later. With him went out of office four of his
Council who sympathized with his deference to parliamentary
authority; dropped by the people to make room for others who were
regarded as more fully Americans in spirit and doctrine.

“No one was then eligible for a seat on the Council-board who had
not been officially nominated in the previous year. Twenty
nominations were annually made for the twelve places, and the
election was so managed that the twelve in office always headed the
list and were voted on first. A majority was not required for an
election. To be once nominated for the upper house was in this way
a substantial assurance of an ultimate election, and to be once
elected was a substantial assurance of an annual re-election for
life.

“Sherman, in 1766, had been on the waiting list for five years. A
political whirlwind, unexampled in our Colonial annals, then made
five vacancies, and death a sixth. He went in with five other new
men, and remained a member until after the close of the Revolution.

“Religion in those days, so far as form at least was concerned, was
a part of politics. There was a religious establishment in
Connecticut. It put the church beside the schoolhouse on the
village green. It made Church and State largely one.

“Sherman was not wiser than his generation in regard to matters of
religion. His reading had been mainly in English history and law;
but the subject next most interesting to him was theology. He
accepted Calvinism. He believed in the Puritans. He distrusted and
feared the Church of England. It was the day when so tolerant and
fair-minded a man as President Stiles could record as among the
fourteen trials and difficulties of this life: ‘Concern for the
Congregational churches, & prevalence of Episcopacy &
Wickedness.’[23]

“When, therefore, about the middle of the eighteenth century, the
Episcopalians, who were especially strong in Connecticut, began to
push for the appointment of one or more American bishops, it is not
surprising that Sherman’s voice was raised in opposition.

“A long letter on this subject, written in 1768, which, it is
believed, came from his pen, is among the files of the New Haven
East Association, to which his church belonged. In this it is urged
that if Parliament provides for American bishops, they might bring
here all the functions and authority of those of England, and hold
ecclesiastical courts like those of Laud, from which our fathers
fled into the wilderness.

“There was this piece of solid ground under Sherman’s argument.
Grant the power of Parliament to establish an American episcopate,
and a new point was made in favor of the general right of
Parliament to legislate as to all American affairs. This
consideration, no doubt, greatly influenced his course; and it was
sufficient to defeat the consecration of any bishop for America
until that of Dr. Seabury, which followed closely after the
Revolution.

“The Wyoming controversy between Connecticut and Pennsylvania was
one in which Sherman took an active part.

“Our charter bounded us ‘on the North by the line of the
Massachusetts Plantation; and on the South by the Sea; and in
Longitude as the Line of the Massachusetts Colony, running from
East to West, _That is to say_, From the said Narragansett Bay on
the East to the South Sea on the West part, with the Islands
thereto Adjoining.’ This gave us a paper title to a swath of North
America sixty miles wide, at least, running from Rhode Island to
the Pacific, and taking in what are now the sites of Wilkesbarre,
Cleveland, Chicago, and Omaha. Our people, as early as 1762, began
to make settlements in that part of it in western Pennsylvania
known as the Wyoming Valley. The General Assembly made it a county
in 1776, styling it Westmoreland County, and it furnished the
Twenty-fourth Connecticut Regiment in the Continental Army.

“Sherman was one of a committee appointed by the legislature in
1774 to report upon measures to support the title of the Wyoming
settlers, which Pennsylvania now disputed, under a later and
conflicting grant from the Crown. Energetic measures were
recommended and adopted, and, knowing the power of the newspapers,
Sherman shortly afterwards followed up the report by a clear and
full statement of the position of Connecticut, in a letter to the
Connecticut _Journal_ of New Haven. Public sentiment, here, was
much divided. There were many who thought that such an ‘expansion’
threatened the safety of our liberties. Sherman proposed that the
colony should secure a determination of its bounds from the King in
Council. Such a law suit, said those who were for letting Wyoming
go, would be slow and costly; and, even if we should win it, what
then? A defeat, Mr. Ingersoll had declared in another newspaper
article, ‘would be very detrimental, but a victory must be absolute
ruin.’ ‘But,’ replied Sherman, ‘he gives no reason for his opinion.
And can his bare assertion make the people of this colony, who are
a company of farmers, believe that to be quieted in their claim to
a large tract of valuable land would ruin them?’

“The Revolution transferred the judicial decision of this
controversy from the King in Council to the Congress of the United
States. A Court of Commissioners was organized to try the issue,
and, in 1782, judgment was rendered against us.

“The Commissioners had prudently determined, before hearing the
case, to give no reasons for their decision, whatever it might be.
That they were not of the strongest may be inferred from the fact
that four years later Congress accepted from Connecticut a
relinquishment of the rest of her Western title, with an express
reservation of a large strip of northern Ohio. This is still known
as the Western Reserve. We soon sold it, and the proceeds
constituted our State School fund of $2,000,000.

“The services rendered by Sherman to the United States outshine
those which he rendered to Connecticut; but it is only because the
field was larger, and the circumstances more striking.

“Three are commemorated upon a mural tablet erected to his memory
in the church of which he was a member in New Haven. This states
that he was ‘one of the committee which drew the Declaration of
Independence, of that which reported the Articles of Confederation,
of the Convention that framed the national Constitution, and a
Signer of these three Charters of American liberty.’

“To no other man came the good fortune to set his hand to these
three great State papers. One marked the birth of the nation. The
next was its first attempt to agree on a constitution of
government--a necessary compromise, and temporary as compromises
always are. The last was what has made the United States the
greatest, richest, freest country that the sun shines upon to-day;
and it was in that, that the work of Sherman told most.

“He was among the leading members of the Convention from whose
hands it came. Connecticut was wise enough to send to it her
strongest men. Our delegates were William Samuel Johnson, Oliver
Ellsworth, and Roger Sherman.

“Johnson was the representative in his generation of the family in
the State most distinguished for public services and personal
attainments. He had ably represented our interests abroad, in
important matters, and twenty years before had received the degree
of Doctor of Civil Law from Oxford University. The Convention made
him head of the committee to put the measures which it adopted in
proper form and style. Oliver Ellsworth, who had been the foremost
lawyer at our bar, was then an associate of Sherman on the bench of
the Supreme Court, and was soon to be Chief Justice of the United
States. But Sherman had a truer sense than either of his colleagues
of what must be the nature and soul of the new government. He felt
that it must stand upon a double foundation, that of the States,
acting each for itself, and that of the people of all the States,
acting for all together.[24]

“He felt, too, that it must stand for human liberty.

“Our State was then a slave-holding State, but he was one of those
who were determined that the word slave should not stain the pages
of the Constitution of the United States. Later, when he was a
member of the first Congress, one of the representatives from
Virginia (for Virginia statesmen were then looking to the gradual
abolition of slavery) proposed to put into the tariff not a duty of
ten dollars on each _slave_ imported. Sherman opposed it. He could
not, he said, reconcile himself to the insertion of human beings as
an article of duty, among goods, wares, and merchandise; and, when
it was replied that the doctrine of the Declaration of Independence
required the endeavor to wipe off the stigma of slavery from the
American government, his reply was that the principles of the
motion and the principles of the bill were inconsistent: the
principle of the bill was to raise revenue, and the principle of
the motion was to correct a moral evil. These few and well put
words illustrate that strong sense of proportion and relation which
gave Sherman such weight in every deliberative assembly.

“In the Convention which framed the Constitution, he was the author
of the compromise by which, in Congress, the Senate represents the
States and the House, the people.

“Afterwards, when Congress was engaged in formulating the first ten
amendments of the Constitution, which serve as a bill of rights for
the people and for the States, it was he who gave the final shape
to the last and most important.

“This (originally the Twelfth, for Congress proposed twelve of
which ten only were ratified by the States), as reported by the
committee, read thus: ‘The powers not delegated to the United
States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are
reserved to the States respectively.’ Sherman moved, and the House
voted to add the words, ‘or to the people.’

“He knew, as a lawyer, that when anything is reserved in a grant it
is reserved by and for the maker of the grant. Who made this grant?
From what authority did the Constitution proceed? Was it from the
States, and were the powers reserved to be reserved to them and
each of them? This was said, or implied, in the original draft of
the amendment. Sherman’s addition recognized the principle,
afterwards affirmed by Chief Justice Marshall, that the people also
had a share in ordaining this Constitution for themselves and their
posterity.

“It is also worthy of remark, that he was careful to follow the
phrase used in the preceding amendment (the Ninth) in which it is
declared that the enumeration in the Constitution of certain rights
shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the
people. What people is thus meant? Is it the people of each State,
regarded state-wise, or the whole people of the United States
regarded nation-wise? That was a question on which public opinion
had been divided, and which it remained for the Civil War to settle
by force of arms.

“Sherman did not seek to precipitate this issue. The framers of the
Constitution of the Southern Confederacy met the same question and
decided it. By the article of that document (the Sixth) which
corresponds to the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution of the
United States, the powers not delegated to the Confederate States
were ‘reserved to the States respectively, or to the people
thereof.’[25] Here is the doctrine of States Rights, clear and
unmistakable. It is not improbable that Sherman would have
preferred the use of similar language by the First Congress, in
drafting the Tenth Amendment. The interest of his State lay or
seemed to lie in that direction. But he had been willing, as a
political necessity, to build the Constitution on pillars of
compromise, and this was one of them. He was content to use words
of comprehension, which the adherents of each school of American
politics could read in their own sense, and to leave it to another
generation to determine which should prevail.

“Another service of importance rendered by Sherman in the First
Congress was to bring the cent into actual use in the financial
system of the United States.

“The revenue measure for the collection by the United States of
customs duties on imported goods, which Congress had urged upon the
States in 1783 as an amendment to the Articles of Confederation,
had stated the proposed duties in dollars and ninetieths of a
dollar. Thus, on rum of Jamaica proof, the rate fixed was four
ninetieths of a dollar, and upon all other spirituous liquors three
ninetieths.[26] This mode of reckoning fractions of a dollar
continued to be that pursued in government accounts down to the
close of the Confederation.[27] In 1786, Congress had, indeed,
provided for the coinage of both cents and half-cents.[28] The next
year a contract was made with James Jarvis of New Haven to strike
off three hundred tons of these coins.[29] This contract was
fulfilled at least in part, and many of the cents struck under it
are to be found in the cabinets of collectors. They bear the legend
_Fugio_, and the date 1787. The work was done at New Haven;
Connecticut being then the great copper-producing State.

“It is probable, however, that these New Haven cents had a very
limited circulation. Hildreth says that but a few tons were issued,
and it is certain that in New York the old plan of reckoning by
ninetieths of dollars remained in use for several years more.

“In 1789 Madison reported a tariff bill to the First Congress under
our present Constitution. The rates of duty were left blank.
Sherman, who had been chairman of a committee appointed by the
General Assembly of Connecticut to supervise the coinage of copper
coins under State authority,[30] took an early opportunity to
propose that in filling the blanks that Madison had left, they
should begin with rum, and tax it fifteen cents a gallon. He
preferred, he said, to use the term cent, for its convenience, as
ten made a dime, and ten dimes, a dollar.[31] This explanation was
evidently necessary to make the House understand what a cent was.
They approved his suggestion, and the bill when passed stated all
duties in dollars and cents. It was thus that the inconvenient and
senseless division of the dollar into ninetieths never afterwards
obtained recognition on the statute books of the United States.

“At the close of the Revolution Connecticut found herself a
tributary State to her neighbors on each side. Her citizens were
buying heavily from New York, Newport, and Boston importers, and
thus paying duties for the benefit of New York, Rhode Island, and
Massachusetts. Connecticut consumed, according to an estimate by
Chief Justice Ellsworth, as late as 1787, about a third of all the
goods entered at the New York custom house, and paid in that way
for New York customs something like twenty thousand pounds a
year[32]--a vast sum for those early days.

“It was thought that if New Haven were made a free port, and
special encouragement offered to merchants to settle there in
business, we might be able to import what we wanted for ourselves.

“Our first city charter was thereupon issued, and New Haven became
a city in 1784, with all the privileges of a free port for seven
years. Her city seal devised by President Stiles still bears the
legend, _Mare liberum_.

“Roger Sherman was elected its first mayor. The charter made the
term of office during good behavior, and he remained the mayor
until his death.

“Sherman was fond of studying problems of controversial theology.
The first President Dwight, in summing up his character, described
him as a ‘profound logician, statesman, lawyer, and
theologian.’[33]

“Religion is the philosophy of life, and theology is, or ought to
be, the philosophy of religion. No thoughtful man can avoid
occasional reflection on these high themes. It is our good fortune
to study them in the light of sciences unknown to him. Put any
doctrinal discussion of the eighteenth century by the side of those
of our day, directed and controlled as ours must be by the truths
of biology, the discoveries of archæologists, and the principles of
evolution, and the older statements seem unreal and unsubstantial.

“Sherman’s thought, however, in theology, as in everything else,
was clear and plain. In 1789, he published, in New Haven, a sermon
of his own composition. A year later he exchanged several long
letters with Rev. Dr. Samuel Hopkins of Newport, in which he
attacked that divine’s peculiar doctrine that a man ought to be
willing to suffer eternal damnation, if need be, for the glory of
God. Calvin was quoted as an authority for this, by the advocates
of “Hopkinsianism.’ ‘Calvinists,’ replied Sherman, ‘do not found
their faith on the authority of his opinions: that would be to
entertain an opinion contrary to his, viz., that the word of God is
the only rule of faith in matters of religion.’

“In 1765 Sherman accepted the position of Treasurer of Yale
College, filling it until 1776, when the cause of American
independence demanded all his energies. He came to this office
during the last years of President Clap’s administration, and held
it through most of the long _interregnum_ during which Professor
Daggett was acting President. It was, as I have said, a dark time
for the College; a day of small things. Daggett and Sherman were
for some years the only permanent officers. The means of the
institution were slender, and the utmost economy was necessary to
secure its maintenance. Sherman’s prudence and business judgment
were here of substantial service, though the struggle of the
College then was more to live than to grow.

“He was also in a position to befriend it, where it then much
needed support, before the Legislature. There was a long and strong
effort during the last half of the eighteenth century to bring it
under State control. Here, writes President Stiles in his Literary
Diary, he was ‘ever a friend to its interests, and to its being and
continuing in the hands of the clergy, whom he judged the most
proper to have the superintendency of a _religious_, as well as a
_scientific_, college.’[34]

“In 1792, while he was a Senator in Congress (to which position he
had been elected the year before), that controversy came to a
peaceful close. The General Assembly offered the College a grant of
what was estimated to be worth about thirty thousand dollars,
provided it would admit the Governor and Lieutenant Governor and
the six senior assistants as, for all time, Fellows of the
Corporation. This left the clergy still in full control, for they
held twelve seats, and could dictate the election of the President
to occupy another. Nevertheless, the clerical Fellows were divided
in opinion, as to the policy of agreeing to this friendly overture.
One of them, Rev. Nathaniel Taylor of this town, was especially
reluctant to take this step. He consulted Sherman, whose pastor he
had formerly been, and by his advice yielded to the rest, and so
made the vote of acceptance an unanimous one.[35]

“This was almost Sherman’s last service to Yale. In the next year,
under date of July 23, in Stiles’ Diary, we find this entry:

“‘About VII^h, or about sunsetting, a bright Luminary set in New
Haven: the Hon. Roger Sherman, Esqr. died æt. 72¼, mayor of the
city & Senator in Congress.’[36]

“He died at his residence on Chapel Street, which is still standing
opposite Vanderbilt Hall, and, on July 25, his funeral was attended
from the North (now the United) Church. President Stiles was one of
the officiating clergyman, and the students and tutors of the
college headed the procession to the grave.[37] His pastor, the
Rev. Dr. Jonathan Edwards, preached the funeral sermon. Edwards was
a metaphysical theologian. One of the audience wrote of this
sermon, a few days later, to a friend in a neighboring town: ‘To do
the Doctor justice he preached better than I expected to hear him,
and seemed to keep almost free from _moral obligation, cause and
effect_, etc.’[38]

“The discourse is in print, and a few of the personal touches in it
may give a clearer idea of how Sherman appeared to his friends and
fellow-townsmen at home.

“‘I need not inform you,’ said Dr. Edwards, ‘that his person was
tall, unusually erect and well proportioned, and his countenance
agreeable and manly.... As he was a professor of religion, so he
was not ashamed to befriend it, to appear openly on the Lord’s
side, or to avow and defend the peculiar doctrines of grace.... In
private life, though he was naturally reserved and of few words,
yet in conversation on matters of importance, he was free and
communicative.’

“The theology of the day appeared in the concluding observations,
in which the preacher referred to the loss they had sustained by
this bereavement as a token of ‘divine displeasure.’

“President Stiles, during the same week, records his estimate of
Sherman in these terms:

* * * * *

“‘He was formed for _Think^{g} & Acting, but Law & Politics_ were
peculiarly adapted to his Genius. He was an admirer of Vattells
Laws of Nature & Nations.... He was exemplary for Piety & serious
Religion, was a good Divine; once printed a well & judiciously
written Sermon of his own Composition, tho’ never preached. He was
far from all Enthusiasm. He was calm sedate & ever discerning &
judicious. He went thro’ all the Grades of public Life, & grew in
them all & filled every Office with Propriety, Ability, & tho’ not
with showy Brilliancy, yet with that Dignity which arises from
doing every Thing perfectly right. In no part of his Employments
has he displayed his intrinsic Merit and acquired that Glory, so
much as in Congress. He there became almost oracular for the deep
Sagacity, Wisdom & Weight of his Counsels. Tho’ of no Elocution, he
was respected & listened to with great Attention; and was
successful in carrying the Points he laboured. He was an
extraord^{y} Man--a venerable uncorrupted Patriot!’[39]

“Many years later Sherman’s character was thus sketched by the
discriminating hand of Professor James L. Kingsley:

* * * * *

“‘No man in Connecticut ever enjoyed the confidence of the people
of the State more entirely, or for a longer period, than Roger
Sherman. Where he doubted, who ventured to be positive? Where he
saw his way clear, who hesitated to follow? In the whole course of
his public life Roger Sherman never failed to leave in those with
whom he had intercourse an impression of deep sagacity, and stern
integrity; and he bequeathed, as a public man, to those who should
come after him, the character of a great, and what is much more
rare, of an honest, politician.’[40]

“Sherman’s English ancestors were of the yeoman class. He was born
in the ranks of what, for want of a better name, is called the
‘common people.’ He knew their virtues, but he knew their failings,
too. It may fairly be said that, when he came to be entrusted with
high public station, the people had more confidence in Sherman than
Sherman had in them.

“This, no doubt, was an esoteric doctrine to be wisely kept for
those who had ears to hear. He stated it without reserve in the
Convention which framed the Constitution of the United States.
Governor Randolph of Virginia had proposed--what is now urged by
many as a needed constitutional change--that the senators from each
State should be elected by popular vote. Sherman opposed it,
‘insisting,’ as Mr. Madison reports him, ‘that it ought to be by
the State legislatures. The people, he said, immediately, should
have as little to do as may be about the government. They want
information, and are constantly liable to be misled.’[41]

“His views prevailed, and, if we may judge from the experience thus
far of his own State, he was probably right in believing that it
was safer to confide in the wisdom of the General Assembly than in
a popular vote. He was speaking as the representative of one of the
smaller States, of territorial limits such as to make it reasonably
certain that every leading man among her citizens would be known to
most of the leading members of her Legislature. The inhabitants of
our towns, again, are quite generally personally acquainted with
those whom they send to represent them at Hartford; and if these
men betray their trust, they are called to a prompt account at
home, before the bar of public opinion.

“It is to be remembered, of course, that Sherman’s unwillingness to
trust the people with the election of a Senator by a direct vote
was not inconsistent with his confidence in their judgment on
general questions of public policy or moral right. That confidence
he always maintained.

“Sherman was an effective speaker, but it was not because he had in
him anything of an orator.[42] His power in debate lay in his habit
of never taking the floor unless he had something new and important
to suggest,[43] and in stopping as soon as he had said it. It lay
also in what Cicero said was the first qualification of the
successful orator--being a good man. People believed him, because
they believed in him.

“Justice was his polar star. He believed that it was the true
mainspring of all political action on the part of the mass of the
people. ‘Popular opinion,’ he said on the floor of the First
Congress, ‘is founded in justice, and the only way to know if the
popular opinion is in favor of a measure is to examine whether it
is just and right in itself.’

“‘The popularity that follows, not that which is run after,’ was
what he thought should be the wish of the legislator.

* * * * *

“So lived, and so, in a green old age, still in high public station
and still useful in it, passed away the man to whose commemoration
this hour has been devoted.

“The Church no longer thinks a peaceful end of a well-spent life is
to be taken as a token of the divine displeasure. It no longer
discusses the theological opinions that were of such absorbing
interest in Sherman’s age. He belonged to the eighteenth and we are
drinking in the inspiration of the twentieth century.

“But Sherman’s religion is still our religion. He stood for
justice, and truth: he stood for duty, quietly, daily, untiringly
done, in whatever station, high or low, God may see fit to place
us. He was a good shoemaker, and he was a good Senator.

“His example will never die out of American memory, because it
appeals to every man in every walk of life, and shows how
character, perseverance, industry, joined to common sense, under
our system of government, put within the reach of their possessor
whatever the times may have to give of opportunity for doing public
service and winning public esteem.

“There are five names in the history of the United States that seem
to me to stand alone. In the view of most Americans, I think,
Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, John Adams, and Hamilton were
above all others the founders of the Republic.

“In his ‘Studies in History and Jurisprudence,’[44] James Bryce
marshals in order the leaders in American affairs at the time of
the adoption of our Constitution. Five, he says, belong to the
history of the world: Washington, Franklin, Hamilton, Jefferson,
and Marshall; ‘and in the second rank are to be named John Adams,
Madison, Jay, Patrick Henry,

Gouverneur Morris, Roger Sherman, James Wilson, and Albert
Gallatin.’

“John Marshall seems to me not so much a founder as a re-founder of
the Constitution, and I should be unwilling to agree with Mr. Bryce
in giving him a place which appears with greater right to belong to
the successor of Washington in the presidential chair. So, in
arranging the statesmen of the second order, it may be doubted if
Gallatin does not more properly belong to a later generation. But
that in that class is Roger Sherman, rather than Trumbull, rather
than Ellsworth, rather than Johnson, rather than any other son of
Connecticut, or, after John Adams, of New England, few will
question who have closely studied the Journals of the Continental
Congress, and the debates in the Convention of 1787, out of which
our Constitution sprang.”

The last speaker, Hon. Daniel Davenport of Bridgeport, was introduced as a descendant of John Davenport, the leader of the first group of colonists to settle the New Haven Colony, and the first pastor of the first church in New Haven. Mr. Davenport spoke as follows:

“The settlement of New Milford began in 1707, exactly a century after that of Jamestown, Va. At that time, although Milford and Stratford at the mouth of the Housatonic had been settled almost seventy years, and the river afforded a convenient highway into the interior, for much of the distance, this place, only thirty miles from the north shore of Long Island Sound, was still beyond the extreme northwestern frontier of New England, and indeed of English North America.

“The inhabitants of Connecticut then numbered about fifteen thousand, settled in thirty towns, mostly along the shore of Long Island Sound, and upon the banks of the Connecticut and Thames rivers. During the thirty years next before, a few families from Norwalk had settled at Danbury, from Stratford at Woodbury, from Milford at Derby, and from Farmington at Waterbury. With these exceptions, hardly more than pin points upon the map, and a few settlements about Albany, N. Y., the whole of western and northwestern Connecticut and of western Massachusetts and northern New York was a savage wilderness, covered with dense forests, and affording almost perfect concealment for the operations of savage warfare.

“Though the northwestern portion of Connecticut was then a most formidable and inhospitable wilderness, strenuous efforts were already being put forth by the Colony to encourage its settlement. For, strange as it seems to us now, at that time, owing to imperfect modes of cultivation and the difficulty of subduing the wilderness, the settled portions of the Commonwealth had begun to feel overpopulated. Twenty-five years before, the Secretary of the Colony had reported to the Home Government, that ‘in this mountainous, rocky, and swampy province’ most of the arable land was taken up, and the remainder was hardly worth tillage.

“This need of more land, and the protection from invasion which the settlement of this section would afford the communities near the coast, and the innate love of adventure and desire to subdue the wilderness, which have characterized the American people from the beginning, were the impelling causes which led to the planting of New Milford.

“So pressing did this movement become that, though what is now Litchfield County was then as remote and inaccessible to the rest of the Colony as were Indiana and Illinois to our fathers in the middle of the last century, within forty-five years after the first settler had built his log cabin and lighted his fire here twelve towns had been settled and the county organized with a population of more than ten thousand.

“In order that we may appreciate, somewhat, the broader political conditions under which the first settlers took up their abode here, which largely engrossed their thoughts and vitally affected them and their children for two generations, it is necessary, before taking up the narrative of their actual settlement here, to advert briefly to the state of affairs at that time in England, and on the continent of Europe, and in the English, French, and Spanish Colonies of North America.

“By 1707 it had become apparent to the people of Connecticut that, soon or late, they must fight for the very existence of their chartered privileges and natural rights, not alone the British Crown, but the English people. The disposition of the people of England to reap where they had not sown had become very clear. In April, 1701, Connecticut was named in the bill then introduced in Parliament to abrogate all American charters. She resisted with all her might through her agent, but it passed the second reading, and would have become a law but for the breaking out of the French War. Its principle was supported by the mercantile interests and the great men of England. Then for the first time the people of Connecticut fully realized that their foes were to be, not the exiled house of Stuart, but the English people themselves, and that, though they changed their dynasties, they did not change their own nature.

“In 1707 the principal kingdoms of Europe and their colonies were ablaze with war. Anne was Queen of England. In that very year she attached her signature to that long projected and most important constitutional arrangement, the Act of Union between England and Scotland, which made them one kingdom, the crown of which, by the Act of Settlement passed a few years before, had been forever vested in the person and heirs of Sophia, the electress of Hanover, the present reigning dynasty. Anne’s accession to the throne in 1702 had been followed by the acknowledgment, by Louis XIV., of the son of James II., the deposed and fugitive king of England and the determined foe of the rights of the Colonists, as the rightful king, although in the Treaty of Ryswick, in 1697, he had solemnly stipulated to the contrary. This act of perfidy roused the English to fury. The primary cause of the war, then raging, was the acceptance by Louis of the crown of Spain for his grandson Philip despite a previous formal renunciation. But the immediate occasion was his espousal of the cause of the son of James II. as pretender to the British throne, which enabled the English Government to form a great European alliance to wrest Spain from Philip and prevent Louis from becoming the absolute master of Europe.

The year before, 1706, had witnessed the humbling of the pride and ambition of Louis by the defeat of his armies at Ramillies by the Duke of Marlborough, in Piedmont by Prince Eugene, and in Spain by Lord Galway. Charles XII. of Sweden had advanced to Dresden in Saxony, an English and Portuguese army had occupied Madrid, and an attack of the combined fleets of Spain and France upon Charleston, S. C., then claimed by Spain as a part of Florida, had been repulsed by the vigor and martial skill of the Colonial authorities.

“At that time the valley of the St. Lawrence was occupied by about fifty thousand French settlers, imbued with bitter hostility towards the settlers in New England and New York. Already the vast design of La Salle to acquire for the King of France the whole interior of the continent seemed to have been accomplished. While as yet the English were struggling to secure a foothold upon the Atlantic seaboard, the French had explored the Mississippi and its tributaries to its mouth; and the whole vast region drained by them, between the Alleghanies and the Rockies, had been taken possession of by the French under the name of Louisiana; and a chain of military and trading posts from New Orleans to the St. Lawrence, admirably chosen for the purpose, had been established to hold it; and another chain was already planned to extend southward along the west side of the Alleghanies, to forever keep out the English. The French had been for fifty years hounding on the numerous tribes of Canada and northern New England to attack and exterminate the settlers of New England. The conquest of Canada by the English was, therefore, an object of the greatest political importance, and necessary for the peace and safety of the Colonists, and their future growth, and it continued to engross the efforts and exhaust the means of the Colonists, until their purpose was finally accomplished in 1763.

“The people who settled here were entirely familiar with the hardships, dangers, and horrors of Indian warfare to which they were liable in taking up their abode on this frontier. The horrible incidents which attended the massacre of the inhabitants of Schenectady, in 1690, seventeen years before, during the previous war, and of the inhabitants of Deerfield, Mass., and other places in 1704, during the war still raging, were household words throughout Connecticut, and had left an abiding imprint in the minds of the people on the border. Though the Indians, right about them here, seem to have been few in number and comparatively harmless, they knew from their own and their fathers’ experiences that their position was one of extreme danger, and that at all times their scanty and hard won possessions and their lives were liable to instant destruction from unheralded irruptions by the more distant Indian tribes of the North and Northwest, urged on by their French instigators and allies. For the experiences of the last seventy years, from the time of the Pequot War, and during the subsequent troubles with the tribes in southwestern Connecticut, and on Long Island, and during King Philip’s War, had fully taught them the craft, treachery, and pitiless cruelty of the savages, as well as their capacity for extensive combination among the widely separated tribes.

“When Major de Rouville, in 1704, with his band of civilized and uncivilized savages, committed the atrocities at Deerfield, Mass., the suspicions of the Colonists that the French had instigated the former Indian outrages became a certainty, for in this instance they openly shared in them.

“Their object was, as I have said, to drive the English colonists from North America, and substitute in their place their own colonial system. For this purpose they fitted out hundreds of parties of savages to proceed to other portions of the English settlements, shoot down the settlers when at work at their crops, seize their wives and children, load them with packs of plunder from their own homes, and drive them before them into the wilderness. When no longer able to stagger under their burdens, they were murdered, and their scalps torn off and exhibited to their masters, and for such trophies bounties were paid. The French Government in Paris paid bounties for the scalps of women and children, as Connecticut did for those of wolves, and it not only fitted out other savage expeditions, but sent its own soldiers to assist in the murderous work. Detailed reports of each case were regularly made to the Government at Paris by its agents in Canada, which can now be read. This is true of every French and Indian war until 1763, and the fact was as well known to the settlers here in 1707 as it is to the historical investigator of to-day.

“In the beginning of 1707 reports of an expedition by the French and Indians against some part of New England gave alarm to the Colony, and on the sixth of February of that year a council of war was convened at Hartford, consisting of the Governor, most of the Council, and many of the chief military officers of the Colony. Suspicions were entertained that the attack would fall upon Western Connecticut, and that the Indians in this vicinity intended to join the French and Indians. The Council of War determined that the then western frontier towns of Danbury, Woodbury, Waterbury, and Simsbury, should be fortified with the utmost expedition. They were directed to keep scouts of faithful men to range the forests to discover the designs of the enemy, and give intelligence should they make their appearance near the frontier. At the October session in 1708 it was enacted that garrisons should be kept at those towns, and so it continued until after the close of the war in 1713.

“It was in the midst of alarms and dangers such as these that the settlement of this town was begun. One of the first houses constructed here had palisades about it to serve as a fort, which lasted many years, and, in 1717, soldiers were stationed here for the protection of the inhabitants; and this was repeated several times afterwards. Every man here was a soldier. He was a soldier when he sat at his meals, a soldier when he stood at his door, a soldier when he went to the cornfield, a soldier by day and by night.

“At the time the first settlers arrived here there was a tract of cleared land on the west side of the river called the Indian Field. It extended from where the river runs in an easterly direction south to the mouth of the little brook which runs along Fort Hill. It was not included in the original purchase from the Indians, having been reserved by them in their deed. It was, however, purchased from them in 1705 by John Mitchell, and was conveyed by him to the inhabitants of the town in 1714. This was of the greatest advantage to the first settlers. It furnished them a space of cleared ground, where each planter could at once plant his corn and other crops without the delay of felling the trees.

“It is thought also that the ground where we now stand and Aspetuck Hill had been in a large measure cleared of trees by the Indians by burning, as was also Grassy Hill, two miles east of here. There appears also to have been some meadow land partially cleared at the mouth of the Aspetuck River.

“At that time the country about here presented no such appearance as it does now. The river then flowed with a fuller tide. With the exceptions I have noted, a continuous forest overspread the whole landscape. No thickets, however, choked up the ways through it, for the underbrush was swept away every year by fires built by the Indians for that purpose. Winding footpaths led here and there, which the Indians and wild beasts followed. The roots of the smaller grasses were destroyed by this annual burning over. A coarse, long grass grew along the low banks of the river and wherever the ground was not thickly shaded by trees. After the occupation of the country by the white settlers this annual burning was prohibited. In lieu thereof, the General Court early in its history enacted that every inhabitant, with a few exceptions, should devote a certain time yearly, in the several plantations, to the cutting of brush and small trees in the more open forests for the purpose of allowing grass to grow in such places, as during the summer the cattle ranged through the forests near the plantations subsisting on what grew there. It is said that in the early settlement of this town all meadow land was secured by clearing marshy or swampy ground and allowing it to grow up with grass from the roots and seeds already in the soil. It was one of the early difficulties in the colony to secure grass from want of seed.

“The forests about here abounded with bears, wolves, foxes, and catamounts, deer and moose, wild turkeys, pigeons, quail and partridges, and the waters with wild geese, ducks, herons, and cranes. The river itself was alive with fish, and every spring great quantities of shad and lamprey eels ascended it. Strawberries, blackberries, and huckleberries were extremely abundant in their season.

“The winters were usually of great severity. In 1637 the snow lay on the ground three feet deep all over New England from the third of November until the twenty-third of March, and on the twenty-third of April it snowed for several hours in Boston, the flakes being as large as shillings. The springs were very backward, the summers extremely hot and often dry.

“Upon the petition of the people of Milford, in May, 1702, the General Assembly granted them liberty to purchase from the Indians a township at Wyantonock, the Indian name of this place, and directed them to report their doings to the Assembly. The next March they made an extensive purchase of the natives, and a patent for the same was granted by the Assembly. In October, 1704, the Legislature enacted that the tract so purchased should be a township by the name of New Milford, and that it must be settled in five years,--the town plat to be fixed by a committee appointed by the General Assembly. In October, 1706, the Legislature annexed the tract to New Haven County. In April, 1706, the first meeting of the proprietors was held at Milford, and it was voted that the town plat and home lots should be speedily pitched and laid out by the committee appointed by the Legislature, according to its own best judgment, following certain rules laid down by the proprietors. During that year and according to those rules, the town plat was laid out.

“It was originally intended to lay out the settlement on the hill immediately east of the present village, from this circumstance called Town Hill to this day. In point of fact, it was laid out on Aspetuck Hill, and consisted of the town street and sixteen home lots. The street was twenty rods wide. It began at the south end of the brow of the hill, or at the lower end of what was then called the ‘Plain on the Hill,’ and extended northward. Eight lots were laid out on each side of this street, each lot being twenty-one rods wide and sixty deep.

“By the rules adopted by the proprietors, these lots were to be taken up successively in regular order by the settlers as they should arrive. John Noble took the first lot on the east side of the street at the lower end, he being the first settler to arrive. John Bostwick took the lot on the opposite side of the street, he being the next settler on the ground. This method was followed by the others until there were twelve settlers, with their families, numbering seventy souls, located on this street in 1712. Of these twelve families, four were from Northampton and Westfield, Mass., four were from Stratford, two from Farmington, and only two from Milford. In 1714 the town street was extended southward to the south end of the present public green.