Page:Autobiographies and portraits of the President, cabinet, Supreme court, and Fifty-fifth Congress (IA autobiographiesp02neal).pdf/19

 JOHN SHERMAN

John Sherman, of Ohio, was born in Lancaster, that State, May 10, 1823. He is of Anglo-Saxon ancestry, and for generations the Sherman family has been noted for the many celebrated men it has produced. John Sherman received an academic education, studied law, and was admitted to the bar May 11, 1844. He was a delegate to the national Whig conventions of 1848 and 1852, and presided over the first Republican convention in Ohio in 1855; was a Representative in the Thirty-Fourth. Thirty-Fifth, Thirty-Sixth, and Thirty-Seventh Congresses, and was the Republican candidate for Speaker in the winter of 1859–60. He was elected to the United States Senate in March, 1861, and reelected in 1866 and 1872. In March, 1877, he was appointed Secretary of the Treasury, and served as such during President Hayes's administration. He was elected to the United States Senate in 1880, and was reëlected in 1886, 1892. He was president of the Senate from December 7, 1885, until February 26, 1887; resigned his seat in the Senate to accept the position of Secretary of State in President McKinley's cabinet, and was confirmed by the Senate March 5, 1897. In the spring of the year following he resigned his position as Secretary of State, owing to his advanced years and to the added burdens which the approaching war with Spain would put upon him. Before retiring from active participation in public life, he compiled “John Sherman's Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate, and Cabinet,” a work exceedingly interesting and instructive.