Page:EB1911 - Volume 24.djvu/885

Rh policy of President Johnson, he supported his party, though opposed to its Radical leaders. He warmly advocated the insertion in the Reconstruction Acts of a provision ensuring the early termination of military government; and he opposed the impeachment of President Johnson, though he voted for conviction on the trial. During the administrations of President Grant his leadership in shaping financial policy became generally recognized. The Resumption Act of 1875, which provided for the return of specie payments four years later, was largely his work both in inception and in formulation, and his appointment to the head of the Treasury Department by President Hayes in 1877 enabled him to carry the policy embodied in the law to successful execution. His administration of the department, in circumstances of great difficulty arising out of the “ greenback ” agitation and the adverse political complexion of Congress, won him high distinction as a financier.

At the end of the Hayes administration he was again elected to the Senate from Ohio and held his seat until 1897. During this period he was largely concerned in the enactment of the Anti-Trust Law of 1890, and of the so-called Sherman Act of the same year, providing for the purchase of silver and the issuing of Treasury notes based upon it. This latter Act he approved only as a means of escaping the free coinage of silver, and he supported its repeal in 1893. In 1880 and 1888 he aspired actively to the Republican nomination for the presidency, but failed to obtain the requisite support in the Convention. During the last years of his senatorial career he was chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs. Upon the accession of President McKinley in 1897, he resigned from the Senate and became secretary of state; but under the tension of the war with Spain the duties of the office became too exacting for his strength at his age, and in April 1898 he resigned and withdrew into private life. Infirmities multiplied upon him, until his death at Washington on the 22nd of October 1900.

A selection from the correspondence of John Sherman and his brother Gen. W. T. Sherman was published as The Sherman Letters in 1894. Sherman published Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet: an Autobiography (Chicago and New York, 1895). A volume of Selected Speeches was published in 1879. See Life, by T. E. Burton (1906). (W. A. D.)

SHERMAN, ROGER (1721-1793), American political leader, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, was born at Newton, Massachusetts, on the 19th of April 1721 (O.S.). He removed with his parents to Stoughton in 1723, attended the country school there, and at an early age learned the cobble1's trade in his father's shop. Removing to New Milford, Connecticut, in 1743, he worked as county surveyor, engaged in mercantile pursuits, studied law, and in 1754 was admitted to the bar. He represented New Milford in the Connecticut Assembly in 1755-1756 and again in 1758-1761. From 1761 until his death New Haven was his home. He was once more a member of the Connecticut Assembly in 1764-1766, was one of the governor's assistants in 1766-1785, a judge of the Connecticut superior court in 1766-1789, treasurer of Yale College in 1765-1776, a delegate to the Continental Congress in 1774-1781 and again in 1783-1784, a member of the Connecticut Committee of Safety in 1777-1779 and in 1782, mayor of New Haven in 1784-1793, a delegate to the Federal Constitutional Convention of 1787 and to the Connecticut Ratification Convention of the same year, and a member of the Federal House of Representatives in 1789-1791 and of the United States Senate in 1791-1793. He was on the committee which drafted the Declaration of Independence, and also on that which drafted the Articles of Confederation. His greatest public service, however, was performed in the Federal Constitutional Convention. In the bitter conflict between the large state party and the small state party he and his colleagues, Oliver Ellsworth and William Samuel Johnson, acted as peacemakers. Their share in bringing about the final settlement, which provided for equal representation in one house and proportional representation in the other, was so important that the settlement itself has come to be called the “ Connecticut Compromise.” He helped to defeat the proposal to give Congress a veto on state legislation, showing that it was illogical to confer such a power, since the constitution itself is the law of the land and no state act contravening it is legal. In the Federal Congress (1789-1793) he favoured the assumption of the state debts, the establishment of a national bank and the adoption of a protective tariff policy. Although strongly opposed to slavery, he refused to support the Parker resolution of 1789 providing for a duty of ten dollars per head on negroes brought from Africa, on the ground that it emphasized the property element in slavery. He died in'New Haven on the 23rd of July 1793. Sherman was not a deep and original thinker like James Wilson, nor was he a brilliant leader like Alexander Hamilton; but owing to his conservative temperament, his sound judgment and his wide experience he was well qualified to lead the compromise cause in the convention of 1787.

Two of Sherman's grandsons, William M. Evarts and George F. Hoar, were prominent in the later history of the country. Lewis H. Boutell's Life of Roger Sherman (Chicago, 1896), based on material collected by Senator Hoar, is a careful and accurate work.

SHERMAN, WILLIAM TECUMSEH (1820-1891), American general, was born on the 8th of February 1820, at Lancaster, Ohio. He was descended from Edmond Sherman, who emigrated from England to the Massachusetts'Bay Colony in 1634. His father, Charles R. Sherman, a judge of the Supreme Court of Ohio, died suddenly in 1829, leaving his widow with a family of young children. William was adopted by the Hon. Thomas Ewing, a close friend of the father, sometime a senator of the United States and a member of the national cabinet. In 1836 he entered West Point, and on graduating near the head of his class he was appointed second lieutenant in the 3rd artillery regiment. His first field service was in Florida against the Seminole Indians. The usual changes of station and detached duty made him acquainted with the geography of all the Southern states, and Sherman improved the opportunity by making topographical studies which proved of no small value to him later. He also employed much of his time in the study of law. When the war with Mexico began in 1846 he asked for field duty, and was ordered to join an expedition going to California by sea. He was made adjutant-general to Colonel Mason, military governor, and as such was executive officer in the administration of local government till peace came in the autumn of 1848 and the province was ceded to the United States. In 1847 he served on the staff of the general commanding the division of the Pacinc. In 1850 he married Ellen Boyle, daughter of Thomas Ewing, then secretary of the interior. Transferred in the same year to the commissariat department as a captain, he resigned three years later and went back to California to conduct at San Francisco a branch of an important St Louis banking-house. He continued successfully in the management of this business through a financial crisis incident to a wildly speculative time, until in the spring of 18 57 the house, by his advice, withdrew from Californian affairs. Afterwards for a short time he was engaged in business at New York and in 1858 practised law at Leavenworth, Kansas. In 1859, the state of Louisiana proposing to establish a military college, Sherman was appointed its superintendent. On the 1st of January 1860 the “State Seminary of Learning and Military Academy” was opened, and here Sherman remained until the spring of 1861, when it was evident that Louisiana would join the states seceding from the Union. He thereupon resigned the superintendency and returned to St Louis, parting with the governor of the state and his colleagues in the school with regret and mutual esteem. Though his brother John Sherman was a leader in the party which had elected Lincoln, William Sherman was very conservative on the slavery question, and his distress at what he thought an unnecessary rupture between the states was extreme. Yet his devotion to the national constitution was unbounded, and he offered his services as soon as volunteers for the three years enlistments were called out. On the 14th of May 1861' he was appointed colonel of the 13th U.S. Infantry, a new regiment, and was soon assigned to command a brigade in General McDowell's army in front of Washington. He served with it in the first battle of Bull Run, on the 21st of July. Promoted