Autobiography of Seventy Years | Page 5

Henry said that the first men in the Continental Congress were
Washington, Richard Henry Lee, and Roger Sherman, and, later in life,
that Roger Sherman and George Mason were the greatest statesmen he
ever knew. This statement, published in the life of Mason, was
carefully verified for me by my friend, the late William Wirt Henry,
grandson and biographer of Patrick Henry, as appears by a letter from
him in my possession.*
[Footnote] *I attach a passage from Mr. William Wirt Henry's letter,
dated December 28, 1892.
"I am glad to be able to say that you may rely on the correctness of the
passage at page 221 of Howe's Historical Collections of Va. giving
Patrick Henry's estimate of Roger Sherman. It was furnished the author
by my father and though a youth I well remember Mr. Howe's visit to
Red Hill, my father's residence. My father, John Henry, was about three
years of age when his father died, but his mother long survived Patrick
Henry, as did several of his older children. From his mother, brothers
and sisters my father learned many personal reminiscences of his father
and his exceptionally retentive memory enabled him to relate them
accurately. I have often heard him relate the reminiscences given on
that page by Mr. Howe." [End of Footnote]
John Adams, in a letter to his wife, speaks of Sherman as "That old
Puritan, as honest as an angel, and as firm in the cause of Independence

as Mt. Atlas."
But perhaps the most remarkable testimony to his character, one almost
unexampled in the history of public men, is that paid to him by Oliver
Ellsworth, himself one of the greatest men of his time,--Chief Justice of
the United States, Envoy to France, leader in the Senate for the first
twelve years of the Constitution, and author of the Judiciary Act. He
had been on the Bench of the Superior Court of Connecticut, with Mr.
Sherman, for many years. They served together in the Continental
Congress, and in the Senate of the United States. They were together
members of the Convention that framed the Constitution, and of the
State Convention in Connecticut that adopted it. Chief Justice
Ellsworth told John Adams that he had made Mr. Sherman his model in
his youth. Mr. Adams adds: "Indeed I never knew two men more alike,
except that the Chief Justice had the advantage of a liberal education,
and somewhat more extensive reading. Mr. Sherman was born in the
State of Massachusetts, and was one of the strongest and soundest
pillars of the Revolution." It would be hard to find another case of
life-long and intimate companionship between two public men where
such a declaration by either of the other would not seem ludicrous.
He was the only person who signed all four of the great State Papers, to
which the signatures of the delegates of the different Colonies were
attached:
The Association of 1774; The Articles of Confederation; The
Declaration of Independence, and The Constitution of the United
States.
Robert Morris signed three of them.
His tenacity, the independence of his judgment, and his influence over
the great men with whom he was associated, is shown by four striking
instances among many others where he succeeded in impressing his
opinion on his associates.
First: It is well known that the dispute between the large States, who
desired to have their votes in the National Legislature counted in

proportion to numbers, and the small States, who desired to vote by
States as equals, a dispute which nearly wrecked the attempt to frame a
Constitution of the United States, arose in the Continental Congress,
and gave rise to great controversy there when the Articles of
Confederation were framed. Mr. Sherman was one of the Committee
that framed those Articles, as he was afterward one of the Committee
who reported the Declaration of Independence.
John Adams writes in his diary, that Mr. Sherman, in Committee of the
Whole, moved August 1, 1776, that the vote be taken both ways, once
according to numbers, and a second time, when the States should vote
as equals.
This was, in substance, so far as the arrangement of political power was
concerned, the plan of the Constitution. In the Constitutional
Convention, Mr. Sherman first moved this plan, known as the
Connecticut Compromise, and made the first argument in its support, to
which his colleague, Oliver Ellsworth, afterward gave the weight of his
powerful influence. The Convention afterward, almost in despair of any
settlement of this vexed question, referred the matter to a grand
committee, on which Mr. Ellsworth was originally named. But he
withdrew from the committee, and Mr. Sherman took his place. Mr.
Sherman had the parliamentary charge of the matter from the beginning,
and at the close of the Convention, moved