Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2

by George Frisbie Hoar

CHAPTER II ROGER SHERMAN AND HIS FAMILY

My mother, who died in 1866, at the age of eighty-three, was the daughter of Roger Sherman of Connecticut. Her father died when she was ten years old. She lived in her mother's house, opposite the College in New Haven, until her marriage in 1812. New Haven was one of the capital cities of New England. Its society had the special attraction which belonged to the seat of a famous college. Her mother's house was visited by the survivors of the great period of the Revolution and the framing of the Constitution, whom her father had known during an eminent public service of nearly forty years.

My mother was the most perfect democrat, in the best sense of the word, that I ever knew. It was a democracy which was the logical result of the doctrines of the Old Testament and of the New. It recognized the dignity of the individual soul, without regard to the accident of birth or wealth or power or color of the skin. If she were in the company of a Queen, it would never have occurred to her that they did not meet as equals. And if the Queen were a woman of sense, and knew her, it would never occur to the Queen. The poorest people in the town, the paupers in the poorhouse, thought of her as a personal friend to whom they could turn for sympathy and help. No long before her death, an old black woman died in the poorhouse. She died in the night. An old man who had been a town pauper a good part of his life sat up with her and ministered to her wants as well as he could. Just before she died, the old woman thanked him for his kindness. She told him she should like to give him something to show her gratitude, but that she had nothing in the world; but she thought that if he would go to Mrs. Hoar and ask her to give him a dollar, as a favor to her she would do it. The draft on the bank of kindness was duly honored. And I think the legacy was valued as highly by her who paid it as if it had been a costly gem or a work of art from an emperor's gallery.

Mr. Calhoun was very intimate in my grandmother's household when he was in college, and always inquired with great interest after the young ladies of the family when he met anybody who knew them. He had a special liking for my mother, who was about his own age, and always inquired for her.

William M. Evarts visited Washington in his youth and called upon Mr. Calhoun, who received him with great consideration, went with him in person to see the President and what was worth seeing in Washington. Mr. Calhoun spoke in the highest terms of Roger Sherman to Mr. Evarts, said that he regarded him as one of the greatest of our statesmen, and that he had seen the true interests of the South when Southern statesmen were blind to them. This Mr. Calhoun afterward said in a speech in the Senate, including, however, Mr. Paterson of New Jersey and Oliver Ellsworth in his eulogy.

The story of Roger Sherman's life has never been told at length. There is an excellent memoir of him in Sanderson's "Lives of the Signers," written by Jeremiah Evarts, with the assistance of the late Governor and Senator Roger S. Baldwin of Connecticut. But when that was written the correspondence of the great actors of his time, and indeed the journals of the Continental Congress and the Constitutional Convention and the Madison Papers, were none of them accessible to the public.

An excellent though brief memoir of Mr. Sherman was published a few years ago by L. H. Boutell, Esq., of Chicago. Mr. Sherman was a man who seemed to care nothing for fame. He was content to cause great things to be done for his country, and cared nothing for the pride and glory of having done them. The personal pronoun I is seldom found in any speech or writing of his. He had a large share in the public events that led to the Revolution, in the conduct of the War, in the proceedings of the Continental Congress, in the framing of the Constitution, in securing its adoption by Connecticut, and in the action of the House and Senate in Washington's first Administration. He was also for many years Judge of the highest court of his State. He was a man of indefatigable industry. An accomplished lady employed to make investigations in the public archives of the Department of State, reported that she did not see how he could ever have gone to bed.

He had a most affectionate and tender heart. He was very fond of his family and friends. Although reserved and silent in ordinary company, he was very agreeable in conversation, and had a delightful wit. Some of the very greatest men of his time have left on record their estimate of his greatness.

Thomas Jefferson said of him: "There is old Roger Sherman, who never said a foolish thing in his life."

Theodore Sedgwick said: "He was a man of the selectest wisdom. His influence was such that no measure, or part of a measure which he advocated, ever failed to pass."

Fisher Ames said that if he were absent through a debate and came in before the vote was taken he always voted with Roger Sherman, as he always voted right.

Patrick 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 the provision that no State should be deprived of its equal vote without its consent.

When Mr. Sherman's known tenacity, and his influence over the great men with whom he was associated, testified to by so many of them, is borne in mind, it seems there can be no doubt that he is entitled to the chief credit of carrying out the scheme which he himself devised, and which, years before the Convention met, he himself first moved in the Continental Congress for which he made the first argument, and which was reported from the committee of which he was a member, representing the State which gave the name to the Compromise. His motion, which was adopted, that no State should be deprived of its equal vote in the Senate without its consent, made the equality secure.*

[Footnote]
* See Boutell's "Life of Roger Sherman," Lodge's "Flying Frigate,
—Address on Ellsworth," Proceedings Am. Ant. Soc., October, 1902.
[End of Footnote]

Second: In 1774, when Mr. Adams was on his way to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia, he records in his diary that he met Roger Sherman at New Haven, who, he says, "is a solid and sensible man." Mr. Sherman said to him that he thought the Massachusetts patriots, especially Mr. Otis, in his argument for the Writs of Assistance, had given up the whole case when they admitted that Parliament had the power to legislate for the Colonies under any circumstances whatever. He lived to join in the report from the committee, and to sign the Declaration of Independence, which put the case on his ground. The Declaration of Independence does not recognize Parliament at all, except indirectly, when it says the King "has combined with others" to do the wrongs which are complained of.

Third: In 1752 the whole country was overrun with paper money. Mr. Sherman published in that year a little pamphlet, entitled, "A Caveat Against Injustice, or An Inquiry Into the Evil Consequences of a Fluctuating Medium of Exchange." He stated with great clearness and force the arguments which, unhappily, we have been compelled to repeat more than once in later generations. He denounced paper money as "a cheat, vexation, and snare, a medium whereby we are continually cheating and wronging one another in our dealings and commerce." He adds, "So long as we import so much more foreign goods than are necessary, and keep so many merchants and traders employed to procure and deal them out to us: a great part of which we might as well make among ourselves; and another great part of which we had much better be without, especially the spiritous liquors, of which vast quantities are consumed in the colony every year, unnecessarily, to the great destruction of estates, morals, healths and even the lives of many of the inhabitants,— I say, so long as these things are so, we shall spend a great part of our labor and substance for that which will not profit us. Whereas, if these things were reformed, the provisions and other commodities which we might have to export yearly, and which other governments are dependent upon us for, would procure us gold and silver abundantly sufficient for a medium of trade. And we might be as independent, flourishing and happy a colony as any in the British Dominions."

He lived to move in the Convention, and to procure its insertion in the Constitution, the clause that no State should make anything but gold and silver legal tender.

Fourth: Mr. Sherman took his seat in the Federal Convention May 30, 1787. Mr. Randolph's resolution, submitted on the 29th day of May, being before the Convention the next day, included the proposition that the National Legislature ought to be empowered to enjoy the legislative rights vested in Congress by the confederation, "and moreover to legislate in all cases in which the separate States are incompetent," —the question being whether the clause authorizing Congress to legislate in all cases in which the separate States are incompetent should be retained, every State in the Convention voted Aye, except Connecticut. Connecticut was divided. Ellsworth voted Aye, and Sherman, No.

Mr. Sherman lived, not only to sign a Constitution of limited powers, but himself to support the Tenth Article of Amendment thereto, which is as follows:

"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." The words "or to the people" were moved by Mr. Sherman after the original article was reported. So he saw clearly in the beginning, what no other member saw, the two great American principles, first that the National Government should be a Government of limited and delegated powers, and next, that there is a domain of legislation which the people have not delegated either to the National Government or to the States, and upon which no legislative power may rightfully enter.

I surely am not mistaken in thinking that even without the other services of a life devoted to the public, these four contributions to the Constitutional history of the country entitle Mr. Sherman to an honorable place in the grateful memory of his countrymen, and vindicate the tributes which I have cited from his illustrious contemporaries.

My grandmother, the daughter of Benjamin Prescott of Salem, was a woman of great intelligence and a great beauty in her time. She was once taken out to dinner by General Washington when he was President. Madam Hancock, whose husband had been President of the Continental Congress and Governor of Massachusetts, complained to General Washington's Secretary, Mr. Lear, that that honor belonged to her. The Secretary told General Washington, the next day, what she said. The General answered that it was his privilege to give his arm to the handsomest woman in the room. Whether the reply was communicated to Mrs. Hancock, or whether she was comforted by it, does not appear. General Washington had been a guest at my grandfather's house in my mother's childhood, and she had sat on his knee. She was then six years old. But she always remembered the occasion very vividly.

My grandfather was a friend of Lafayette, who mentions him in one of his letters, the original of which is in my possession. One of my mother's brothers, Lt. Colonel Isaac Sherman, led the advance at Princeton, and was himself intimate with Washington and Lafayette. He was a very brave officer and commanded a Connecticut regiment at the storming of Stony Point. He is honorably mentioned in Gen. Wayne's report of the action. Washington alludes to him in one of his letters to Lafayette, as one of his friends whom Lafayette will be glad to see if he will visit this country once more. There is, in the State Department, an amusing correspondence between Col. Sherman and Gen. Wayne, in which he complains that Mad Anthony does great injustice in his report to the soldiers from other States than Pennsylvania. Mad Anthony was mad at the letter. But after a rather significant request from Gen. Washington, he repaired the wrong.

Another of her brothers who died at the age of eighty-eight, when I was thirty years old, and at whose house I was often a visitor, spent three weeks as Washington's guest at Mount Vernon. Old Deacon Beers of New Haven, whom I knew in his old age, was one of the guard who had Andre in custody. During his captivity, Andre made a pen-and-ink likeness of himself, which he gave to Deacon Beers. It is now in the possession of Yale College.

I had from my mother the story of General Washington taking Chief Justice Ellsworth's twin children, one on each knee, and reciting to them the ballad of the Derbyshire Ram. This tradition has remained in the Ellsworth family. I have confirmed it by inquiry of the Rev. Mr. Wood, a grandson of Oliver Ellsworth, who died in Washington a few years ago.

Besides the uncle to whom I allude, who died in 1856, Judge Simeon Baldwin, who married two of my aunts, died in 1851, aged ninety. He was a Member of Congress in 1803-5, and was an intimate friend of Chancellor Kent, who was his classmate and chum in Yale, and was intimate with the Federalist leaders of the Hamilton party. I several times made visits in his household before his death. President Jeremiah Day, another uncle by marriage, was at the head of Yale for thirty years. He died in 1867, at the age of 94.

My mother's sister, Mrs. Jeremiah Evarts, was born January 28, 1774, and died in 1851, at the age of seventy-seven. She knew intimately many famous men and women of the Revolutionary period. Her husband was an intimate friend of John Jay. She had a great deal of the sprightly wit for which her son, William, was so famous. She was at home at the time of Washington's visit, then a child eleven years old, and opened the door for him when he took his leave. The General, who was very fond of children, put his hand on her head and said, "My little lady, I wish you a better office." She dropped a courtesy and answered, quick as lightning, "Yes, sir; to let you in."

Mrs. Evarts was a woman not only of sprightly wit, but of great beauty. She liked to tell in her old age of a dinner which John Hancock gave for her father and her, in Boston, when she was a girl. She described her dress with great minuteness, and added naively, "Didn't I look pretty?"

My mother, who was married in 1812, knew very intimately many of her father's and mother's old friends who had been distinguished in the public service in the Revolutionary period and the Administration of Washington and John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. She knew very well the family of John Jay. He and his wife were visitors at my grandmother's after their return from Spain. My mother was intimate in the household of Oliver Ellsworth as in a second home. His children were her playmates. She was also very intimate indeed with the family of Senator Hillhouse, whose daughter Mary was one of her dearest friends.

Senator Hillhouse held a very high place in the public life of Connecticut in his day. He was one of the friends of Hamilton, and one of the group of Federal statesmen of whom Hamilton was the leader. He was United States Senator for Connecticut from 1796 to 1810.

After she became a young lady, my mother, with Fanny Ellsworth, afterward Mrs. Wood, and Mary Hillhouse, daughter of the Senator, established a school to teach young colored children to read and sew. The colored people in New Haven were in a sad condition in those days. The law of the State made it a penal offence to teach a colored child to read. These girls violated the law. The public authorities interfered and threatened them with prosecution. But the young women were resolute. They insisted that they were performing a religious duty, and declared that they should disobey the law and take the consequences. A good deal of sympathy was aroused in their behalf. The New Haven authorities had to face the question whether they would imprison the daughter of a Signer of the Declaration of Independence, who had affixed his signature to the great affirmation that all men are created equal, the daughters of two Framers of the Constitution, and the daughter of James Hillhouse, then the foremost citizen of Connecticut, for teaching little children to read the Bible. They gave up the attempt. The school kept on and flourished. President Dwight raised a considerable fund for it by a course of lectures, and it continued down to within my own recollection. What became of the fund which was raised for its support I cannot tell.

Jeremiah Evarts was born February 13, 1781. He died May 10, 1831. He was the founder and Secretary of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. He was one of the thirteen men who met in Samuel Dexter's office in 1812, to inaugurate the Temperance Reformation. The habit of excessive drinking was then almost universal in this country. Liquors and wines were freely used on social occasions, at weddings and at funerals. The clergyman staggered home from his round of pastoral calls, and the bearers partook of brandy or gin or rum in the room adjoining that where the coffin was placed ready for the funeral. A gentleman present said it was utterly impracticable to try and wean the American people from the habit of drinking. Jeremiah Evarts answered, "It is right, therefore practicable."

He was a Puritan of the old school. He made a vigorous but ineffectual attempt in Connecticut to enforce the Sunday laws. His death was caused by his exertions in resisting the removal of the Cherokee Indians from Georgia, a removal accomplished in violation of the Constitution and of public faith. The Supreme Court of the United States declared the law of Georgia unconstitutional. But Georgia defied the mandate of the Court, and it was never executed. The missionary agent was imprisoned and died of his confinement. Mr. Evarts said, "There is a court that has power to execute its judgments."

I told this story to Horace Maynard, an eminent member of Congress and a member of the Cabinet. Mr. Maynard said, "There was never a prophecy more terribly accomplished. The territory from which those Indians were unlawfully removed was the scene of the Battle of Missionary Ridge, which is not far from the grave of Worcester, the missionary who died in prison. That land was fairly drenched with blood and honeycombed with graves."

Mr. Evarts edited the Panoplist, a very able magazine which powerfully defended the old theology against the Unitarian movement, then at its height.

A well-known writer, Rev. Leonard W. Bacon, published a short time ago a sketch entitled, "The Greater Evarts," in which he contrasted the career of Jeremiah Evarts with that of his brilliant and delightful son. Whether that judgment shall stand we may know when the question is settled, which is to be answered in every generation, whether martyrdom be a failure.

Among the inmates of my grandfather's household in my mother's childhood and youth was Roger Minott Sherman. He was the son of the Reverend Josiah Sherman, my grandfather's brother, a clergyman of Woburn, Massachusetts, where Roger Minott was born. His father died in 1789. My grandfather took the boy into his household and educated him and treated him as a son, and just before his death gave him his watch, which is now in the possession of a son of General Sherman.

Roger Minott Sherman was unquestionably the ablest lawyer in New England who never obtained distinction in political life, and, with the exception of Daniel Webster and Jeremiah Mason and Rufus Choate, the ablest New England ever produced.*

[Footnote]
* See Appendix.
[End of Footnote]

Roger Minott Sherman's father died in 1789. The widow wrote to some of her friends to see what assistance could be obtained to enable her son to continue his studies at Yale. It was apparently in response to this appeal that Mr. Sherman wrote the following letter to his nephew.

NEW YORK, April 28, 1790.

Dear Nephew,—I would have you continue your studies and remain at my house as you have done hitherto. I hope you will be provided for so as to complete your education at College, and lay a foundation for future usefulness. When I return home I shall take such further order respecting it as may be proper. I shall afford you as much assistance as under my circumstances may be prudent.

I am your affectionate uncle,
ROGER SHERMAN.

Mr. Sherman died a year after his nephew graduated; but before he died he doubtless saw the promise of that distinguished career which added new lustre to the Sherman name.

It is a rather remarkable fact that my mother had such close relations to so many eminent lawyers. Her father, though his public duties prevented him from practising law very long, was a very great lawyer and judge. Her brother-in-law, Judge Baldwin, was an eminent Judge of the Connecticut Supreme Court. Her cousin, Roger Minott Sherman, as has just been said, was an inmate of her father's household in her childhood, and was to her as a brother. She had, after his mother's death, the care of Senator Roger Sherman Baldwin, her nephew, who was for many years at the head of the Connecticut Bar. To her nephew, William M. Evarts, my father's house was as another home in his boyhood. He was the leading advocate of his time. Her son, E. R. Hoar, was Attorney General of the United States. And her husband was in his day one of the foremost advocates of Massachusetts. So, with a little alteration, the Greek epitaph of the woman who was the daughter, wife, sister and mother of princes, might apply to her, if, as I like to think, a first-rate American lawyer is entitled to as much respect as a petty Greek prince.