“Franklin was already at work in a Boston printing office, when Sherman, in 1721, was born in Newton. Neither had any advantages of education. Franklin’s schooling ended when he was about ten, and Sherman was apprenticed to a shoemaker and began to learn his trade at an age not much greater. He had hardly acquired it when his father, then living at Stoughton, Massachusetts, died, and he found, at the age of nineteen, that the main charge of a numerous family of younger brothers and sisters, as well as of his mother, must thenceforward rest upon his shoulders. Three years of struggle upon the small farm, which his father left, satisfied him that to support this load he must seek some more remunerative employment.
“An elder brother had previously removed to this town, then a frontier settlement. Connecticut was the West of that day to the towns of eastern Massachusetts. It was the place for more than a century where many of the most active and enterprising sons of the older colony had gone to found new homes and breathe a freer air. Connecticut, it will be recollected, had preserved her charter and elected her own governors. Massachusetts, for half a century, had received hers from the crown.
“Sherman resolved to join his brother, and the whole family were united in New Milford in 1743. From the early years of his apprenticeship he had been in the habit, as he bent over his last, of keeping a book open on his bench, to the study of which he gave what moments he could occasionally snatch from his work. In this way, and in his hours of leisure, he had been able to pick up the elements of a good English education, and to make considerable attainments in mathematics and plane geometry. One object of his removal to Connecticut had been to put this knowledge to practical use by engaging in the business of a surveyor.
“Those were days when the quick division of land, from the great blocks included in colonial patents granted for the formation of a new township, into numerous small farms, called far more frequently than now for the services of men who could run a line with precision and describe it in the proper terms of art. Within two years from his arrival at New Milford, he had fitted himself to engage in this business, and received from the General Assembly the appointment of a Surveyor of Lands for the County of New Haven; for New Milford was then a part of that county, Litchfield County not having been created until 1751.
“This office of County Surveyor was a responsible one. Whoever held it took an oath, prescribed by statute, to discharge its duties ‘without Favour or Respect to Persons,’ and, if he had occasion to employ chainmen for his assistance, was to administer to each of them an oath, adjuring them ‘by the ever living God’ to keep and render a true account of whatever lines and measures they might take.[18]
“That there is an ever living God, who is the supreme authority on earth as in heaven, has always been the faith of Connecticut, and shines through all her statute books. From 1640 down to the present hour it has been part of the solemn ceremonial—solemn to those who stop to think of what it is and what it means—of admission to the privileges of a freeman or elector, that every man shall with uplifted hand swear that with God’s help, whenever he shall be called to give his vote, he will give it as he shall judge will conduce to the best good of the commonwealth, without respect of persons or favor of any man. How many of us, on each election day, bethink ourselves of the high obligation to which we have thus pledged ourselves, and ask the help we have invoked to act our part as voters ‘without respect of persons or favor of any man’?
“I doubt if Roger Sherman, as a County Surveyor, needed the weight of an official oath to bind him to his duty, but I doubt not that his sense of duty was bottomed on a sense of God, and that honesty and Christianity were to him, from boyhood on, one and inseparable.
“He had joined the Stoughton church a few weeks before he came of age. It was a time, in the year 1742, in which were gathered in the fruits of religious awakening in New England. Our churches had lapsed into formalism; and dogmatic belief had been accorded a prominence which threw Christian conduct into the background. Seventeen hundred forty-two was a marked year in the course of the returning tide towards better things.
“In 1749 Sherman used his mathematical attainments for a new purpose. He prepared an almanac for 1750, which was published in New York, and was the first of a series which he put out during a considerable period of years.
“By this time he had saved some money, and, in 1750, we find him putting part of his capital, in partnership with his elder brother, into a country store. This was a business in which he was interested first at New Milford, and then at New Haven, with a branch at Wallingford, for more than twenty years.