“The country store then, as now in the more thinly settled communities, was in miniature the department store of our modern cities. There were few of them, and their customers came from a wide circuit of country. The trade was largely one of barter. The farmer’s wife drove in with her cheese and butter, and might go back with stuff for a dress, a box of needles, a new coffee-pot, a bottle of salts, a loaf of sugar, a quintal of codfish, and perhaps a volume of sermons. The store was not daily visited by drummers. The proprietor went himself every few months to Boston or Newport, New York or Philadelphia, to replenish his stock, and with every such journey found his mental horizon broadened, and felt better acquainted with the great world of men and things that lay beyond the limits of his own neighborhood.
“Sherman, from the first, made the most of these glimpses of a larger life. If he rode down to New Haven to buy West India molasses, he would visit the college to ask President Clap’s opinion about the probable course of an expected comet.[19] If he went to New York to correct the proofs of his almanac, he would take the opportunity to find a publisher for some pamphlet he had written on the financial errors in the legislation of the day.
“Sherman, by this time, had acquired the faculty, rarer, perhaps, then than now, of expressing his thoughts in writing, in a fashion that was simple, clear, and straightforward. An artificial, overwrought, and overladen style of composition, if not the prevailing one, was certainly not uncommon among Americans during the middle of the eighteenth century. He wrote, as Franklin did, in the plain language of familiar conversation, with no straining after effect. I do not mean that he wrote as well as Franklin. There was a long, long interval between them; but they were of the same school. Both were men who thought more of what they had to say than of how they said it; of communicating facts or ideas, rather than of seeking to make them attractive by ornament.
“Sherman’s reading was of a kind that both strengthened and disciplined the mind. The first President Dwight, in summing up his character, emphasized ‘his attachment to books of real use,’ adding that he ‘was, what very few men unacquainted with the learned languages are, accurately skilled in the grammar of his own language.’[20]
“It is probable, however, that in paying this tribute to an old friend who had passed away, President Dwight had in mind Sherman’s style of written composition, rather than his ordinary manner of speech. It is seldom that one born to poverty and denied the common advantages of education, escapes a certain rusticity, to say the least, not only in his choice of words in conversation, but in their arrangement and pronunciation.
“A franker, and I dare say juster, portrait of the man as he appeared in public discussions and debate is given in a series of rough notes of the doings of the Convention of 1787 which framed our national Constitution, made by one of the Southern delegates, William Pierce of Georgia.
“ ‘Mr. Sherman,’ he writes, ‘exhibits the oddest shaped character I ever remember to have met with. He is awkward, un-meaning, and unaccountably strange in his manner. But in his train of thinking there is something regular, deep, and comprehensive; yet the oddity of his address, the vulgarisms that accompany his public speaking, and that strange New England cant which runs through his public as well as his private speaking make everything that is connected with him grotesque and laughable;—and yet he deserves infinite praise,—no Man has a better Heart or a clearer Head. If he cannot embellish he can furnish thoughts that are wise and useful. He is an able politician, and extremely artful in accomplishing any particular object; it is remarked that he seldom fails. I am told he sits on the Bench in Connecticut, and is very correct in the discharge of his Judicial functions. In the early part of his life he was a Shoe-maker; but, despising the lowness of his condition, he turned Almanack maker, and so progressed upwards to a Judge. He has been several years a Member of Congress, and discharged the duties of his Office with honor and credit to himself, and advantage to the State he represented. He is about 60.’
“Silas Deane, his colleague in the Continental Congress, in a frank letter to his wife, thus paints Sherman, as he appeared at a New York dinner party:
“ ‘Mr. Sherman is clever in private, but I will only say he is as badly calculated to appear in such a Company as a chestnut-burr is for an eye-stone. He occasioned some shrewd countenances among the company, and not a few oaths, by the odd questions he asked, and the very odd and countrified cadence with which he speaks; but he was, and did, as well as I expected.’[21]
“In the same letter Deane shows his vexation at Sherman’s views regarding traveling on Sunday: