“Five years later he was appointed a Judge of the Superior Court, a position which he continued to hold for nearly a quarter of a century.
“The British legislation culminating in the Stamp Act had now begun to arouse the spirit of independence in the American colonies. Sherman was one of those who took the most advanced ground. He maintained that Parliament had no jurisdiction over them whatever.
“Connecticut sent him as one of her delegates to the first Continental Congress, in 1774, and there he maintained this doctrine with all his power. John Adams reports him as declaring upon the floor that there was no legislative power superior to the Colonial Assemblies, and that Americans had adopted the common law of England, not as the common law, but as the highest reason.
“It was his thorough-going republicanism, indeed, which had carried him into public life, and put him in a leading place among the legislators of his State. He had been first elected to the Governor’s Council or upper house of the General Assembly in 1766. The Stamp Act had brought the ‘Sons of Liberty’ into existence. They had forced, under threat of death, Jared Ingersoll, who, under the advice of Franklin had accepted the position of stampmaster for Connecticut, to resign the office. Governor Fitch, though with reluctance, had taken the official oath which the obnoxious Act required. It cost him his place, William Pitkin being elected his successor a year later. With him went out of office four of his Council who sympathized with his deference to parliamentary authority; dropped by the people to make room for others who were regarded as more fully Americans in spirit and doctrine.
“No one was then eligible for a seat on the Council-board who had not been officially nominated in the previous year. Twenty nominations were annually made for the twelve places, and the election was so managed that the twelve in office always headed the list and were voted on first. A majority was not required for an election. To be once nominated for the upper house was in this way a substantial assurance of an ultimate election, and to be once elected was a substantial assurance of an annual re-election for life.
“Sherman, in 1766, had been on the waiting list for five years. A political whirlwind, unexampled in our Colonial annals, then made five vacancies, and death a sixth. He went in with five other new men, and remained a member until after the close of the Revolution.
“Religion in those days, so far as form at least was concerned, was a part of politics. There was a religious establishment in Connecticut. It put the church beside the schoolhouse on the village green. It made Church and State largely one.
“Sherman was not wiser than his generation in regard to matters of religion. His reading had been mainly in English history and law; but the subject next most interesting to him was theology. He accepted Calvinism. He believed in the Puritans. He distrusted and feared the Church of England. It was the day when so tolerant and fair-minded a man as President Stiles could record as among the fourteen trials and difficulties of this life: ‘Concern for the Congregational churches, & prevalence of Episcopacy & Wickedness.’[23]
“When, therefore, about the middle of the eighteenth century, the Episcopalians, who were especially strong in Connecticut, began to push for the appointment of one or more American bishops, it is not surprising that Sherman’s voice was raised in opposition.
“A long letter on this subject, written in 1768, which, it is believed, came from his pen, is among the files of the New Haven East Association, to which his church belonged. In this it is urged that if Parliament provides for American bishops, they might bring here all the functions and authority of those of England, and hold ecclesiastical courts like those of Laud, from which our fathers fled into the wilderness.