“There was this piece of solid ground under Sherman’s argument. Grant the power of Parliament to establish an American episcopate, and a new point was made in favor of the general right of Parliament to legislate as to all American affairs. This consideration, no doubt, greatly influenced his course; and it was sufficient to defeat the consecration of any bishop for America until that of Dr. Seabury, which followed closely after the Revolution.
“The Wyoming controversy between Connecticut and Pennsylvania was one in which Sherman took an active part.
“Our charter bounded us ‘on the North by the line of the Massachusetts Plantation; and on the South by the Sea; and in Longitude as the Line of the Massachusetts Colony, running from East to West, That is to say, From the said Narragansett Bay on the East to the South Sea on the West part, with the Islands thereto Adjoining.’ This gave us a paper title to a swath of North America sixty miles wide, at least, running from Rhode Island to the Pacific, and taking in what are now the sites of Wilkesbarre, Cleveland, Chicago, and Omaha. Our people, as early as 1762, began to make settlements in that part of it in western Pennsylvania known as the Wyoming Valley. The General Assembly made it a county in 1776, styling it Westmoreland County, and it furnished the Twenty-fourth Connecticut Regiment in the Continental Army.
“Sherman was one of a committee appointed by the legislature in 1774 to report upon measures to support the title of the Wyoming settlers, which Pennsylvania now disputed, under a later and conflicting grant from the Crown. Energetic measures were recommended and adopted, and, knowing the power of the newspapers, Sherman shortly afterwards followed up the report by a clear and full statement of the position of Connecticut, in a letter to the Connecticut Journal of New Haven. Public sentiment, here, was much divided. There were many who thought that such an ‘expansion’ threatened the safety of our liberties. Sherman proposed that the colony should secure a determination of its bounds from the King in Council. Such a law suit, said those who were for letting Wyoming go, would be slow and costly; and, even if we should win it, what then? A defeat, Mr. Ingersoll had declared in another newspaper article, ‘would be very detrimental, but a victory must be absolute ruin.’ ‘But,’ replied Sherman, ‘he gives no reason for his opinion. And can his bare assertion make the people of this colony, who are a company of farmers, believe that to be quieted in their claim to a large tract of valuable land would ruin them?’
“The Revolution transferred the judicial decision of this controversy from the King in Council to the Congress of the United States. A Court of Commissioners was organized to try the issue, and, in 1782, judgment was rendered against us.
“The Commissioners had prudently determined, before hearing the case, to give no reasons for their decision, whatever it might be. That they were not of the strongest may be inferred from the fact that four years later Congress accepted from Connecticut a relinquishment of the rest of her Western title, with an express reservation of a large strip of northern Ohio. This is still known as the Western Reserve. We soon sold it, and the proceeds constituted our State School fund of $2,000,000.
“The services rendered by Sherman to the United States outshine those which he rendered to Connecticut; but it is only because the field was larger, and the circumstances more striking.
“Three are commemorated upon a mural tablet erected to his memory in the church of which he was a member in New Haven. This states that he was ‘one of the committee which drew the Declaration of Independence, of that which reported the Articles of Confederation, of the Convention that framed the national Constitution, and a Signer of these three Charters of American liberty.’
“To no other man came the good fortune to set his hand to these three great State papers. One marked the birth of the nation. The next was its first attempt to agree on a constitution of government—a necessary compromise, and temporary as compromises always are. The last was what has made the United States the greatest, richest, freest country that the sun shines upon to-day; and it was in that, that the work of Sherman told most.
“He was among the leading members of the Convention from whose hands it came. Connecticut was wise enough to send to it her strongest men. Our delegates were William Samuel Johnson, Oliver Ellsworth, and Roger Sherman.