“The revenue measure for the collection by the United States of customs duties on imported goods, which Congress had urged upon the States in 1783 as an amendment to the Articles of Confederation, had stated the proposed duties in dollars and ninetieths of a dollar. Thus, on rum of Jamaica proof, the rate fixed was four ninetieths of a dollar, and upon all other spirituous liquors three ninetieths.[26] This mode of reckoning fractions of a dollar continued to be that pursued in government accounts down to the close of the Confederation.[27] In 1786, Congress had, indeed, provided for the coinage of both cents and half-cents.[28] The next year a contract was made with James Jarvis of New Haven to strike off three hundred tons of these coins.[29] This contract was fulfilled at least in part, and many of the cents struck under it are to be found in the cabinets of collectors. They bear the legend Fugio, and the date 1787. The work was done at New Haven; Connecticut being then the great copper-producing State.
“It is probable, however, that these New Haven cents had a very limited circulation. Hildreth says that but a few tons were issued, and it is certain that in New York the old plan of reckoning by ninetieths of dollars remained in use for several years more.
“In 1789 Madison reported a tariff bill to the First Congress under our present Constitution. The rates of duty were left blank. Sherman, who had been chairman of a committee appointed by the General Assembly of Connecticut to supervise the coinage of copper coins under State authority,[30] took an early opportunity to propose that in filling the blanks that Madison had left, they should begin with rum, and tax it fifteen cents a gallon. He preferred, he said, to use the term cent, for its convenience, as ten made a dime, and ten dimes, a dollar.[31] This explanation was evidently necessary to make the House understand what a cent was. They approved his suggestion, and the bill when passed stated all duties in dollars and cents. It was thus that the inconvenient and senseless division of the dollar into ninetieths never afterwards obtained recognition on the statute books of the United States.
“At the close of the Revolution Connecticut found herself a tributary State to her neighbors on each side. Her citizens were buying heavily from New York, Newport, and Boston importers, and thus paying duties for the benefit of New York, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts. Connecticut consumed, according to an estimate by Chief Justice Ellsworth, as late as 1787, about a third of all the goods entered at the New York custom house, and paid in that way for New York customs something like twenty thousand pounds a year[32]—a vast sum for those early days.
“It was thought that if New Haven were made a free port, and special encouragement offered to merchants to settle there in business, we might be able to import what we wanted for ourselves.
“Our first city charter was thereupon issued, and New Haven became a city in 1784, with all the privileges of a free port for seven years. Her city seal devised by President Stiles still bears the legend, Mare liberum.
“Roger Sherman was elected its first mayor. The charter made the term of office during good behavior, and he remained the mayor until his death.
“Sherman was fond of studying problems of controversial theology. The first President Dwight, in summing up his character, described him as a ‘profound logician, statesman, lawyer, and theologian.’[33]
“Religion is the philosophy of life, and theology is, or ought to be, the philosophy of religion. No thoughtful man can avoid occasional reflection on these high themes. It is our good fortune to study them in the light of sciences unknown to him. Put any doctrinal discussion of the eighteenth century by the side of those of our day, directed and controlled as ours must be by the truths of biology, the discoveries of archæologists, and the principles of evolution, and the older statements seem unreal and unsubstantial.
“Sherman’s thought, however, in theology, as in everything else, was clear and plain. In 1789, he published, in New Haven, a sermon of his own composition. A year later he exchanged several long letters with Rev. Dr. Samuel Hopkins of Newport, in which he attacked that divine’s peculiar doctrine that a man ought to be willing to suffer eternal damnation, if need be, for the glory of God. Calvin was quoted as an authority for this, by the advocates of “Hopkinsianism.’ ‘Calvinists,’ replied Sherman, ‘do not found their faith on the authority of his opinions: that would be to entertain an opinion contrary to his, viz., that the word of God is the only rule of faith in matters of religion.’