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View Full Version : Good Morning..."He never said a foolish thing in his life"



Okla-homey
7/23/2006, 08:13 AM
July 23, 1793 Connecticut Patriot Roger Sherman dies

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Roger Sherman. The serious looking self-educated genius from Connecticutt saved the Constitutional Convention.

213 years ago on this day in 1793, Roger Sherman, a Connecticut patriot and member of the Committee of Five selected to draft the Declaration of Independence, dies of typhoid in New Haven, Connecticut, at age 72.

Sherman is the only man among the Patriots of the American Revolution who signed all four documents gradually assigning sovereignty to the new United States: the Continental Association of 1774, the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation and the United States Constitution.

Thomas Jefferson credited Sherman with having “never said a foolish thing in his life.” (Of course, Sherman lived during the era which preceded the advent of innerweb message boards.)

When the Continental Congress struggled with finding a way to give representation to the smaller states as well as the large ones, it was Sherman who broke the impasse with the suggestion that the Congress be composed of two bodies--one, the Senate, giving equal representation to every state, and another, the House of Representatives, giving more representatives to larger states, depending on population. His proposal, which some credit with saving the Constitutional Convention from collapse, was called the “Connecticut Compromise.”

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Founding Father Roger Sherman has been honored for perpetuity by this statue that stands in the East Central Hall of the Capitol.

Of humble birth, Sherman was a self-educated cordwainer (shoemaker,) raised on the western frontier of Massachusetts. He would eventually distinguish himself as a surveyor and astronomer; read the law and join the Bar of Litchfield, Connecticut; and serve as both a professor of religion and treasurer of Yale College in New Haven, Connecticut.

He served in numerous elective and judicial offices, including in the Second Continental Congress, in the Connecticut General Assembly, and as justice of the peace, justice of the Superior Court of Connecticut and a representative in the first United States Congress. Sherman was the mayor of New Haven and a member of the United States Senate at the time of his death.

Sherman was as prolific in his personal life as he was in his political career. He had seven children with his first wife, Elizabeth Hartwell, and eight more with his second wife, Rebecca Minot Prescott. That 15 kids. Sheesh.

Sherman was buried near the Yale campus. He is remembered with a statue in the US Capitol and at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia.

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