In Conversation With
Accession № RS–1721–2026  ·  The Republic Room
THE STATE HOUSE AT PHILADELPHIA — SOUTH FRONT Where the Connecticut Compromise carried · 16 July, A.D. MDCCLXXXVII N 107 ft. even to the vane above the bell the bell that rang for independence the Assembly Room — where the Declaration and the Constitution were signed THE FOUR INSTRUMENTS · EACH BEARING HIS NAME Association 1774 Declaration 1776 Confederation 1777 Constitution 1787 THE STATE HOUSE Where the Great Compromise carried, and the Senate was born measured plainly, after the surveyor's manner, by the hand of R.S.
Roger Sherman
Museum of Minds

Roger Sherman

1721 — 1793
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The only man to sign all four founding documents — the cobbler who built the republic

The Gallery
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In His Own Words
Curator's Note

The man who signed everything.

Roger Sherman had no formal education past childhood. He learned his father's trade — making shoes — in Newton, Massachusetts, and taught himself surveying and law from books bought with the money the cobbler's bench earned him. By the time he settled in New Milford, Connecticut, he was a storekeeper; then a justice of the peace; then a judge of the Connecticut Superior Court; then treasurer of Yale, mayor of New Haven, and a delegate to the Continental Congress. He was fifty-two when he signed the Declaration of Independence. He is the only American to sign all four founding documents: the Articles of Association in 1774, the Declaration in 1776, the Articles of Confederation in 1777, and the Constitution in 1787. That record is not a coincidence — it is fourteen years of steady, practical presence at every moment the republic was assembled.

His largest work has no title page. In the summer of 1787, the Constitutional Convention was deadlocked over representation: the large states demanded proportional suffrage in both houses of Congress, the small states demanded equality, and neither side would yield. Sherman — who had first proposed the arrangement in June, as a member of the Committee of Five that had drafted the Declaration eleven years earlier — put forward the plain solution everyone had been too proud to accept: a House apportioned by population, a Senate in which every state stood equal. The Connecticut Compromise carried on July 16. Without it, the Convention would almost certainly have dissolved, and there would have been no Constitution to sign.

That is Mr. Sherman of Connecticut, a man who never said a foolish thing in his life. — Thomas Jefferson, pointing him out to a visitor in Congress

He was a Calvinist of the old New England kind — blunt, plain-spoken, suspicious of eloquence, and certain that institutions must restrain human nature rather than hope it away. He is also candid about the concession that shadows his record: he thought slavery wrong and compromised on it anyway, judging that a union which failed would fix nothing. Ask him whether that trade was worth it. Ask him how close the Convention came to collapse, why he thought the Bill of Rights unnecessary and helped draft it anyway in the First Congress, and what it feels like to be the least famous indispensable founder. He died in office, a Senator from Connecticut, in 1793.

Constitutional Design The Connecticut Compromise Bicameral Legislature Founding Documents Connecticut Politics Calvinist Political Theory Practical Governance The First Congress
That the proportion of suffrage in the first branch should be according to the respective numbers of free inhabitants; and that in the second branch, or Senate, each State should have one vote and no more.”
Motion Before the Federal Convention · Recorded by James Madison · June 11, 1787

Drawn From the Corpus