Roger Sherman and the Creation of the American Republic

Revolutionary historians recognize Roger Sherman as the Connecticut man whose Zelig-like ability to appear at important Philadelphia events rivals that of more prominent founders. Sherman was at the Second Continental Congress, helped draft the Declaration of Independence, and attended the Constitutional Convention, faithfully representing the “Land of Steady Habits.” In Connecticut, Sherman was a legislative bulwark, serving in the upper house and as a superior court judge, before ending his career in the United States Senate. Yet, Sherman remains anchored in the second tier of founders, overshadowed by Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, George Washington, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson. Mark David Hall thinks Sherman deserves better. Hall eschews a traditional biographical approach, saying little about Sherman's family or business activities, to argue for the importance of religious faith in decoding his subject's political thought and actions. Hall's Sherman is a true-blue Congregationalist, New Light variety, for whom religion and politics often appear as opposite sides of the same coin. Not for Sherman was the drift toward Unitarianism that enticed John Adams, nor the Enlightenment ideals that defined Benjamin Franklin or Thomas Jefferson. Time-tested Calvinist precepts that underscored the rights of the governed and the need for state-supported churches to promote morality were Sherman's lodestars. In arguing that Reformed Christianity defined Sherman, Hall takes aim at such earlier biographers as Charles Collier, who depicted an ambitious yet flexible pragmatist less wedded to faith. Although Sherman left no diary, his letters, publications, and friendships, argue Hall, show a man imbued by Calvinism and theologically conversant.

Convention · Declaration of independence · Enlightenment · Faith · Morality · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Theology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · American History and Culture · Law · Mormonism, Religion, and History · Philosophy · Religious studies

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