John Sherman

JOHN SHERMAN.

JOHN SHERMAN, United States Senator from the State of Ohio, comes from the distinguished Connecticut family of Shermans, which was founded by a refugee Roundhead from Essex, England, who brought with him to America, the Puritan politics, courage, and conscience, which sent him into the field as soldier on the popular side in the Civil Wars. The Senator's father, Charles Robert Sherman, a thoroughly educated lawyer, removed from Connecticut to Ohio in 1810, and there became famous first as an advocate, and afterwards as a Judge of the Supreme Court. His professional life and judicial service won the success of eminent reputation and social regard—his generosity and disinterestedness restricted their profits to the maintenance of his large family. When, in 1829, he was stricken upon the bench with a mortal disease and died, he left a widow and eleven children, the oldest eighteen, the youngest an infant—and he left no estate. The boys became somewhat scattered.   William Tecumseh, now General Sherman, became by adoption a member of the family of the Hon. Thomas Ewing. John went to Mount Vernon, Ohio, where he was sent to school, and kept steadily and generally under good masters until he was fourteen years old. Then he was sent to the Muskingum Improvement, in part to earn his own support, in part to learn the business of a civil engineer, and was placed under the care of Colonel Curtis, since General Samuel R. Curtis, the resident engineer of the work The lad's grade in the corps was junior rodman. He was employed two years on this work —the two most valuable years of his education; for in them he learned the methods and forms of business, acquired a habit of working hard and systematically, and became self-reliant. When he was sixteen years old and innocent of all politics, save a boy's idea that Tom Corwin and Tom Ewing were the greatest men in the world, he became the victim of politics, and lost his employment. The Ohio election of 1838 brought the Democratic party into power. The pernicious doctrine the leaders of that party had established, that "to the victors belong the spoils," was applied to the Muskingum Improvement. Colonel Curtis was a Whig. He was turned out in the summer of 1839, and most of his boys were turned out with him, to give place to a Democratic engineer, and to Democratic boys. Sherman was among the discharged. He lost little time in weighing the justice which punished him for other people's politics, and not his own, but after his divorce from his engineering apprenticeship, set himself to thinking how he could accomplish the dream and ambition of his young life—a college education. He went to his brother, Charles T. Sherman, now United States District Judge in Ohio, who was then engaged as a lawyer in Mansfield, Ohio. The collegiate education was discussed in domestic session of the Ways and Means committee, composed of the two brothers, with the family resources all around subject to requisition. It could not be accomplished. John had to give up the idea of a college course.  Furthermore, he had to earn his living. It was finally agreed that the best thing to be done was for John to fit himself to be a lawyer as soon as he could, and while he was reading law with Charles, and working in his office as a clerk, to go to school to his brother in some sense, and study mathematics and the Latin classics under his instruction and direction. The attorney's business of the office of course ran over this, the boy's substitute for a college education, but amid his drudgery as a clerk, and his reading or elementary books of law, he picked up considerable Latin, and read miscellaneously, but, largely of English authors. His four years' novitiate expired while he was thus liberally educating, himself, and he was graduated out of his college by a license to practice law, which he obtained on examination the day after he was twenty-one years old. He immediately entered into a co-partnership with his older brother, which lasted for eleven years, and which was active and lucrative for those days and the region of Ohio, and in which John earned a solid reputation as an able, wise, resolute, laborious, honest, and successful lawyer. John rode the circuits; Charles managed the business and counselled in the office.