Collected Works of Roger Sherman

Book Synopsis

Roger Sherman (1721-1793) was the only founder to sign the Articles of Association, the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution. He served 1,543 days in the Continental Congress and was a member of the five-man committee that drafted the Declaration of Independence.

At the Federal Convention of 1787 he spoke more times than all but three delegates and was the driving force behind the Connecticut Compromise. As a Representative and Senator in the new republic, he played critical roles in debates over the Bill of Rights, the assumption of state debts, and the creation of a national bank. He was also one of the leading political leaders in Connecticut for the latter part of the eighteenth century. Nevertheless, no book dedicated to his writings has ever been published. Collected Works of Roger Sherman brings together essays, documents, records of his remarks in the Constitutional Convention and in the First Federal Congress, and important representative letters Sherman wrote to a variety of correspondents, including:

1768 letter to William Samuel Johnson, emphasizing Parliament's limited authority over the colonies

1772 letter to the theologian Joseph Bellamy, criticizing Bellamy's position on a congregation's ability to fire its minister

1777 letter to Richard Henry Lee, addressing a number of economic issues

1789 series of letters between Sherman and John Adams, exploring the nature of republican government and the proper scope of presidential power.

Mark David Hall is Herbert Hoover Distinguished Professor of Politics and Faculty Fellow in the William Penn Honors Program at George Fox University. In addition to editing, with Kermit L. Hall, the Collected Works of James Wilson (Liberty Fund, 2007) and, with Daniel L. Dreisbach, The Sacred Rights of Conscience: Selected Readings on Religious Liberty and Church-State Relations in the American Founding (Liberty Fund, 2009), he has written Roger Sherman and the Creation of the American Republic (Oxford University Press, 2013).