“Roger Sherman was born to a great opportunity. So was every child born in the American colonies during the years between 1720 and 1760. Those colonies were then assuming proportions inconsistent with the long maintenance of British dominion over a territory so distant and a people so enterprising and intelligent. The day was soon to come when they would strike for liberty. Who were to be the leaders, then? “Massachusetts was to furnish her full share, and two of them grew up, in neighboring towns, to begin life as apprentices and end it as statesmen. “Franklin was already at work in a Boston printing office, when Sherman, in 1721, was born in Newton. Neither had any advantages of education. Franklin’s schooling ended when he was about ten, and Sherman was apprenticed to a shoemaker and began to learn his trade at an age not much greater. He had hardly acquired it when his father, then living at Stoughton, Massachusetts, died, and he found, at the age of nineteen, that the main charge of a numerous family of younger brothers and sisters, as well as of his mother, must thenceforward rest upon his shoulders. Three years of struggle upon the small farm, which his father left, satisfied him that to support this load he must seek some more remunerative employment. “An elder brother had previously removed to this town, then a frontier settlement. Connecticut was the West of that day to the towns of eastern Massachusetts. It was the place for more than a century where many of the most active and enterprising sons of the older colony had gone to found new homes and breathe a freer air. Connecticut, it will be recollected, had preserved her charter and elected her own governors. Massachusetts, for half a century, had received hers from the crown. “Sherman resolved to join his brother, and the whole family were united in New Milford in 1743. From the early years of his apprenticeship he had been in the habit, as he bent over his last, of keeping a book open on his bench, to the study of which he gave what moments he could occasionally snatch from his work. In this way, and in his hours of leisure, he had been able to pick up the elements of a good English education, and to make considerable attainments in mathematics and plane geometry. One object of his removal to Connecticut had been to put this knowledge to practical use by engaging in the business of a surveyor.