“To no other man came the good fortune to set his hand to these three great State papers. One marked the birth of the nation. The next was its first attempt to agree on a constitution of government--a necessary compromise, and temporary as compromises always are. The last was what has made the United States the greatest, richest, freest country that the sun shines upon to-day; and it was in that, that the work of Sherman told most. “He was among the leading members of the Convention from whose hands it came. Connecticut was wise enough to send to it her strongest men. Our delegates were William Samuel Johnson, Oliver Ellsworth, and Roger Sherman. “Johnson was the representative in his generation of the family in the State most distinguished for public services and personal attainments. He had ably represented our interests abroad, in important matters, and twenty years before had received the degree of Doctor of Civil Law from Oxford University. The Convention made him head of the committee to put the measures which it adopted in proper form and style. Oliver Ellsworth, who had been the foremost lawyer at our bar, was then an associate of Sherman on the bench of the Supreme Court, and was soon to be Chief Justice of the United States. But Sherman had a truer sense than either of his colleagues of what must be the nature and soul of the new government. He felt that it must stand upon a double foundation, that of the States, acting each for itself, and that of the people of all the States, acting for all together.[24] “He felt, too, that it must stand for human liberty. “Our State was then a slave-holding State, but he was one of those who were determined that the word slave should not stain the pages of the Constitution of the United States. Later, when he was a member of the first Congress, one of the representatives from Virginia (for Virginia statesmen were then looking to the gradual abolition of slavery) proposed to put into the tariff not a duty of ten dollars on each _slave_ imported. Sherman opposed it. He could not, he said, reconcile himself to the insertion of human beings as an article of duty, among goods, wares, and merchandise; and, when it was replied that the doctrine of the Declaration of Independence required the endeavor to wipe off the stigma of slavery from the American government, his reply was that the principles of the motion and the principles of the bill were inconsistent: the principle of the bill was to raise revenue, and the principle of the motion was to correct a moral evil. These few and well put words illustrate that strong sense of proportion and relation which gave Sherman such weight in every deliberative assembly.