Roger Sherman: “Letters of a Countryman” (November 14, 1787)

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

From May 25 to September 17, 1787, the Constitutional Convention took place in Philadelphia. The express purpose of the convention was to amend the Articles of Confederation, the document under which the United States had been operating since independence from Great Britain. The articles, however, were fraught with problems. Considerable conflict was arising among the states—conflict not unlike that to which Sherman alluded in “A Caveat against Injustice”—and it was becoming apparent to the nation's leaders that the Articles of Confederation was a weak document that granted too much power to the individual states and not enough to the federal government. Many delegates to the convention, among them James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, arrived in Philadelphia with the intention not just of amending the articles but of creating an entirely new constitution.

Even before the convention ended, bitter debate began. Some members of the convention left before the closing ceremonies. Three others refused to sign the new document. As the rest returned to their states to urge ratification, they knew that no one was entirely happy with it. Sherman helped lead the fight for ratification in Connecticut, and to that end he wrote a series of five “Letters of a Countryman,” which were published that autumn in the New Haven Gazette. The first appeared on November 14, 1787.

The principal issue Sherman addresses in the first letter urging ratification of the new constitution is resistance to the notion of uniting the states into a larger entity. Throughout the states, those who opposed a federal constitution expressed the fear that a strong federal government would correspondingly weaken the states, depriving them of their rights. For example, two of New York's delegates to the Constitutional Convention, Robert Yates and John Lansing, Jr., wrote a letter to the governor of New York in which they voiced their opposition to a consolidated federal government. The core of their argument was that a strong federal government would be “productive of the destruction of the civil liberty of such citizens who could be effectually coerced by it, by reason of the extensive territory of the United States” (qtd. in Elliot, ed., vol. 1, p. 481). The governor of New York, George Clinton, opposed ratification, as did no less a figure than Patrick Henry.

In his letter of November 14, Sherman tries to allay such fears. He notes in the opening two paragraphs that citizens are understandably cautious about trading one form of government that already offers certain advantages for another form of government in the hope that it will offer greater advantages in the future. In the third paragraph, he imagines a small ten-mile-square community being asked to subsume itself in a larger state government but resisting because it considered the request a “violent attempt to wrest from them the only security for their persons or property.” He then compares the matter to the absorption of Scotland into Great Britain and the evils that many people in Scotland predicted would befall as a result. He concludes that the people of the ten-mile-square community would be no less secure if they were united to the rest of the state. In the final paragraphs, he suggests that people in entirely independent small communities run the risk of being “unsafe, poor and contemptible” and argues that just as states have not crushed the liberties of the communities within them, so the federal government would not crush the liberties of its constituent states.

Sherman was invested personally in the ratification of the Constitution, for he worked tirelessly to help create the document. Much of the convention's debate focused on two related issues. The first was the nature of the legislative branch of the federal government. Various proposals were put forward about the makeup of the legislature. One, called the Virginia Plan, was proposed by Virginia's governor, Edmund Randolph. It called for a bicameral legislature in which the number of representatives in both houses would be based on population. The members of the lower house would be elected by the people; members of the upper house would be elected by the lower house. The legislature would select the nation's president. This plan was often referred to as the “large state plan” because it would have allowed the nation's larger states to dominate the smaller ones.

An alternative, called the New Jersey Plan, was proposed by New Jersey governor William Paterson after a caucus with the smaller states, whose delegates threatened to walk out of the convention if the Virginia plan was accepted. The New Jersey Plan proposed a single house in which each state, regardless of size, would have one representative—a structure not unlike that under the Articles of Confederation—but the legislature would be granted additional powers. This plan, however, would have given smaller states influence in the legislature out of proportion to their population. The plan was rejected, but its proposal made clear that the smaller states would not agree to a constitution that reduced them to appendages of the larger states.

Enter Roger Sherman. Sherman drafted an alternative, usually called the Connecticut Compromise or the Great Compromise, that merged some of the features of each plan. It called for a bicameral legislature with each state having equal representation in the upper house (the Senate) and representation based on population in the lower house (the House of Representatives). In this way, the interests of large and small states were balanced.

The other contentious issue was how to count population, specifically, whether slaves should be counted for purposes of congressional representation in the lower house. The southern states, where the majority of slaves were held, would have been happy to have the slave population fully counted. The northern states, where opposition to slavery was already building, wanted to exclude slaves entirely rather than reward the southern states for owning slaves. The outcome of the debate was the so-called Three-fifths Compromise. Under this plan, five slaves were counted as three people for purposes of representation. Among historians, there is some uncertainty as to who proposed the Three-fifths Compromise. Some say that the idea came from James Wilson of Pennsylvania. Others say that Wilson and Roger Sherman jointly developed the compromise. Either way, the proposal was accepted and incorporated into the Constitution because of the widespread belief that otherwise the southern states would not ratify it. It should be noted that sometimes the Three-fifths Compromise is referred to as the Great Compromise, but this is a historical inaccuracy, for the two were entirely different proposals.

Sherman's other major contribution to the Constitution was the wording of Article I, Section 10, which has to do with currency. Harking back to the concerns he expressed in “A Caveat against Injustice,” he insisted that the words “nor emit bills of credit, nor make any thing but gold & silver coin a tender in payment of debts” be included in the article, thus eliminating the possibility that the states' governments would print their own paper currency. He continued to insist that giving a state government the power to print paper money was tantamount to giving it the power to print debased and worthless currency to pay its own debts. Although Sherman does not directly address this matter in his “Letters of a Countryman,” it suggests his belief that the new document, vesting powers in the federal government, would solve the young nation's currency problems, and for this reason, Sherman was eager to see it ratified.

Supporters of the Constitution mounted a push to see it ratified early by the most influential states, thus making it harder for other states to reject the document. On October 19, 1787, the Connecticut Assembly called for a series of town meetings to elect ratifying delegates. On January 9, 1788, these delegates voted to ratify the Constitution, making Connecticut the fifth state to do so.