Roger Sherman (19 April 1721 – 23 July 1793) was a member of the US House of Representatives (F-CN) from 4 March 1789 to 3 March 1791 (preceding Amasa Learned) and a US Senator from 13 June 1791 to 23 July 1793 (succeeding William Samuel Johnson and preceding Stephen Mix Mitchell).
Biography[]
Roger Sherman was born in Newton, Massachusetts in 1721, and he established a legal practice in Litchfield County, Connecticut despite a lack of formal education. After serving in the State House of Representatives, he served as a Justice of the Superior Court of Connecticut from 1766 to 1789, and he represented his state in the Continental Congress; there, he helped to draft the US Declaration of Independence. He served as a delegate to the 1787 Constitutional Convention, and Sherman and James Wilson proposed the "Three-Fifths Compromise", which ensured that the American South would have more representation in the US Congress by counting its slaves as three-fifths of a person. Sherman went on to serve in the US House of Representatives from 1789 to 1791 and in the US Senate from 1791 to 1793, and he died in office in 1793.