Senator John Sherman

Born:   May 10, 1823 Lancaster Ohio

Died:   October 22, 1900 Washington D.C.

Buried:   Mansfield Cemetery, Mansfield, Richland County, Ohio

Plot:   Section 1, across from Mordecai Bartley

John Sherman was a senator, secretary of the treasury, and secretary of state. Hewas born in Lancaster, Ohio, the son of Charles Sherman, judge on the Ohio Supreme Court, and Mary Hoyt. Sherman was only six years old in 1829 when his father died, leaving a widow with eleven children. The family's financial situation forced Sherman's mother to send many of the children to relatives, and in 1831 Sherman moved to Mount Vernon, Ohio, to live with is father's cousin. He returned to Lancaster four years later. His decision to quit school at the age of fourteen may have been motivated by a determination to help provide for the family. Sherman spent the next vo years outdoors, apprenticing to engineers working on river improvements in Ohio. In 1840 he moved to Mansfield, Ohio, to study law. When Sherman turned twenty-one in 1844, he was admitted to the bar and stablished a practice. He married Margaret Stewart four years later. They adopted one child. Sherman entered political life as a Whig in the late 840s. Within a few years, however, outrage over the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which made it possible to establish slavery in those territories, led to formation of a coalition in Ohio among Whigs, some Democrats, and lembers of the antislavery Free Soil party. Nominated by this coalition to run for a seat in the House of Representatives in 1854, Sherman rode the tide of sentiment against the Kansas-Nebraska Act to win by some 300 votes. He became a "founding father" of the Republican party in Ohio. Never an abolitionist, Sherman quickly emerged as n articulate spokesman for the moderate Republicins, those who would not interfere with slavery' where it existed but who absolutely opposed the extension of slavery into the western territories. After being elected twice, Sherman emerged as a candidate for speaker in 1859 in a bitterly divided House of Representatives but withdrew from the contest and became chair of the Ways and Means Committee. He thus took the first step toward establishing himself as the leading Republican figure in the conduct of the nation's financial and monetary affairs over the next thirty-five years. Sherman won a fourth term in the House in 1860, and he had reason to believe that every Republican would support him for Speaker. Instead, when President Abraham Lincoln chose Senator Salmon P. Chase of Ohio to become secretary of the treasury in 1861, the Ohio legislature selected Sherman to replace "Chase for a full six-year term in the Senate just as the nation plunged into the Civil War. While his older brother, General William Tecumseh Sherman, helped lead the North to victory, Sherman played a critical ole as well as a member of the Senate Finance Committee. To pay for the war, in 1862-1863 he vigorously supported the temporary use of hundreds of millions of dollars in paper money without gold backing, or "greenbacks"; the first income tax in the history of the nation; and the creation of the National Banking System. The Ohio legislature voted in 1866 to return Sherman to the Senate for a second term. As a moderate in his approach toward the defeated South, he hoped that President Andrew Johnson and the leaders of Congress would cooperate on a policy that would bring the South back into the nation as quickly as possible. Sherman came to believe, however, that the president's determination to control Reconstruction threatened to divide the Republican party. When Johnson vetoed the Civil Rights Act of 1866, the first attempt to extend the protection of the federal government to the freedmen, or former slaves, Sherman concluded that the president had abandoned the party. Driven into the camp of the Radical Republicans as much by the president's actions as by the mistreatment of the freedmen and the abuses of the Ku Klux Klan in the South, Sherman took the lead in the Senate in writing the Reconstruction Act of 1867, providing for military occupation often states. Each state could return to the nation only when it ratified the proposed Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, the "civil rights" amendment. After the House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly for impeachment of President Johnson, the Senate conducted the trial in 1868, and Sherman joined those who found the president guilty. The Senate came within one vote of removing Johnson from office. The question remains: why did Sherman's presidential ambitions fail so miserably? The answers all relate to Sherman's personality. He has been described as the "Ohio Icicle" , his quest for the presidency doomed because he "carried the political cross of dullness" . More specifically, he faced two insurmountable obstacles. Ohio Republicans, with more than their share of potential presidential candidates, never truly united behind him at any national convention. Additionally, he was a colorless man, and it was his misfortune that every four years he had to contend for the nomination against his opposite, Blaine, the "Plumed Knight," who captured the imagination of the American public. Sherman experienced a sort of last hurrah after the Republicans regained the White House in 1888. He helped write what became known as the Sherman Silver Purchase Act of 1890, even though he accepted it only as an alternative to the unlimited coinage of silver dollars. The law provided that the federal government would purchase virtually all of the silver produced in the United States each month but would have the option of coining the silver or holding it in reserve. Sherman understood this as guaranteeing that no increase would be made in the coinage of silver dollars. In his bid for a sixth term in 1892, Sherman faced serious opposition for the first time from the much younger Joseph Foraker, who had served two terms as governor of Ohio. Foraker, then forty-five years old, was one of the many Ohioans with presidential ambitions and had been in conflict with Sherman throughout the 1880s. When Foraker had first run unsuccessfully for governor in 1883, some had talked of nominating Sherman instead of Foraker, who was only thirty-seven years old at the time. Foraker became governor in 1885. Though Sherman had supported Foraker's successful bid for a second term in 1887, he began to see Foraker as a potential rival for the presidential nomination in 1888. At the state convention in 1887, Sherman insisted that Ohio Republicans endorse him for the nomination. Governor Foraker initially opposed that action, understanding that such an endorsement would eliminate him as a potential candidate and believing that it would hurt his chances for a second term by alienating those who supported Blaine for another nomination. In 1889 Foraker lost his bid for a third lerm as governor, and he became determined to move up to the Senate in place of Sherman, who was then sixty-eight years old. Sherman won the contest in the Ohio legislature and began the last phase of a distinguished career doomed lo an unfortunate ending. Once again Sherman believed that a Republican convention might turn to him. President Harrison won the nomination, however, and the presidential election of 1892 brought Cleveland back to the White House. When the nation's economy suffered a complete collapse in 1893, Mierman, who never believed in the law named for him, did not hesitate to support Cleveland's demand for repeal of the Sherman Silver Purchase Act. By 1898 he sometimes would not recognize old acquaintances. He resigned at the end of April 1898, shortly after the United States went to war with Spain. Differences over expansionism, some degree of awareness that others had taken over his responsibilities, and suggestions from colleagues that the time had come to leave public office all may have contributed to his decision. Sherman then identified with other prominent individuals who opposed creation of an American empire in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War, but he did little more than lend the use of his name to the anti-imperialist movement. He died in Washington. During a year as secretary of state, Sherman repeatedly demonstrated that he suffered from an almost total loss ol hearing. and could not concentrate for prolonged periods.

My Source:  Book: American National Biography (Library of Congress)