Cecilia Sherman
In my Saturday's communication, I gave a sketch of Sherman's home and improvements in Mansfield. After he shall have passed away he will become the property of the State. Present party differences will not be to his disadvantage. His long success and nearly even tone and quality through many occurrences, and the absence of any real scandals in his life, will probably hush dissent at his decease, and awaken attention to his general services. Even at the present it is wise to consider a man fairly who has been in many things the public servant and steward of us all. I have not said anything with reference to Senator Sherman's wife, a lady who has been unusually prudent and modest during her husband's long career, and, although known to his circle of intimate friends and constituents, has seldom been described in the newspapers. Everybody speaks of her as an excellent, capable and devoted woman, who, in the absence of children, has supplied a charity, counsel and assistance to the public man whose name she bears recognized by Mr. Sherman and all his family. Cecilia Sherman was the only daughter of Judge James Stewart and of his wife Margaret Lougheridge, to whom he was married in 1826. These names will at once be recognized as Scotch or Scotch-Irish. Mrs. Stewart lived only two years after her marriage, leaving this only child to her husband, who subsequently married Mary Mercer, a lady who lived to 1860, and survived her husband about two years. Judge Stewart was one of the ablest men by nature and grace ever seen in that part of Ohio. He was of an old Irish family, which came to Pennsylvania about twenty-five years before the American Revolution. He was born in York County, Pennsylvania, at a place called Chanceford. This old region of the country has been noted for its Scotch-Irish jurists and its staid, industrious German population. Judge Stewart's mother was named Jane Duncan. He was born at the beginning of the century, and first removed to New York State, where he lived in a log house. While still in his youth he came to Ohio, and taught in an academy, I think, at Mansfield, probably the first academy in the town. Mansfield must have been then a very small place, for it was started in 1809 by Jared Mansfield. Judge Stewart taught himself to read, and, it is said, could not read and write till he was a man. If such was a fact, no sign existed on his noble and intelligent countenance of any want of education or sense. A picture of him hangs in the Sherman family library, and in some of its characteristics so much resembles the late Judge Charles Sherman that I mistook it for him awhile. Mr. Stewart rose to high consideration in Mansfield, and in 1850 was put on the bench, where he sat six years amid great satisfaction, till he was beaten by Judge Geddes, the present Democratic Member of Congress, and he died two years after that. We may suppose that the young John Sherman had no sooner seen his way clear to a settlement in life than he attached himself to the interesting daughter of James Stewart, who at that time bade fair to be a man of property, and had a farm in the vicinity of Mansfield. His elevation to the bench was not of advantage to his worldly estate, and it is said that this property was embarrassed, and that John Sherman, in respect to his wife and her father, paid off the mortgages, and that it remains in the family. Mr. Sherman has considerable farm and town property in the Mansfield region, and he has uniformly given his attention to business so closely that he has little trouble in keeping up improvements and collecting his rents. The principal practice of his brother and law tutor was in making collections. John Sherman spent a good deal of his youth collecting money for the firm. Some of the people in Mansfield say that Mrs. Sherman, being the daughter of a lawyer and the wife of another, paid considerable attention to the forms and theory of law, and that she can draw a legal paper as accurately as her husband, and has often done so. She has the instinct of property and of husbandry well defined, and is amply capable of taking care of her husband's estate. She has been a mother to the children of other people, not only with the family of her husband, but to strangers, and the Senator and his wife have adopted at least two children and brought them up. Mr. Sherman's friends say that it would have been of advantage to his temperament and made him a more sociable man if his own children had been around his household. The Sherman family at large has been quite prolific as Ohio families of thrifty stock, but in this one instance there is no prosperity. John Sherman, however, has been attending to the needs of his brothers and sisters, and has been a general adviser and friend of them all. He may be called the old man of the family, having been a sort of overseer of all the rest. Indeed, he has been the architect of the whole family, particularly of his brothers. Charles Sherman owed his appointment as United States Judge to his brother John, and Tecumseh Sherman had not only been a business failure up to the beginning of the war, but when the war broke out he was of a disturbed and wavering mind, not on the subject of union or disunion, but he thought the Abolitionists as much as the disunionists were responsible for the hostilities, and that his brother, John Sherman, had been too much of an Abolitionist. I think it probable that letters were written about that time arraigning John Sherman for having departed from the Conservative Whig precepts of his father and friends and gone into the black Republican camp. John Sherman, however, believed that Tecumseh had ability, and after trying to secure him some place on the staff at Washington, got him the offer of a whole regiment, which was a great promotion for Sherman, who had never been above a First Lieutenant or Captain in the Regular Army, and had with avidity seized upon the offer of chief of a military academy in Louisiana. John Sherman's connections, brothers-in-law, &c., have also derived influence, and perhaps advantage, from his public promotions. In nearly all these cases the appointments of his people to place have been to the public advantage. The selection of General Sherman to be a Colonel; and his subsequent promotions, attest good discernment and have brought ample return to the United States. When General Sherman was notified of his appointment to a regiment he was merely President of a horse-car company in St. Louis, probably with a salary of $2,500 a year. His ambitious, determined and almost sleepless mind was just what was needed to be united with Grant's steady yet somewhat phlegmatic temperament. These two men early united their fortunes, and without any waste of affection have understood each other, co-operated without friction and closed the war out gloriously together. If John Sherman ever made mistakes in the appointment of any of his people to place they were far over compensated by the gift of General Sherman to the Government. The Sherman family of Ohio is a branch of the Connecticut Shermans, who are said to have come from Dedham, in Sussex County, England, and one of the earliest recorded is Sir Henry Sherman, of Yoxley. The first Sherman, Edmond, came to this country with the proverbial three sons, and settled in Massachusetts, at Watertown. Roger Sherman, the celebrated Connecticut Senator, was of this stock, a man who took position at home and at the Capitol for his distinctive good sense, as contrasted with the more courtly and showy qualities of the colonial gentry who about that time had given tone to the Senate. Roger Sherman had been a mechanic, a shoemaker, I think, and became a lawyer, and when he arrived in the Senate he was, perhaps, the first representative in it of the American mechanic, the grim, listening, criticizing business man, who had not been brought up as a shipping merchant, like Robert Morris, nor as a lawyer or planter, but as a craftsman accustomed to weigh his leather. Roger Sherman started the Senate in the line of its present business, looking out for the revenue, watchful over the trades and the prosperity of the country; and there is something of his stamp in John Sherman's countenance and work. Charles R. Sherman, the Senator's father, was a lawyer of Norwalk, Conn., and an office-holder there. His deputy-collector, it is said, robbed him, and he had to be sold out, and, therefore, came out to Ohio soon after his marriage, in 1810, to Mary Hoyt. His eldest son, it is believed, was born at Norwalk in 1811. Somewhat later, Mr. Sherman assisted to located fire lands in the northern part of the State to compensate the Connecticut towns which had been destroyed by the British in the second war with England. Settled in Ohio, at Lancaster, this young Connecticut mother produced children without intermission. When Judge Sherman died, at Lebanon, while holding Court, of an attack, it is said of Asiatic Cholera, he left eleven children with the smallest amount of money to provide for them, some say only $200 to $400. The oldest of these children was only sixteen, and the youngest was only six weeks old. John Sherman was the eighth child. The little frame house yet stands in Lancaster where the young mother, with a child at her breast and this formidable family around her, faced the world. Her husband had been regarded, however, as one of the most creditable men in the state, and had many friends at the Bar and among his prosperous neighbors. Consequently, Thomas Ewing, one of his friends, asked to have one of the children, and Tecumseh fell into his hands and so was sent to West Point and became the son-in-law of Mr. Ewing. Some of the girls, I think, were also sent to distant connections and friends and so married in other portions of the state. How few rich families have ever had the success that came out of this huddle of eleven poverty-stricken children in an Ohio town. But their father had really not left them poor; he had left them his name and the recollection of his character. He had been one of the Judges of the state, and in those early days a Judge in America stood as high as a Judge in the Pentateuch. His children seemed to become wards of the Bar. John Sherman at the ate of eight, was adopted by his father's cousin at the town of Mt. Vernon, which is but a few miles below Mansfield, in the same general valley. He remained at Mt. Vernon until 1831 and was sent back to Lancaster to school, the home of his childhood. At school he was a little sharp and testy and stood a good deal of flogging. His first occupation was to carry a rod in 1837 on the Muskingum Canal, an improvement work. This open-air occupation was a benefit to him, and though he had always been a thin man, he has never since been a sickly one. He was not presented with the fine round stomach and bodily gifts of his older brother Charles, and hence has always had entire possession of his head to work with, whereas if he had been a high-liver the blood which has propelled his brain might have been wanted in his stomach to assist digestion. It is a well-known law that when the stomach is full the blood goes there to assist assimilation, and those who eat frugally have more use for their brains. It was about 1840 that Mr. Sherman went to Mansfield to enter the law office of his brother Charles D., and be a lad of all work. He made up his mind to settle right there, and he has, therefore, lived in Mansfield within a few years of half a century. Considering this length of time to occupy one town and grow up with it, what is said against Sherman in Mansfield is extremely slight and thin. Some of his Democratic neighbors say that he is a cold man. That remark has been adopted over much of the country. In one sense it is true -- he is as frank a man in is momentary enjoyments and repulsions as can be found. His temper is without disguise. He has learned through a long public career, to keep still, though his disposition is generally to retort immediately in kind, and not to maintain vindictiveness. There has hardly ever been a case where one of his friends, encountering any particular hostility, could not count on John Sherman not only standing by the friend, but fighting the enemy.
From The Mansfield Herald, March 6, 1884