James Schoolcraft Sherman

SHERMAN, JAMES SCHOOLCRAFT American politician, was born near Utica, N.Y., on Oct. 24, 1855. He graduated at Hamilton college in 1878 and was admitted to the bar in 1880. He was elected mayor of Utica in 1884. In 1886 he was elected to the U. S. House of Representa tives and was returned continuously until 1908, excepting the term 1891-93. He was chairman of the Republican State conven tion in 1895, 1900 and 1908; and chairman of the Republican national committee in 1906. At the Republican national conven tion of 1908 he was nominated vice-president and was elected on the ticket with William Howard Taft. Four years later he was renominated, but died at Utica, on Oct. 3o, 1912, shortly before the elections.

SHERMAN, JOHN

(1823-190o), American financier and statesman, a younger brother of Gen. W. T. Sherman, was born at Lancaster, 0., on May I0, 1823. He began the study of law at Mansfield, 0., and was admitted to the bar in 1844. For ten years he practised his profession with success, and with only cas ual interest in politics, but upon the repeal of the Missouri Com promise by the Kansas-Nebraska bill in 1854, he joined the great popular movement in Ohio against the policy represented by this bill, and was elected to Congress in the autumn of that year as an "Anti-Nebraska" man. In the summer of the next year he took an active part in the formal organization of the Republican Party in the State, and at the opening of Congress in December began a long career of public service. As a member of the House (1855-61) he quickly manifested the qualities which characterized his whole political life. Though a thorough and avowed partisan, he was within the party the counsellor of moderate rather than extreme measures, and thus gained on the whole a position of great influence. He was a member of the committee sent by the House in 1856 to investigate the troubles in Kansas, and drafted the report of the majority. In March of 1861 he took his seat in the Senate in which he sat continuously until he became secre tary of the Treasury in 1877. His interest and efficiency in finan

cial legislation in the House led to his appointment on the Senate committee of finance, and of ter 1867 he was chairman of this influential committee. He thus became associated with the enact ment of all the great fiscal laws through which the strain of war and of reconstruction was sustained. He gave earnest support to the Legal Tender Act, and the substitution of the national for the State banking system. The Resumption Act of 1875, which provided for the return of specie payments four years later, was largely his work, and his appointment to the head of the Treasury department by President Hayes in 1877 enabled him to carry the policy embodied in the law to successful execution.

At the end of the Hayes administration he was again elected to the Senate from Ohio and held his seat until-1897. During this period he was largely concerned in the enactment of the Anti Trust Law of 189o, and of the so-called Sherman Act of the same year, providing for the purchase of silver and the issuing of Treas ury notes based upon it. In 188o and 1888 he aspired actively to the Republican nomination for the Presidency, but failed to obtain the requisite support in the Convention. During the last years of his senatorial career he was chairman of the Senate com mittee on foreign affairs. Upon the accession of President McKin ley in 1897, he became secretary of State ; but under the tension of the war with Spain the duties of the office became too exacting for his strength at his age, and in April 1898 he resigned and withdrew into private life. He died at Washington on Oct. 2 2, A selection from the correspondence of John Sherman and his brother Gen. W. T. Sherman was published as The Sherman Letters in 1894. Sherman published Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet: an Autobiography (Chicago, 1895). A volume of Selected Speeches was published in 1879. See Life, by T. E. Burton (1906).