John Sherman was a congressman (1855-1861), senator
(1861-1877; 1881-1897), secretary of the treasury (1877-1881),
and secretary of state (1897-1898). In 1867, he chaired the
Senate committee that drafted the first Military Reconstruction
Act, which placed the former Confederate states under the
authority of the federal government and army. He was born on May 10, 1823, in Lancaster, Ohio, to Mary Hoyt
Sherman and Charles Sherman, a state supreme court judge. His
father died when Sherman was six, forcing him and his 10
siblings to be raised by various relatives. (One of his older
brothers was William Tecumseh Sherman, who later became a famous
Union general during the Civil War.) John Sherman dropped out
of school at the age of 14 and apprenticed for two years with
civil engineers working on river improvements. In 1840, he
began studying law and was admitted to the Ohio state bar four
years later when he was 21.
Sherman began his political life as a Whig, but was elected
to Congress in 1854 by a coalition of Ohio Whigs, Democrats, and
Free-Soilers opposed to the
Kansas-Nebraska Act,
which repealed the
Missouri Compromise ban on
slavery in the Western territories. He helped to found the
Republican Party in Ohio, and became a House leader of
Republican moderates who opposed the expansion of slavery but
pledged not to interfere with it in the South. In 1859, after
election to his third consecutive term, Sherman became a
candidate for speaker of the house, but soon withdrew from that
bitter contest. Instead, he was selected as chairman of the
powerful Ways and Means Committee, beginning a decades-long
involvement in federal financial and monetary affairs.
In 1860, Sherman was elected to a fourth term and expected to
be chosen the new speaker, but in early 1861 was selected by the
Ohio State Legislature to fill the vacancy in the U.S. Senate
left when Salmon P. Chase resigned to become treasury
secretary. As a member of the Senate Finance Committee, Sherman
supported Chase’s wartime policies of printing greenbacks,
taxing wealthy incomes, and establishing a national banking
system. In 1866, Sherman was reelected to a second term in the
Senate. The policies of President Andrew Johnson and the
actions of former Confederates drove Sherman and other moderates
to support the Reconstruction agenda of the Radical
Republicans. In 1868, the Ohio senator voted to remove
President Johnson from office (an attempt that failed to gain
the necessary two-thirds majority).
In 1867, Sherman assumed the chairmanship of the Senate
Finance Committee, and became a major voice in the nation’s
monetary and fiscal policies. He was a moderate hard-money
advocate, calling for the resumption of gold payments and
opposing the circulation of silver coins, but favoring bringing
greenbacks on par with gold dollars, rather than removing the
paper currency from circulation. In 1873, he steered through
the Senate legislation that removed (“demonetized”) silver as
legal tender, which became particularly controversial after the
onset of an economic depression the next year. In 1875,
Sherman’s leadership convinced Congress to adopt the Specie
Resumption Act, which retained $300 million of greenbacks in
circulation, but which backed them by gold beginning on January
1, 1879.
In March 1877, Sherman resigned from the Senate to become
secretary of the treasury under President Rutherford B. Hayes, a
fellow Ohio Republican. Sherman’s policies prepared the way for
the resumption of the gold standard, but he also had to
compromise with the silver forces. In 1877, the House passed
unlimited silver coinage, so Sherman lobbied the Senate to adopt
a bill that set monthly limits on the amount coined. The
revised measure, the Bland-Allison Act, passed both houses in
1878.
Sherman was a candidate for the Republican presidential
nomination three times in the 1880s. In 1880, he ran a distant
third to front-runners Ulysses S. Grant, the former president
seeking a third term, and Senator James G. Blaine. The
deadlocked convention eventually turned to Sherman’s campaign
manager, Congressman James A. Garfield. However, the Ohio
legislature did return the treasury secretary to a fourth term
in the U.S. Senate that year. Sherman fared even worse, though,
at the 1884 Republican National Convention, placing fifth on the
first ballot and losing to his rival, Blaine. Reelected to the
Senate in 1886, the Ohio senator believed that Republican
delegates would finally be receptive to his candidacy at the
next presidential convention. In the crowded field of 14
candidates in 1888, Sherman’s first-ballot tally was more than
twice than of his nearest challenger, but only one-quarter of
the total needed to win the nomination. Delegates then began
migrating to the banner of Benjamin Harrison of Indiana, who
surpassed Sherman on the seventh ballot to win the nomination.
Although his presidential ambition had been thwarted, Sherman
remained a powerhouse in the U.S. Senate. In 1890, Congress
enacted two major pieces of legislation that bore his name: the
Sherman Silver Purchase Act and the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. The
former authorized the government to purchase most of the
nation’s production of silver without increasing the
government’s coinage of the metal. The latter law was the first
federal attempt to regulate large business corporations, and
remains an important guide in today’s anti-trust decision
making. In 1888, Sherman faced a tough challenge to his Senate
seat from fellow Republican Joseph Foraker, but managed to win
reelection. As an economic depression began in 1893, Sherman
backed the repeal of the Silver Purchase Act, a law that he had
promoted earlier only to conciliate Western silver interests
within the Republican Party.
In 1897, President William McKinley appointed Sherman as
secretary of state, but he served only one year, resigning after
the U.S. declared war on Spain in April 1898. Sherman lent his
name to the anti-imperialist movement, but did not play an
active role. He died in Washington, D.C., on October 22, 1900.
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