Roger Sherman (April 19, 1721 – July 23, 1793) was an early American statesman and lawyer, as well as a Founding Father of the United States. He is the only person to have signed all four great state papers of the United States: the Continental Association, the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution.Born in Newton, Massachusetts, Sherman established a legal career in Litchfield County, Connecticut despite a lack of formal education. After a period in the Connecticut House of Representatives, he served as a Justice of the Superior Court of Connecticut from 1766 to 1789. He represented Connecticut at the Continental Congress and signed the Continental Association, which provided for a boycott against Britain following the imposition of the Intolerable Acts. He was also a member of the Committee of Five that drafted the Declaration of Independence. He later signed both the Articles of Confederation and the United States Constitution. In 1784, he was elected as the first mayor of New Haven, Connecticut. Sherman served as a delegate to the 1787 Philadelphia Convention, which produced the United States Constitution. After Benjamin Franklin, he was the oldest delegate present at the convention. Along with James Wilson, he proposed the Three-Fifths Compromise, which counted three-fifths of the slave population for the purposes of representation in the United States House of Representatives and the Electoral College. He favored granting the federal government power to raise revenue and regulate commerce, but initially opposed efforts to supplant the Articles of Confederation with a new constitution. He ultimately came to support the establishment of a new constitution, and proposed the Connecticut Compromise, which won the approval of both the larger states and the smaller states.After the ratification of the Constitution, Sherman represented Connecticut in the United States House of Representatives from 1789 to 1791. He served in the United States Senate from 1791 to his death in 1793.