Sherman, John, 1823-1900

Sherman was born in Lancaster, Ohio to Charles Robert Sherman and his wife, Mary Hoyt Sherman, the eighth of their 11 children. John Sherman's grandfather, Taylor Sherman, a Connecticut lawyer and judge, first visited Ohio in the early nineteenth century, gaining title to several parcels of land before returning to Connecticut. After Taylor's death in 1815, his son Charles, newly married to Mary Hoyt, moved the family west to Ohio. Several other Sherman relatives soon followed, and Charles became established as a lawyer in Lancaster. By the time of John Sherman's birth, Charles had just been appointed a justice of the Supreme Court of Ohio.

Sherman's father died suddenly in 1829, leaving his mother to care for 11 children. Several of the oldest children, including Sherman's older brother William, were fostered with nearby relatives, but John and his brother Hoyt stayed with their mother in Lancaster until 1831. In that year, Sherman's father's cousin (also named John Sherman) took Sherman into his home in Mount Vernon, Ohio, where he enrolled in school. The other John Sherman intended for his namesake to study there until he was ready to enroll at nearby Kenyon College, but Sherman disliked school and was, in his own words, "a troublesome boy". In 1835, he returned to his mother's home in Lancaster. Sherman continued his education there at a local academy where, after being briefly expelled for punching a teacher, he studied for two years.

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