After the end of the Revolutionary War in 1783, Roger Sherman, a signer of the Declaration Of Independence for Connecticut, returned to his home in New Haven. The following year, on February 16, 1784, he was elected the first mayor of New Haven, which had just voted to incorporate itself as a city.
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Only a few years into his executive post, however, Sherman was once again called back into national service as one of Connecticut’s representative to the Constitutional Convention in 1787, originally convened to amend the deeply flawed Articles of Confederation. There, despite his status as the Convention’s second-oldest member, Sherman played a fundamental role in shaping what would become the United States Constitution, co-authoring the “Connecticut Compromise,” that called for the creation of a bicameral legislature and broke a deadlock that threatened to upend the entire convention.