Background
He was born on December 26, 1613 in Dedham, England, United Kingdom, the son of Edmund and Joan (Makin) Sherman.
He was born on December 26, 1613 in Dedham, England, United Kingdom, the son of Edmund and Joan (Makin) Sherman.
He matriculated sizar from St. Catharine's College, Cambridge, in 1631, but declined to subscribe to the Thirty-nine Articles of the established faith and left without a degree.
In 1634 he emigrated to Massachusetts Bay, where he became assistant to the Rev. George Phillips at Watertown, but in 1635, with five others, was dismissed to the church at Wethersfield in Connecticut, where settlement had begun the previous year.
He was one of the "Free Planters" of Milford, listed November 20, 1639, and was invited to become teacher of the church there as a colleague of the Rev. Peter Prudden, but declined. In 1643 when Milford came under the jurisdiction of the New Haven Colony, he was sent as a deputy to the General Court.
After 1644 he preached and taught at Branford (then Totokett) and other places in the colony, but without being regularly settled. His reputation as a preacher was spreading, for not only did he win unstinted praise from Thomas Hooker and many other New England divines, but a recall came from England, which he promptly rejected.
Invited to return to the Watertown parish after the death of Phillips, he was dismissed from the Milford church, November 8, 1647, and became pastor at Watertown, where he remained for the rest of his life. After returning to Massachusetts, Sherman became an occasional lecturer at Harvard College on mathematics. He published for at least three years (1674, 1676, 1677) An Almanack of Coelestial Motions.
On May 19, 1669, he was made a freeman of the Bay Colony. In 1672 he became an Overseer of the College and in 1677, a fellow of the Corporation. The honor of bestowing degrees was given him in 1681, but, according to the College records, because "by reason of the Infirmitys attending his Age" he might not be able to do so, Increase Mather was authorized to act in his stead. In the spring of the following year, Sherman delivered a discourse before the convened Congregational ministers of Massachusetts, his being the first recorded sermon on such an occasion.
While preaching at Sudbury on July 5, 1685, he was stricken with a fever, of which he died a month later.
Quotes from others about the person
According to W. T. Harris, he was "as a preacher a veritable Chrysostom".
He married his first wife, Mary, at Milford in 1644, he married Mary Launce, a ward of Governor Hopkins, who survived him until 1710. Cotton Mather credits him with twenty-six children, but only thirteen are mentioned in his will.