John was born on May 12, 1844 at Stratford, Connecticut, United States, the son of John William and Catharine Tomlinson (Plant) Sterling, His father was a sea captain, but retired from that calling before he was forty years old. He was a descendant of William Sterling who came to America before 1660, settling in Haverhill, Massachussets.
Moving to Lyme, Connecticut, John entered Yale in the fall of 1860. After graduation with the class of 1864, he remained at college for a year, reading under the guidance of Noah Porter, chiefly in the fields of general literature and history.
In October 1865 he went to New York to enter the Columbia Law School, then directed by Theodore W. Dwight. He was chosen valedictorian of his class (1867).
After graduation from the Columbia Law School Sterling was engaged as a clerk (at first without pay) in the office of David Dudley Field, who at that time probably had the largest law practice in New York. Within eighteen months Sterling was admitted to the new firm of Field & Shearman as junior partner. All his life a man who hated and dreaded publicity, Sterling figured in sensational news that could not be kept out of the daily headlines, for his firm, as counsel for Jay Gould and James Fisk in their control of the Erie Railway, was active for years in hard-fought litigation.
Sterling himself obtained from Justice Barnard (later impeached) the mysterious order putting the Albany & Susquehanna Railroad into a receivership. After the famous "Black Friday" in Wall Street (1869), nearly a hundred suits were begun against Gould and Fisk as a result of their attempt to corner gold. A great part of the office drudgery in each case fell to the lot of the junior counsel. Sterling had not wished to be an "office lawyer, " merely, but the logic of events made him that and the time came when he was fully reconciled to such an outcome; for the advance of "big business" demanded the kind of service that he was equipped to give - at the office desk rather than at the counsel table in court.
Sterling's knowledge of business practice, not less than his mastery of the law, made his advice priceless to an increasing number of important clients. The National City Bank and Standard Oil groups, with many railroad corporations, availed themselves of his counsel. At Shearman's death in 1900 the firm name was retained, with Sterling as senior partner, others having from time to time been admitted to membership. His fees in the organization of combines and mergers, as well as in the settlement of estates, were very large, and the money so received was profitably invested.
In hinting at the size of this prospective addition to Yale's resources he used the word "fabulous. " The only philanthropy in which he was known during his lifetime to be interested was the Miriam Osborn Memorial Home for old ladies at Harrison, New York, established by a friend of whose will he was executor. This also contributed to Yale indirectly, since tracts of land in Westchester County, New York, and in Connecticut, that he acquired while he was building the Osborn Home, were deeded by him to the University.
While salmon fishing, as had long been his custom, at Lord Mount Stephen's lodge, Grand Metis, Quebec, he died suddenly from a heart attack. His will left his residuary estate to yale University, under the direction of a board of trustees. Sterling died in 1918.
John William Sterling became a corporate lawyer in New York City, and helped found the law firm of Shearman & Sterling in 1871, a firm that represented Jay Gould, Henry Ford, the Rockefeller family, and Standard Oil. On his death, Sterling left a residuary estate of $15 million to Yale, at the time the "largest sum of money ever donated to an institution of higher learning in history" - equivalent to about $200 million in 2011 dollars.
He toiled early and late, subjecting himself to a routine that for most men would have been painful. When he was about sixty years of age he said to at least one of those in his confidence that he had from the first cherished the ambition of making money which after his death should enrich Yale University.
He never married. Historian Jonathan Ned Katz uncovered evidence that Sterling lived for nearly fifty years in a same-sex intimate partnership with cotton broker James O. Bloss.
