At age 28, she took a big step when she helped architect a suffrage parade the day before Woodrow Wilson’s first presidential inauguration, a seminal moment that revealed her encodings for quiet, fearless leadership and a penchant for crafting spectacles of protest. She also began to show what would be one of her most distinctive leadership encodings: strategic insight. Paul had an impressive ability to see with piercing clarity the grand strategies that would lead to victory. In particular, she saw that the best strategy lay in pursuit of a constitutional amendment, rather than seeking suffrage state by state, and she co-founded with Lucy Burns the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage dedicated to that strategy.

Yet he remains far less well known than Washington, Hamilton, Franklin, Adam’s, Jefferson, and Madison. Sherman sought impact, not fame, responsibility, not credit. He chose the responsibility to protect the Constitution, deploying his leadership encodings into the work right in front of him. Sherman might not have gained the famous legacy of his fellow founders, but he is one of the primary reasons the Constitution itself endured.

In the source notes for chapter 12, I’ve included some of the most useful materials we found on Sherman, if you’re interested in learning more about this unsung hero of the Constitution.

As Carl Van Doren wrote in his Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Franklin, “He had wanted wealth only that he might be free, and to be free only that he might be useful.

SUB-CAPABILITY NO.3: CREDIBILITY EQUITY

Sherman and Franklin made a huge impact late in life partly by drawing upon storehouses of credibility they’d built over decades. It wasn’t just Franklin’s words at the end of the Constitutional Convention that held sway, but also that these words came from Franklin. It wasn’t just that Sherman articulated a strong argument to preserve the actual text of the Constitution and use the amendment mechanism to include the Bill of Rights, but also that the argument came from Sherman.