Sherlock James Andrews

Sherlock James Andrews (November 17, 1801 – February 11, 1880), was an American lawyer and abolitionist Congressman from Ohio. He became the 1st President of the Cleveland Bar Association and was one of the lawyers who defended the abolitionists in the Oberlin–Wellington Rescue Case with John Mercer Langston.

He was also among the leaders of the Cleveland Anti-Slavery Society, and cofounded with Congressman Joshua Giddings the Select Committee on Slavery, wishing the end of slavery through legislation. Sarah Yale was the daughter of Capt. Theophilus Yale, and they were members of the Yale family who gave their name to Yale College. He advocated for and promoted the building of the Cleveland & Pittsburgh Railway.

Career In 1840 he was elected to the Twenty-seventh Congress on the Whig platform. In 1842 health issues compelled him not to seek nomination for a second term. He was appointed Judge of the superior court of Cleveland which he served from 1848 to 1850. He founded the Select Committee on Slavery while in Congress, wishing to see the end of slavery through legislation, and paid for a number of speeches done by abolitionist orator Theodore Dwight Weld.

He was a delegate in the Ohio constitutional convention from 1850 to 1851. In 1856, the Republican Party was founded, and Judge Andrews left the Whigs to become a Republican at the same time as Abraham Lincoln.

Through her great-grandmother Ursula Wolcott Griswold, sister of Gov. Roger Griswold, she was a relative of the Griswold family and a cousin of Founding Father Oliver Wolcott and U.S. Treasury Secretary Oliver Wolcott Jr. who replaced Alexander Hamilton. Her sister-in-law was suffragist Mary Barr Clay, daughter of Maj. Gen. Cassius M. Clay, Ambassador to Russia, and abolitionist Mary Jane Warfield Clay, members of the Clay family. Gamaliel was also a cousin of Gov. Myron T. Herrick, U.S. Ambassador to France.

Judge Andrews's son, William Whiting Andrews, married the daughter of banker Nelson Beardsley, law partner of abolitionist Secretary of State William H. Seward, who served under Abraham Lincoln. Their daughter was artist Josephine Herrick who worked on the Manhattan Project and was in partnership in a New York studio with Princess Miguel de Braganza.