Leadership Quote by Roger Sherman

“We were driven off like rats in five minutes” is the language of a statesman briefly dropping the statesman act. Roger Sherman - usually remembered as a steady, compromise-minded Founding Father - reaches for an image that’s meant to sting. “Rats” isn’t just self-pity; it’s a moral inversion. Political men who imagine themselves as architects of a republic suddenly cast as vermin being flushed from a space they believed they belonged in. The shock is the point.

The line’s force comes from its compression: passive voice (“were driven off”) emphasizes powerlessness, while the tight time stamp (“in five minutes”) turns the episode into an indictment of imbalance. Whatever deliberation, legitimacy, or decorum Sherman thought should govern public life, it evaporated instantly under pressure. The phrase reads like a bruise held up for witnesses.

Sherman’s era was thick with contested authority: crowds, militias, British officials, colonial assemblies, and later rival American factions all jostled to define who could speak, meet, or govern without being physically dispersed. In that churn, “driven off” signals more than embarrassment; it points to a world where political outcomes can be decided by intimidation rather than argument. The subtext is a warning to fellow elites: institutions are fragile if they can be swept aside by force in minutes.

It’s also a tactical line. By choosing degradation over heroics, Sherman invites solidarity and urgency. If even “respectable” leaders can be scattered like pests, then the crisis isn’t personal - it’s structural.