Six primary documents from the youngest signer, the delay, the changed vote, the capture, and the governorship. The record runs from the Continental Congress floor to a prisoner of war camp in Florida.
Edward Rutledge was born on November 23, 1749, in Charleston, South Carolina, the youngest of seven children of an Irish immigrant physician. Like the other South Carolina signers, he studied law in London at Middle Temple, returning to Charleston in 1773. In his first year of practice he won acquittal for a newspaper publisher imprisoned by the colonial authorities for printing an article critical of the upper house. The case made his reputation.
He was twenty-four when he was selected as a delegate to the First Continental Congress in 1774. He was twenty-six in the summer of 1776, when he led the fight that nearly stopped independence.
On June 7, 1776, Richard Henry Lee introduced the resolution for independence. Rutledge led the moderate delegates in arguing for postponement. His position was not that independence was wrong, but that it was premature: the colonies had not yet established foreign alliances or a formal confederation, and moving too fast risked failure. He knew that some colonies, including South Carolina, were uncertain. He obtained a three-week delay in the vote.
On July 1, 1776, when the vote came up, Rutledge and the South Carolina delegation voted against independence. Nine of the thirteen colonies voted in favor. The next day, July 2, Rutledge changed his vote. South Carolina came over. Independence was unanimous. He signed the parchment Declaration on August 2 at age twenty-six.
Why should we deceive ourselves? Without a foreign alliance we cannot reasonably expect success. Without a continental government we cannot have the credit abroad, the discipline at home, the taxation, the revenue, that are indispensable.
Rutledge returned to South Carolina in November 1776 and was commissioned a captain of artillery in the state militia. He fought at the Battle of Beaufort in 1779. In May 1780, he was captured along with his fellow South Carolina signers Arthur Middleton and Thomas Heyward Jr. during the British siege and capture of Charleston. He was held as a prisoner of war in St. Augustine, Florida for more than a year. He was released in a prisoner exchange in July 1781.
The men who had imprisoned him were the government he had chosen to oppose when he changed his vote on July 2, 1776. The irony was not lost on contemporaries.
After his release Rutledge returned to South Carolina, resumed his legal practice and political career, and served in the state legislature. He was elected Governor of South Carolina in 1798, twenty-two years after signing the Declaration, and served until 1800. He was the first governor of South Carolina under the new state constitution of 1798. He died in office on January 23, 1800, at age fifty.
His career runs from the youngest delegate at the Continental Congress to the last founding-era figure to hold the governorship of South Carolina before the nineteenth century. The South Carolina Historical Society holds his papers.