Three primary documents from the South Carolina signer who replaced his dying father in Congress, signed the Declaration while ill himself, and disappeared at sea three years later.
Thomas Lynch Jr. was born August 5, 1749 in Prince George Parish, Winyaw, South Carolina. His family owned extensive rice plantations. At age twelve he was sent to England for schooling, attending Eton College and then Cambridge University, where he studied law at the Middle Temple alongside fellow South Carolinians Edward Rutledge, Thomas Heyward Jr., and Arthur Middleton.
Lynch's father, Thomas Lynch Sr., was a respected South Carolina delegate to the Continental Congress who had helped persuade Washington to accept command of the Continental Army. In 1776, the elder Lynch suffered a severe stroke that paralyzed him and prevented him from signing the Declaration of Independence. The South Carolina assembly unanimously elected his son to fill his seat, the only instance in the Continental Congress of a son being elected to serve alongside his incapacitated father.
Thomas Lynch Jr. had contracted a severe malarial fever while serving as a captain in the First South Carolina regiment in 1775. He had never fully recovered. He signed the Declaration of Independence on August 2, 1776, while still suffering the effects of that fever.
He and his father left Philadelphia together in December 1776 to return to South Carolina. Thomas Lynch Sr. died during the journey home. Thomas Jr. returned to his plantation at Hopsewee in Georgetown County, South Carolina, ill and without his father. He served in the South Carolina General Assembly until his health prevented him from continuing. By 1779, his physicians advised him to travel to southern France, where the climate might aid his recovery.
Thomas Lynch Jr. · Delegate from South Carolina · signed the Declaration of Independence · one of the youngest delegates present · contracted malarial fever in 1775 while a Captain in the First South Carolina regiment · never recovered his health · sailed from South Carolina December 17, 1779 · ship disappeared at sea.
On December 17, 1779, Thomas Lynch Jr. and his wife Elizabeth Shubrick Lynch boarded a ship bound for the West Indies, intending to find passage from there to the south of France. The ship disappeared. It was never found. Lynch was thirty years old. No distress signal reached any port. No wreckage was recovered. No survivors were reported. The most likely explanation is that the ship was caught in a storm.
He left no children. He had no surviving descendants. His birth home, Hopsewee Plantation in Georgetown County, South Carolina, is a National Historic Landmark. His signature is the rarest of any South Carolina signer, fewer surviving examples of his handwriting exist than of any other Declaration signer except Button Gwinnett. Because he served in Congress less than a year and was ill for most of it, he wrote almost nothing.