Later Years
The Senate's rejection of his nomination left Rutledge mentally ruined. He attempted suicide shortly afterward. His method was jumping off a wharf into Charleston Bay. Rutledge returned to Charleston, South Carolina, following his resignation and withdrew from public life.
John Rutledge died on June 21, 1800, at the age of sixty. He was interred at St. Michael's Episcopal Church in Charleston. One of his houses, said to have been built in 1763 and definitely sold in 1790, was renovated in 1989 and opened to the public as the John Rutledge House Inn.
Read more about this topic: John Rutledge
Famous quotes containing the word years:
“In 1845 he built himself a small framed house on the shores of Walden Pond, and lived there two years alone, a life of labor and study. This action was quite native and fit for him. No one who knew him would tax him with affectation. He was more unlike his neighbors in his thought than in his action. As soon as he had exhausted himself that advantages of his solitude, he abandoned it.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Could it be that those who were reared in the postwar years really were spoiled, as we used to hear? Did a child-centered generation, raised in depression and war, produce a self-centered generation that resents children and parenthood?”
—C. John Sommerville (20th century)