John Rutledge was the master lawyer of colonial Charles Town — in his third year at the bar he appeared in 52 cases and lost none, and his cash income from fees eventually exceeded that of any other professional in the colonies. He dominated South Carolina politics for a generation: delegate to the Stamp Act Congress at 26, president and then governor of revolutionary South Carolina, holding the state's government together through the British invasion.
At the Constitutional Convention in 1787 he had his most consequential moment: as chairman of the Committee of Detail, Rutledge drafted the first working text of the Constitution. The final document differed from the Rutledge draft, as a contemporary put it, "only in arrangement and in the addition of some qualifying and, presumably, some decorative phrases." His nationalism was understated but potent — he "breathed something to create national power" into its clauses. His uncle's maxim captured his hard-edged realism: "Care not who reigns; think only of who rules."
Washington appointed him one of the original associate justices in 1789. He accepted the seat believing his credentials exceeded John Jay's, and the wound of ranking second never fully healed. He resigned in 1791 — without ever sitting on a Supreme Court case — to become Chief Justice of South Carolina.