death Rutledge and his wife Annabel had three children: a son, Neal, and two daughters, Mary Lou and Jean Ann. Raised a Southern Baptist, Rutledge later became a Christian humanist; his religious views resembled those of Unitarianism. He was universally regarded as a pleasant and friendly man who genuinely cared about everyone with whom he interacted. Rutledge's perfectionism and penchant for hard work drove him to the point of exhaustion by the summer of 1949, and his friends and family expressed worry about his health. On August 27, while in Ogunquit, Maine, he experienced a hemorrhagic stroke and was hospitalized in nearby York Harbor. The fifty-five-year-old justice drifted in and out of consciousness and, on September 10, died. President Harry S. Truman, writing to Rutledge's wife Annabel, stated that a "tower of strength has been lost to our national life"; Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson praised the justice as "true to his ideals and, in all, a great American". Rutledge's funeral service, conducted by A. Powell Davies, was held at All Souls' Unitarian Church on September 14. A headstone in Rutledge's memory was placed at Mountain View Cemetery in Boulder, Colorado, but the grave is empty: as of 2008, his physical remains are held at Cedar Hill Cemetery in Suitland, Maryland, pending further instructions from his family. Rutledge's death was almost simultaneous with that of Murphy; Truman's appointments of Sherman Minton and Tom C. Clark, respectively, to replace them led to a considerably more conservative Court. Legacy Legal scholars have generally looked favorably upon Rutledge's tenure on the Supreme Court, although the brevity of his service has lessened his historical importance. In a 1965 biography, Fowler V. Harper opined that "[h]istory is writing Wiley Rutledge into the slender volume of 'Justices in the Great Tradition. The political scientist A. E. Keir Nash responded in 1994 that "calling him a great justice looks somewhat like calling John Kennedy a great president. It substitutes a wistful 'what might have been' for a realistic 'what was'." A 1970 survey of judges and legal academics ranked Rutledge as the twenty-fourth-greatest justice of the Supreme Court; a similar 1993 assessment found that he had fallen to thirty-fifth place. Observing that "short tenure naturally tends to depress rankings", the scholar William G. Ross suggested that "bright and able persons" such as Rutledge "would have received higher rankings—perhaps even as 'greats'—if their tenures had not been cut