Posted on 08/11/2003 7:24:17 AM PDT by stainlessbanner
RALEIGH, N.C., Aug. 7 -- They said it was theirs. They said it was stolen. They said more than once that they would never, ever pay to get it back.
And now, 138 years after it vanished, North Carolina officials are poised to reclaim their treasured copy of the Bill of Rights, which had fallen into the hands of Connecticut Yankees.
It is a long story, beginning in April 1865, in the final throes of the Civil War, when a Union soldier lifted the sheepskin document from the North Carolina Statehouse and marched home to Ohio with it on his back. The document, one of only 14 copies, then disappeared, surfacing on a handful of occasions, sometimes decades apart. In March, two Connecticut antique collectors tried to sell it to a museum at a carpetbagger profit. That is when an F.B.I. agent, posing as a philanthropist, swooped in and snatched it.
But who really owns the 27-by-31-inch sheet of history, thought to be worth as much as $30 million? North Carolina? The federal government? The treasure hunters who rediscovered it?
On Monday, the case goes to court and a federal judge here will begin to sift through a sheaf of Civil-War-era papers to settle this North-South dispute. It may seem like a slam-dunk for North Carolina. But there are many legal twists, including the sticky little fact that the state denounced the Constitution, including the Bill of Rights, when it seceded from the Union.
Meanwhile, the document, complete with John Adams's signature and swirly letters two inches tall, remains under guard here, in a safe within a safe within a vault.
"After all these years of waiting for it to surface," said Frank D. Whitney, United States attorney for the Eastern District of North Carolina, "we're not going to have it walk away now."
A few years ago a shadowy dealer approached North Carolina officials through lawyers and threatened to ship the document "to somewhere in the Middle East" if the state did not cough up at least $3 million.
But Jeffrey J. Crow, director of the state's archives, did not flinch.
"Our position has always been we're not going to pay for something we believe is ours," Dr. Crow said.
According to historical records, an Ohio infantryman walked off with North Carolina's copy of the Bill of Rights in 1865. The soldier's name, like other details, has faded into the ephemera of history. But many accounts from that time depict a chaotic scene in the State Capitol, where Union troops were garrisoned and where the copy of the Bill of Rights had been archived since 1789.
George Washington had sent each of the 13 original states a copy to be ratified. At least two are still missing.
After the Civil War, the soldier sold the document for $5 to an Indianapolis businessman named Charles Shotwell, who later tried to entice North Carolina officials to buy it back. They refused.
The document then went underground. For a lifetime. It resurfaced in 1995, when the North Carolina archives department received the strange threat about taking it to the Middle East.
Soon after, it caught the eye of Wayne Pratt, a titan in the high-end antique trade, where fortunes can be made or broken on a chest of drawers. Based in Woodbury, Conn., Mr. Pratt was featured on PBS's "Antiques Roadshow" -- until he became embroiled in this controversy.
Mr. Pratt has declined to comment. His investment partner, Robert V. Matthews, a New Haven developer and antique collector, said that Mr. Pratt asked him to help buy the document from the Shotwell heirs.
"It's not every day someone says to you, `Hey, you want to buy half the Bill of Rights?' " Mr. Matthews said.
Mr. Matthews said he flew to Indianapolis, where the document was "in a crummy little frame" but otherwise in good condition.
Mr. Matthews and Mr. Pratt then bought the document for $200,000. They quickly established that it was real, taking it to George Washington University, where experts matched handwriting on the back of the document to others from the period. Antique dealers said that because of North Carolina's history with the document it would be difficult to sell, and that Mr. Pratt should have known better.
In March, Mr. Pratt was about to seal a $5 million deal for the document with the new National Constitution Center in Philadelphia when museum officials contacted the authorities, which led to the document's seizure.
Both North Carolina and the collectors claim ownership. Each side has done its research. The collectors cite Abraham Lincoln's General Order 100, which says confiscated Confederate property belongs to the Union. Therefore, they argue, the Bill of Rights was not stolen but liberated.
Federal prosecutors, working closely with the North Carolina attorney general, cite Special Order 88, issued by a Union general in June 1865, which requires "all archives and other property" entrusted to the secretary of state of North Carolina to be returned to him.
"It's really simple," said Mr. Whitney, the United States attorney. "That document was never supposed to be private property. It belongs to the people."
Court documents indicate there is probable cause for criminal charges of dealing in stolen property, but none so far have been filed. Mr. Matthews now says he would be willing to donate the document to a museum.
"But I don't want anything shoved down my throat," he said.
And, as his lawyers point out, it is the Bill of Rights that protects individual freedoms and says that no person shall "be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law."
So this gives the Union soldiers the right to steal anything they got their greedy hands on? It doesn't matter WHAT was written on the parchment, it still belongs to the state of North Carolina.
Seems like the court, in deciding this case, will have to rule on the legitimacy of either the confederacy or Lincoln's order.
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