by Nancy Moses
13. “Niagara Museum,” http://www.niagaramuseum.com.
14. Felix Bonfils, The Mummy Seller (1883).
15. “The Royal Cache,” 22.
16. Ibid.
17. “Niagra Museum.”
18. Lindsay Bourgon, “Bill Jamieson Was a Treasure-Hunting Rarity,” The Globe and Mail, July 29, 2009, http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/television/bill-jamieson-was-a-treasure-hunting-rarity/article4260507/.
Chapter 6
Selling History
Civil War soldiers loved Civil War trophies: they plucked them from battlefields, secreted them out of prisons, removed them from plantation mansions and public buildings, placed them in their knapsacks and carried them home. Today, Civil War buffs—and there are many of them—love these relics. I have personally witnessed grown men and women of otherwise sound minds swoon over hunks of logs with bullets still lodged in them, corroded canteens, pocket watches with smashed faces, fraying regimental flags, and crumpled Confederate currency. Most of these have modest monetary value. But, once in a while a Civil War relic comes along that’s so rare, so remarkable, that it can seduce even an expert, blind his or her professional judgment, fill his or her dreams with dollar signs, and set off a cascade of events that can only end in trouble.
That’s what happened with North Carolina’s copy of the Bill of Rights. Although it had been penned on vellum parchment in 1789, it counts as a Civil War relic because an infantryman had taken it during the Union occupation of Raleigh, North Carolina. The document was penned and signed in New York, sent by George Washington to North Carolina’s governor Samuel Johnson in 1789, and stolen in 1865. It then traveled to Troy, Ohio; to Indianapolis, Indiana, where it stayed for 134 years; then to Woodbury, Litchfield, and New Haven, Connecticut. It briefly stopped in Washington, DC, Manhattan, and Philadelphia before finally returning home in 2003.
“Everyone who comes here says they want to see it,” Sarah Koonts said as she opened the heavy door to the climatically stable vault. We were standing in the basement of the North Carolina Department of Cultural Affairs in Raleigh. Koonts, the director of the Division of Archives and Records, led me into the silent, chilled room and turned on the light.
I had just arrived after a ten-hour drive from Philadelphia to Raleigh to see North Carolina’s Bill of Rights, even though I could only view it for five minutes. In fact, it had taken all my Northern charm to convince Koonts, its keeper, to allow me any access to a document in such delicate condition, since it had suffered some damage during its many travels. I was happy to make the trip, though, to see it in person and visit the spot where it was stolen.
The storage crypt was banked with metal shelves that held carefully arranged documents and microfilm. Koonts pulled a heavy metal case off one of them until it tipped down, then gently slid it on to the table she had placed below the shelf. She carefully removed a piece of muslin that covered the front of the case. There it was: North Carolina’s copy of the Bill of Rights, a fading twenty-seven-by-thirty-one-inch parchment, surrounded by a gold gilt frame. I noticed it had all of the twelve amendments proposed by Congress in 1789. Only ten had been ratified by three-quarters of the states and so became the first ten amendments to the Constitution. Much of the text and the signatures of Senate President John Adams and House Speaker Frederick Muhlenberg were faded but legible—though the ink of their titles had long since flaked off, which can happen to ink on documents, like this one, made of vellum, which is animal skin. North Carolina’s copy of the Bill of Rights is identical to its thirteen counterparts—except for a small anomaly.
“Look closely here,” Koonts said, pointing to the “Trial by Jury Amendment.” “Ours says ‘where the crime,’ while in all other thirteen, the words are ‘wherein the crime.’ It was this copying error, along with the handwriting on its reverse side, which proved this particular copy of the Bill of Rights belonged to North Carolina.”
I had first learned about North Carolina’s copy of the Bill of Rights in 2003, when it was seized by the FBI, but didn’t focus on it until a decade later when a friend reminded me about it. I vaguely remembered that the document had been offered to the National Constitution Center, a museum located close to Independence Hall, and that there had been quite a stir when the FBI captured it during a government sting at a local law firm. It sounded intriguing. I decided to take a closer look.
It didn’t take long to research the journey of the document as it passed from hand to hand. But I could not figure out why it had taken North Carolina 140 years to get it back. After all, this wasn’t a lost treasure: North Carolina knew where to look for it since the 1890s. Three times the state was offered the document and every time it turned the offer down. Why? Didn’t they want it back? Couldn’t North Carolina afford the asking price? Or was there something else at play, perhaps something connected to its theft during the Civil War?
On October 2, 1789, President George Washington signed a letter addressed to North Carolina Governor Samuel Johnson transmitting a copy of the proposed twelve amendments to the U.S. Constitution that Congress had passed the previous August. Washington’s clerks had penned fourteen copies of the document on vellum, and Senate President John Adams and House Speaker Frederick Muhlenberg had signed them: one for each of the eleven states, one for Rhode Island, one for North Carolina—neither of which was a state at the time—and one for the federal government.
From our vantage point some 225 years later, it seems odd that the U.S. Constitution sparked so much controversy—but it did. While the Constitution assigned the federal government only limited powers, many feared it might be used to run roughshod over the rights of states and their citizens. Some states ratified the Constitution reluctantly, and Rhode Island decided not to take a vote at all. North Carolina alone refused to ratify the Constitution without a Bill of Rights. North Carolina insisted on amendments that would curtail the scope of federal control and delineate such fundamental civil rights as freedom of speech, press, and religion; the right to keep and bear arms; the right to assemble; the right to fair and unbiased trials; and the right to due process. President Washington hoped this Bill of Rights would be sufficient to quell the worries of the legislators in Rhode Island and North Carolina and convince them to ratify both the Constitution and these protective amendments.
North Carolina’s copy of the Bill of Rights arrived in Raleigh in the fall of 1790 and made its way to Pleasant Henderson, engrossing clerk of the General Assembly.[1] He folded the large parchment into a packet small enough to fit into his filing box. Then he “docketed” it—officially accepted it—by writing on the backside, “1789 Proposed Amendments to the Constitution of the United States,” before slipping it into the file. Washington’s plan worked. North Carolina ratified the U.S. Constitution on November 21, 1789, and all twelve amendments on December 22 of that year.[2]
The document remained snug in its packet in the state Capitol building for seventy-six years—as North Carolinians became increasingly frustrated with the federal government, voted to join the Confederacy in May of 1861, and waved their fathers, husbands, brothers, and sons off to war. The people of Raleigh looked on as battles were won and lost; as their men wounded and killed Union fathers, husbands, brothers, and sons; and as they themselves were wounded and killed. They watched as Union soldiers captured North Carolina’s coastline and General William Tecumseh Sherman’s army swept through Georgia and the Carolinas, leaving death and destruction in its wake. They learned about “Sherman’s bummers,” who were officially authorized to take, from any available source, whatever they needed to supply the army. Raleigh’s residents knew Sherman was on the way. They had reason to fear the worst.
On April 9, 1865, General Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Virginia to General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House in Virginia. I was surprised to learn that Lee’s surrender represented a major Northern victory, but did not end the war. Four days later, tens of thousands of Union soldiers and officers began to ent
er Raleigh. By that time, local officials had formally surrendered the city to avoid the devastation experienced by others in the South.
“What was it like to be living in Raleigh during the Union occupation?” I asked Chris Meekins on the steamy August day when I visited Raleigh. A large burly man, Meekins is a North Carolinian born and bred, an archivist, and authority on its history, especially its Civil War history. We were sharing a bench in front of North Carolina’s Capitol, a grey granite antebellum beauty framed by Doric columns. In front of us was a statue titled “Presidents North Carolina Gave the Nation,” depicting James Knox Polk (1845–1849), Andrew Jackson on his horse (1829–1837), and Andrew Johnson (1856–1869). A shabbily dressed man dozed at its base.
“It was pretty scary,” Meekins said. “The locals had direct telegraphs, instant communications, so they knew that Wilmington, North Carolina, had been lost. As a resident, you heard rumors of Sherman’s army coming up from South Carolina and the total war he was perpetuating on the population.” General Sherman, Meekins said, wanted to break the will of the people, so he handpicked a core of hard, battle-ready men and directed them to destroy rail lines, free the slaves, and forage for food off the land.
“As Sherman’s troops closed in, the Confederate cavalry was on the skedaddle moving west out of town,” Meekins continued. “They were stealing everything they could get their hands on, rummaging and ransacking the city on the way out. The railway depot in South Raleigh was on fire, likely set by Confederate troops.”
I tried to imagine the scene, to join with the people awaiting their fate: parents, grandparents, and children, Southern politicians, wounded soldiers in hospital wards, Confederate recruits from the training camp nearby, refugees from South Carolina, former prisoners of war, people fleeing with their slaves. Most supported the Confederacy, but there were others who were against it and a few who looked forward to welcoming the troops. Most were inside; the streets were empty.
Early on April 13, a giant brown cloud of dust was stirred up by boots marching into town along Fayette Street. As the Union troops appeared far in the distance, a lone Confederate cavalry lieutenant stood at the head of Fayette Street and fired his gun in a useless display of gallantry that placed the entire city at risk. He was caught, tried, and hanged, the only casualty of Raleigh’s occupation.
Over the next days, tens of thousands of Union soldiers and officers streamed in as fearful residents looked on. The conquerors set up camps in the parks surrounding the Capitol, on the lawns of private homes, and on the grounds of the State Insane Asylum. Within a day or two, Union General John M. Schofield announced that the Emancipation Proclamation was in effect, ending slavery, so the city was also filled with jubilant blacks. Sherman ordered that the inhabitants and their property be treated with courtesy, and things calmed down. Soon, winsome Southern belles, eager for socializing after years of war, were accompanying young Union officers on their strolls through town.[3]
Raleigh’s most commanding, and certainly most intriguing, building was the glass-domed Capitol in the center of town. Company D of the 94th Ohio Volunteers patrolled its grounds; they had been assigned provost duty at the request of the locals, who insisted on military police protection. At some point during the two-week-long occupation, one of the soldiers entered the building. The Bill of Rights, encased in a packet, was among the stacks of documents in a closet in the office of the attorney general. The soldier looked through the packets until he found a folded parchment with the words “1789 Proposed Amendments to the Constitution of the United States” written on its reverse side. He unfolded it to find North Carolina’s copy of the Bill of Rights, then carefully folded it back up and walked out the door. A year later, he sold it to one Charles Shotwell. The identity of the thief remains a mystery to this very day.
Chris Meekins escorted me across the square to the Capitol where the unnamed soldier had committed the crime. Tiffianna Honsinger, collections curator and research historian for the North Carolina State Capitol, was waiting, her soft flowered dress and charming drawl revealing her Southern roots.
“During the Union occupation, the building looked exactly the same, but what was in it was completely different,” she began as she led me up a flight of winding granite stairs. At the time, the Capitol housed the offices of the governor and secretary of state, chambers for the Senate and House, and the state library and geological museum. It also served as a depot for military supplies and a gathering place where people came to roll bandages and sew blankets for their soldiers. I wondered how all these functions could fit into a single building until I learned that Raleigh at the time was a small town of only ten square blocks, not the big, bustling city of today.
On the second floor, we entered the majestic Senate chamber with its white pillars and flowered parlor carpeting. I looked at the painting above the presiding officer’s desk and found George Washington looking back at me. “George Washington was a revolutionary, he was from the South, and he fought the bad guys,” Honsinger explained. “Washington became a symbol for the Confederacy.” During the Civil War, Confederacy honor flags and captured Union flags hung from the balcony that surrounded the room. A couple of years before our meeting, Honsinger had caused considerable controversy by installing replicas of these flags to celebrate the war’s anniversary. The Confederate flag, with its stars and bars, was quickly removed.
Back on the first floor, we entered a bare room with a small closet. “This is the office of the attorney general,” she said. “The Bill of Rights was stored here with stacks of other documents.” I had seen a photograph of the closet in the attorney general’s office stuffed with high stacks of packets containing government documents. I imagined the thief pulling and opening one after another until he found the Bill of Rights.
Newspaper accounts and soldiers’ letters home described the conditions they found at the Capitol: the place was a mess. “The interior of the Capitol presented a scene of utmost confusion,” wrote the regimental surgeon of the 117th Regiment of New York. “Bound legislative documents, and maps, laid strewn about the floor of the library. The museum rooms were in even a worse plight . . . glass of the cases had been broken, and many of the specimens of natural history had been confiscated . . . geological collections broken and scattered.”[4] State officials caused some of this disarray, spilling papers onto the floor in their haste to remove incriminating documents before they fell into Union hands. The rest of the disorder was caused by Union troops who stopped by the Capitol to pick up a war souvenir or two.
As soldiers and locals attempted to coexist peacefully, the war swirled around them. On April 14, President Lincoln was assassinated and Union troops found themselves defending Raleigh from fellow soldiers infuriated by the murder. Eight days later, General Joseph E. Johnson surrendered some ninety thousand troops to General Sherman at Bennett Place, just up the road from the city. While the final Confederate surrender did not take place until November, the war was essentially over.
Looting government documents was a crime. At the beginning of the war, Lincoln had issued General Order 100, the first attempt to codify the laws of war, which forbade individuals to remove or destroy such items.[5] Near the end of the war, the War Department issued other General Orders that mandated returning the state of North Carolina’s property back to the secretary of state.[6] Sherman had discouraged troops from looting Raleigh. But, even if the soldiers knew about these orders, they certainly didn’t follow them. Many of North Carolina’s documents, geological specimens, and other items left with the troops.
On April 30, 1865, the 94th Ohio Volunteers and most of the rest of Sherman’s army began their march to DC, where they joined the Grand Review on May 24 before mustering out of service on June 5 and returning home.[7] Military occupation of North Carolina continued until 1870, two years after the state ratified a new constitution that gave blacks the right to vote and rejoined the Union. Raleigh suffered much more humiliation by Northerners during these five ye
ars of Reconstruction than it did during its two weeks of occupation.
After the War, North Carolina’s secretary of state desperately tried to reclaim its official documents. Many were returned, but not the Bill of Rights.
“Why was it so important to get this particular document back?” I asked Honsinger.
She thought for a moment, frowning. “We in North Carolina believe the Bill of Rights was written for us,” she said. “We’re the only state that voted against the Constitution until we got the Bill of Rights. Only after it arrived were we willing to ratify the Constitution and the amendments. The Union soldier stole something that has to do with our birth as American people. That’s insulting, you know.”
The North Carolina History Museum was across the street from the Capitol, so I went in it to cool off and look at the face of the Confederacy. I gazed at Civil War era guns, battle gear, flags, and a quilt made from scraps of fabric from the clothes a mother sewed for her soldier sons. Three died during the war and one shortly afterward, four of the state’s thirty-five thousand Confederates casualties. I had seen similar relics many times. Why did these touch me so deeply?
I thought about mothers, guns, and the cost of war during the next couple of hours as I wandered around Raleigh in the sticky heat looking for the lovely antebellum town I had read about in history books. Not much remained since hulking government buildings and offices for lawyers and lobbyists had replaced homes and lawns. A couple of blocks from the Capitol, a charming red brick mansion with an historic plaque on its façade commanded the prime lot on a leafy street. Sitting in its front yard under the shiny, sheltering leaves of a magnolia tree, I finally realized why it had been so important to come to Raleigh. I needed to experience what it was like to look on helplessly as occupying troops stole your cultural treasures. I needed to learn about the legacy of defeat to understand the meaning, to North Carolina, of its Bill of Rights.
