Stolen, Smuggled, Sold

by Nancy Moses

  In 1897, an article in the Indianapolis News reported that North Carolina’s Bill of Rights was hanging on the wall of an office in the Indianapolis Board of Trade occupied by Charles A. Shotwell, a grain and feed merchant. Shotwell told the reporter he had bought the document for five dollars from a Civil War veteran in Tippecanoe, Ohio, who had taken it from the State House in Raleigh during its occupation. A month later, the story was reprinted in the Raleigh News and Observer.

  It had been thirty-two years since North Carolina had heard anything about its Bill of Rights, and the article caused considerable concern. North Carolina Secretary of State, Dr. Cyrus Thompson, who was responsible for the state’s archives, wrote to his counterpart in Indiana, William D. Owen, asking for his help. Owen then walked to Shotwell’s office and personally examined the document. Shotwell was not willing to relinquish his copy of the Bill of Rights, certainly not for free. North Carolina was not in the mood to pay, so the matter ended there.

  Another twenty-eight years passed before the Bill of Rights surfaced again. This time Charles Reid, on behalf of an unnamed client, wrote to a professor at the University of North Carolina to offer, for sale, North Carolina’s original copy of the Bill of Rights, which “was taken from the state house at Raleigh by one of the Union soldiers who came from Ohio.” The professor wrote back requesting its return and noting that the Bill of Rights was the property of North Carolina. Reid then wrote to a private collector in North Carolina offering to sell the document, but the collector had died, so Reid’s letter ended up in the hands of R.B. House, secretary of the North Carolina Historical Commission. House’s letter back to Reid again stated that Bill of Rights had been stolen from the Capitol in 1865 and belonged to North Carolina. When Reid repeated his offer to sell, House wrote back:

  “So long as it remains away from the official custody of North Carolina, it will serve as a memorial of individual theft. Since this fact must be clear to anyone acquainted with history and law, not to mention honor, it is interesting to note the present whereabouts of the document and to speculate on how long the joy of illegitimate possession can hold out against scruples arising from intelligent consideration of the facts involved.[8]

  Everyone I interviewed repeated this statement. Each time I heard it, I thought: What does this mean?

  Charles Shotwell died in 1972, passing the Bill of Rights to his son. When the son died, his widow hung it on the wall of her apartment in a continuing care retirement community, its black ink slowly fading brown from sun exposure. When the son’s widow died in 1990, her two daughters inherited North Carolina’s copy of the Bill of Rights and soon decided to sell it. They contacted their family lawyer, Charles Reeder, who contacted Leslie Hindman, owner of a Chicago-based auction house. Though intrigued, she decided not to participate because selling North Carolina’s Bill of Rights at a public auction might draw the attention of North Carolina. In 1993 or 1994, she mentioned the document to a friend, Wayne Pratt.

  Pratt was a high-profile antiques dealer in Westbury, Connecticut, with a spot as a guest appraiser on Public Broadcasting’s popular program, Antiques Roadshow. He specialized in New England high-style furniture and folk art, but he was not above taking on something as potentially lucrative as an original copy of the Bill of Rights, even with a problematic past. Soon, dealer Wayne Pratt and attorney Charles Reeder were shaking hands in the Indianapolis airport on their way to see North Carolina’s copy of the Bill of Rights.

  I began to wonder why a well-known antique dealer would risk arrest for trafficking in stolen goods. After all, Pratt knew the Bill of Rights had been stolen during the Civil War. But, was it actually stolen? Would Pratt violate any laws or professional ethics?

  That’s when I decided to consult someone reputed to be an especially ethical antique dealer: Ed Hild of Olde Hope Antiques. We met at the Philadelphia Antiques Show, an annual event where men in prep school blue blazers and women in flowered scarves surveyed the well-heeled browsers while guarding their booths perfectly arranged with exquisite objects.

  Olde Hope Antiques in New Hope, Pennsylvania, dealt in folk art and country furniture similar to what Wayne Pratt sold. Hild knew Pratt and remembered the unfortunate incident surrounding him and North Carolina’s copy of the Bill of Rights, which had been the talk of the antiques trade when the FBI sting was reported in 2003.

  “I wasn’t surprised,” Hild told me. “Wayne was driven. When he wanted the object, he had the passion to get it and was willing to fight for it. Some people believe they have a legal right to beat the system.” Finding an original Bill of Rights was as good as it gets; it could be worth millions. In the late 1980s, a bargain hunter had found a very early and rare copy of the Declaration of Independence tucked into a picture frame he had purchased for four dollars at a flea market. In 1991, Sotheby’s put the document up for auction, and it sold for $2.42 million, a new high watermark for historic documents.

  I asked Hild what he would do if he ran across a copy of the Bill of Rights.

  He didn’t hesitate. “I’m a dealer in furniture and folk art, so I’m not an expert in documents. I would find the top person in the field to get advice,” he said. “A document like this throws up a red flag. A dealer has a responsibility to prove ownership throughout history, so you can argue the law. You need to get it authenticated.”

  The Shotwell sisters originally asked two million dollars for North Carolina’s Bill of Rights—perhaps they had heard about the valuable flea market Declaration of Independence—but Pratt was patient and persistent; and the longer he waited, the more the price dropped. In the spring of 1999, the Shotwell sisters sold North Carolina’s copy of the Bill of Rights to Wayne Pratt and his friend and silent partner, Bill Matthews, for two hundred thousand dollars. The sale carried two conditions. First, Pratt had to agree to assume all risk for the cloudy title: if North Carolina sued, he would not ask for his money back. Second, he had to agree to sell North Carolina’s copy of the Bill of Rights to a museum or library, or to someone who would donate it to such an institution.[9] This is not as onerous a condition as it might seem because a number of wealthy collectors purchase rare and valuable Americana and donate it to museums and educational institutions for the tax deduction and considerable public recognition they receive.

  Wayne Pratt knew little about historic documents or the collectors who purchased them. But he did know about selling and must have realized that finding a buyer wealthy enough to purchase the third most important document of the nation’s founding—after the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution—was going to take some work. The first person he recruited was William Richardson, a well-connected Washington attorney who agreed to represent Pratt on the sale and advise on legal matters, including the potentially sticky issues related to selling a document that had been the property of a state government. Richardson signed on for three times his hourly rate, thirty percent of the profits, and reimbursement of all his legal expenses—a very hefty sum, but one only due upon the sale of the document.

  In 1995, Richardson contacted North Carolina’s secretary of the Department of Cultural Resources, offering to sell North Carolina its own Bill of Rights. At the time, Jeff Crow was the director of the Division of Archives and Records, and he agreed to tell me what happened.

  “The Bill of Rights and its loss during the Civil War were always part of the lore of the State Archives, but no one thought it would ever be returned,” he told me, noting it had surfaced in the 1880s and 1920s but was never recovered. “In the 1990s, a lawyer named William Richardson contacted us, said he had a client who had a document from North Carolina, and asked if we wanted to buy it back.” Again, the state remained unwilling to pay for its own copy of the Bill of Rights, and Richardson soon disappeared.

  “Why didn’t you go after Richardson and get the document?” I asked.

  “He refused to reveal the owner’s name so there was no way the attorney general could get it back,” said Crow. “Anyway, he had su
ggested it was worth a minimum of two million dollars. We didn’t have two million dollars: we’re a state agency.”

  When the sale to North Carolina failed to pan out, Wayne Pratt needed to find a wealthy, patriotic, private collector willing to donate the Bill of Rights to a nonprofit institution. That’s when he turned to Peter Tillou.[10]

  Tillou, who lives in tony Litchfield, Connecticut, was one of the nation’s leading dealers in American folk art and antiques, known for the quality of his inventory and the wealth and prestige of his clients. Pratt knew these things. He approached Tillou with an offer to share in the profits from the sale of the Bill of Rights in exchange for an introduction to a buyer. Soon, Tillou was on his way to Pratt’s home. Although Tillou didn’t deal in documents, one look at the Bill of Rights convinced him to take on the assignment. At this point, Pratt got cagey since he needed to avoid revealing its connection to North Carolina and the Civil War.[11]

  David Howard wrote about this incident in his book, Lost Rights: The Misadventures of a Stolen American Relic. According to Howard, Pratt explained to Tillou that a number of states were missing their original Bill of Rights for many years, and there was no way to know where this particular parchment came from, other than that it had been found behind a painting in upper New York State. The document could be worth as much as twenty million dollars, and if Tillou secured the buyer, he would receive twenty percent of the sale price. Pratt turned the document over to Tillou who carefully placed North Carolina’s copy of the Bill of Rights under his bed for safekeeping, removing it occasionally to admire it. He knew his clients would need the document authenticated before spending millions on it, so he turned to William Reese of William Reese Rare Books and Collectables in New Haven, one of the most distinguished and reputable dealers in his field.

  William Reese was happy to share his story of the Bill of Rights when I called. “When Peter Tillou came to me,” Reese said, “he said he represented the owners of an original copy of the Bill of Rights and the owners didn’t want their names known.”

  “Wasn’t that suspicious?” I asked.

  “No, it’s not that unusual—to keep the customers quiet, since some buyers will try to cut you out of the deal by calling the owners directly,” Reese explained. “Peter didn’t know documents, but he knew I did—we’d been doing business for years—and he thought I would know the best buyer for it.”

  It was now 2002, and the price of history had gone up. The flea market copy of the Declaration of Independence that had sold in 1991 for $2.42 million had come back on the market, and had been purchased at Sotheby’s for over $8 million. Reese reasoned that an original copy of the Bill of Rights was worth close to that—if it were real and had a clean title.

  He explained. “The Bill of Rights was an unusual opportunity—a major document in American history. I often invest in cataloging—historical research—and in this case I was willing to make an unusual investment in time and effort. If it were legitimate, I thought it would go for five million to seven million dollars, so the investment was not large.”

  Reese soon learned that President Washington had prepared fourteen original copies of the Bill of Rights on vellum: eleven for each of the states that had ratified the Constitution, one for Rhode Island, one for North Carolina, and one for the federal government. Reese then began to search for all of these copies. The federal government and six states still had their original Bill of Rights in their archives or libraries, but five states were missing theirs: Georgia, Maryland, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and New York. Reese then directed his staff to travel to these five states, find documents that had arrived in 1789—at the same time as the Bill of Rights—and bring back images of their front and reverse sides.

  I knew why Reese wanted photos of the fronts—to see whether they matched the handwriting of one of Washington’s clerks—but why the reverse sides? “Because of the docketing,” he told me. “In the early years of the nation, when a federal government document arrived at a state capital, the receiving clerk would fold it four times into a long, thin piece of paper and write the name of the document and the date of arrival on its reverse side, near the top. He would then stick it in the file.”

  The same state clerk would docket and file everything that arrived around the same time. This meant if you found an original vellum copy of the Bill of Rights, you could turn it over, identify the handwriting on the reverse side, and know which state it came from.

  Reese discovered that there were three mysterious copies of the Bill of Rights: one at the Library of Congress, one at New York Public Library, and the one that Tillou had left with Reese. Which of the five states did they belong to? Though the provenance was fuzzy, one thing was clear. If the copy in Reese’s possession belonged to one of the five states that were missing their copies, he didn’t want anything to do with it. Selling a document with a cloudy title could mean years of expensive litigation.

  But was there another possibility? Was it possible that this Bill of Rights had never been owned by a state? Reese thought so. He had seen the situation before. During the first three sessions of Congress, when a bill became an act, official copies of it were prepared on vellum parchment and sent to all the states and the federal government. But often, at the same time, other copies were made, sometimes for those involved in the legislation or the Speaker of the House. If the mysterious Bill of Rights in Reese’s shop was one of these unaffiliated copies, the title went from cloudy to clear, and the document would be worth millions.

  “I’m not saying more copies were created here, but the possibility exists,” said Reese.

  Reese’s sleuthing had taken some time. Meanwhile, he had repeatedly asked Peter Tillou for provenance and conditions reports, the standard documents related to any item worth more than fifty thousand dollars. Reese assumed that a professional conservator had worked on Tillou’s Bill of Rights, and he wanted to talk to the conservator to find out what he or she had done. When no reports arrived, Reese asked Tillou for the name of the owner so that he could contact him directly.

  “When I heard it was Wayne Pratt, I was very surprised,” Reese said. “I had been led to believe the owner was an individual, not an experienced dealer. A dealer would know the importance of authentication.” When Pratt refused to supply it, Reese knew something was wrong. “I felt I was being stonewalled—it was a very big deal,” he told me.

  Reese’s team compiled a comprehensive dossier with photographs of the front and reverse sides of the mysterious Bill of Rights. The report also contained photos of the reverse side dockets of the federal documents that the five missing states had received in 1789. Along the way Reese had remained in touch with the representative of a potential buyer: Seth Kaller, a dealer in upper-tier historical documents. Kaller represented Richard Gilder and Lewis Lehrman, investment bankers, who purchased important documents and donated them to historical institutions. In January of 2003, Bill Reese brought the mysterious Bill of Rights and the dossier he had prepared to Kaller, Gilder, and Lehrman. They decided to purchase the document and donate it to a museum. The museum they all agreed on had not yet opened its doors: the National Constitution Center, slated to be launched in Philadelphia on July 4, 2003.

  Gilder knew that Pennsylvania Governor Edward Rendell was the moving force behind the Constitution Center. He immediately wrote Rendell asking whether the center might want to receive a copy of the Bill of Rights, free of charge, and Rendell passed the letter along to Joe Torsella, the new center’s president.

  Steven Harmelin was the general counsel of the National Constitution Center at the time and involved in the negotiations to acquire the Bill of Rights. Recently, we met in the lobby of his law firm, Dilworth Paxson, LLP, where floor-to-ceiling windows framed Philadelphia’s skyline. Harmelin spoke with the deliberate cadence of the esteemed Philadelphia lawyer that he is as he remembered the incident.

  “If you’re in for iconic material for a National Constitution Center, you don’t do much b
etter than the Bill of Rights,” he said.

  Soon after learning that an original copy of the Bill of Rights might be available, Harmelin and Torsella invited the seller, who was represented by his attorney, William Richardson, and Seth Kaller, representing the buyers, to bring the document to the temporary offices of the National Constitution Center in downtown Philadelphia. The center’s officials were very impressed by what they saw, but once the delegation and document left, many questions remained. Richardson had mentioned that the Bill of Rights had been found, quite by accident, in upper New York state. How did it get there? More to the point, was the document genuine? At this point, Torsella and Harmelin decided to consult an expert, and with Kaller’s approval, they sent it to the nation’s leading authority on early Congressional documents: Kenneth Bowling of the First Federal Congress Project, a research center located at George Washington University.[12]

  Bowling had encountered this Bill of Rights twice before: first, in the 1990s, when Richardson had sent a photograph of it to First Federal Congress Project, and again in 2000, when Richardson and a couple of other people had visited the project’s offices with a faded vellum bearing the words “Bill of Rights” at its top, pasted on a backing, and set in an old gold gilt frame. One look at the document was all Bowling needed to realize it was an original. He told Richardson that it probably belonged to one of the five states that were missing their copies, and it could have a lot of value—or none at all. Under federal law, a state that could prove it once was theirs could lay claim to it. Staff suggested that Richardson hire a conservator to remove the document from its frame and backing. The eighteenth-century docketing now hidden from view on the reverse side would reveal the state to which it belonged.