Yankees Stole It, Naturally

Our story starts on September 23, 1789, when a congressional clerk with phenomenally good penmanship took 14 large pieces of vellum and began the laborious task of copying all twelve of the Bill of Rights.

Yes, I said twelve.  Originally, there were twelve amendments proposed to the U. S. Constitution, but two of them were never ratified.  One proposed amendment dealt with allocating representatives per state and the other was about congressional pay raises—never a popular topic, so they were just ignored.  Still, getting 10 out of 12 passed is a good solid ‘B’—not too bad for a brand-new republic.

After the 14 copies were finished, the President of the Senate, Vice-President John Adams and the Speaker of the House, Frederic Augustus Muhlenberg, signed each copy and, following the orders of President George Washington, kept one a copy for the federal government, and sent one copy to each of the original 13 states for ratification.

Today, four of those states no longer have their copies.  Over the last two hundred and thirty years, fires, floods and assorted mishaps have taken a toll on the old parchments.  If you buy a copy of the Bill of Rights at a museum gift shop, you are probably getting a facsimile of the one the federal government kept, which is on display at the National Archives.

North Carolina’s copy was sent to the state’s new capital, Raleigh, that was still under construction.  A planned new city, Raleigh was ten square blocks with the new wooden capitol building in the center—a layout that loosely followed the plan of Philadelphia.  The state clerk accepted the document, signing and dating the back of it.  In time, North Carolina ratified ten of the Amendments, and the original parchment was folded, wrapped in paper, and filed away.

I wouldn’t say the Bill of Rights—as the first ten amendments collectively became known—were forgotten, but they weren’t nearly as well known to the general public until the Twentieth Century, when they were cited in several prominent Supreme Court cases.  North Carolina, like all the other states, simply filed the documents away.  In 1831, when the Raleigh capitol building burned down, employees in the building grabbed all the important maps and documents and carried them out of the building.  Ten years later, the documents were safely stored in the new gray granite capitol, with the aging document stored in the safe in the office of the Secretary of State, where it was once again ignored.

Contrary to popular belief, the Civil War didn’t stop immediately everywhere in the country after the surrender of Robert E. Lee at Appomattox, even though that certainly did mark the beginning of the end of the war.  Two days after Lee’s surrender, the 90,000-man army of General Sherman stood on the outskirts of Raleigh, North Carolina, and the combined efforts of the Confederate forces inside the city to repel the threat were about as effective as a flea fart in a hurricane.  

Governor Zebulon Vance sent a letter to General Sherman, stating that there would be no resistance if Sherman would guarantee that his men would not sack the city.  Then, the governor wisely, if not bravely, skedaddled.  What remained of the Confederate defenses followed the lead of their governor and abandoned the city.  The letter was, of course, ignored by the Union Army.  

The soldiers who entered the city were met with only token resistance.  A young Confederate, Lieutenant Walsh, a Confederate cavalryman, fired on the Union Army as it entered the city.  According to Southerners, Walsh was defending the city.  According to some Yankee reports, Walsh was looting a jewelry store.  Regardless of the nature of his actual motive, Walsh was captured and hanged on the grounds of the Executive Mansion.  

The city was not burned, nor were businesses looted, but soldiers certainly took just about anything that wasn’t nailed down inside the government offices.  By the time the soldiers left, a lot of important papers had gone missing, including the state’s original copy of the Bill of Rights.

And for decades, it was simply gone.  In 1897, a sharp-eyed reporter saw the document (now in a glass frame), hanging in the Indianapolis Bank of Trade, nominally the property of Charles Shotwell.  Shotwell claimed to have bought the document from Walter Clark, a veteran of the Union Army, who freely admitted to having taken the document, claiming it as legal booty during a time of war.

The term ‘legal booty’ is probably a universal oxymoron, but stealing that historic parchment certainly wasn’t legal during the capture of Raleigh.  Not only had General Sherman forbidden his men from looting the town, but in 1863, President Lincoln had issued General Order 100, that specifically prohibited the theft of Southern historic artifacts and documents.

Ironically, it may have been the death of Lincoln, just two days after the Army occupied the town, that so infuriated the Union soldiers and motivated them to tear apart the government offices.  Although he also was furious at the assassination, General Sherman threatened to use his artillery on his own army if order wasn’t restored, otherwise, the city would undoubtedly have been burned to the ground.

Every year, the city of Raleigh places a sash on the grave on Lieutenant Walsh.  If you ask me, they ought to be honoring the memory of General Sherman.

We’ll put aside for now the question of the legality of how Clark obtained the Bill of Rights.  He had the document, and not particularly prizing it, he sold the document to Charles Shotwell for $5.  

When the newspaper story was reprinted in North Carolina, the state quiet reasonably demanded its return.  Suddenly, the document vanished.  Well, not really:   Shotwell just took it home and hung it in his living room and quit showing it to strangers.

In 1925, a friend of Shotwell’s son, representing an “unknown client”, tried to sell the document back to the state of North Carolina.  So, a half dozen good ol’ boys, drove north and went medieval on the asses of the entire Shotwell family, ripping the document from the dead cold hands of the son and taking it back south where it belonged.

No—that is what should have happened.  Instead, North Carolina refused to buy the document and demanded its return.  Of course, the document promptly vanished again.

In 1995, Charles Shotwell’s granddaughters hired a lawyer and a prominent art historian from The Antique Roadshow to sell a “suddenly discovered” copy of the Bill of Rights.  These experts claimed they had no idea where the document had come from and that they had luckily “discovered” it in an antique store in upstate New York.  Since all the copies were identical, there was no telling where this copy had come from.  Indeed, it might have been a hitherto unknown fifteenth copy.  

These extremely “lucky” experts wanted to sell the Bill of Rights for $4 million dollars.  They offered to sell it to several prominent collectors, including Steven Spielberg, Oprah Winfrey, and Michael Jordan.

The FBI sent an undercover agent to buy the document, and it was quickly seized.  The FBI, to determine exactly who owned the document, sent it to the National Archives for study.  Unless it could be proven that the document actually belonged to the State of North Carolina, it would have to be returned to the agents of the Shotwell family, who could do as they wish with the aging parchment.

It didn’t take very long for the National Archives to send the document back to Raleigh.  Remember that North Carolina state clerk who had signed the back of the document back in 1789?  More than two centuries later, the signature was a little faint, but it was still there.