David Howard - Lost Rights: The Misadventures of a Stolen American Relic

Copyright 2010 by David Howard

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

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The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Howard, David, date.
Lost rights : the misadventures of a stolen American relic / David Howard.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-618-82607-0
1. United StatesHistoryCivil War, 18611865Confiscations and contributions. 2. North CarolinaHistoryCivil War, 18611865Confiscations and contributions. 3. Lost articlesNorth CarolinaHistory. 4. Theft of relicsNorth Carolina History. 5. ManuscriptsCollectors and collectingUnited States. 6. United States. Constitution. 1st10th Amendments. I. Title.
E 480. H 847 2009
973.7'8dc22 2009018046

e ISBN 978-0-547-48710-6

v4.1216

FOR ANN

Freedom is a hard-bought thing.
P AUL R OBESON , actor, cultural scholar, political activist

C HARLENE BICKFORD DIDNT GIVE the appointment a moments thought. The notion was too far-fetched to merit even a blip in her daily schedule. Her colleague, Ken Bowling, had mentioned it in passing the day before: A man had called wanting to come to the offices of the First Federal Congress Project in Washington, D.C., and have the staff authenticate a document. Hed claimed to have an original copy of the Bill of Rights. Bickford and Bowling had heard such unlikely boasts before. Their response was, in essence: Uh-huh. Sure.

The caller had chosen the ideal experts. Bickford and Bowling were preeminent authorities on the first-ever United States Federal Congress, which convened from 1789 to 1791. Combined, they had more than sixty years of experience examining documents from that era. Bickford, the director and coeditor, was in her mid-fifties and stood just over five feet tall, with short-cropped brown hair and glasses with large, round frames that exaggerated the size of her eyes. She spoke softly and in a measured voice, as if permanently habituated to hushed, scholarly spaces.

The project, run under the auspices of George Washington University, had an audacious goal: to collect all documents relating to the inaugural Congress and publish them in twenty-two volumes. This task had occupied most of Bickfords professional life. On the day of the appointment, shed spent more than half her life studying the political maneuverings of that two-year period. She knew the handwriting of the First Congresss three clerks like she knew her own.

Which was why the Bill of Rights authentication request was so implausible. Bickford had never seen such an esteemed document outside an official setting. The parchments on which the three clerks carefully inscribed the fourteen copies of the Bill of Rights in 1789 are among the rarest and most treasured artifacts in American history. Of the manuscripts that President George Washington sent offone for each of the thirteen original states, and another for the new federal governmentonly nine remain in official custody. New Yorks copy was believed to have burned in a fire. Georgias either went up in flames or was simply lost. Three others were stolen, but the theftsall unsolvedhappened more than a lifetime ago. One was snatched during the Civil War and hadnt been seen since. No original had appeared on the historic-manuscript marketplace for almost sixty years. For this reason it would be difficult to assess the value of such a documentbut it would likely be in the tens of millions of dollars.

Bickford had seen only two genuine originals: Delawares and the federal governments. The latter is on display in the dimmed and filtered light of the Rotunda for the Charters of Freedom in the National Archives, where hundreds of thousands of visitors view it annually. Archivists call such sovereign documents holy relics.

Because such broadsheets are so rareand so stratospherically valuableBickford and Bowling occasionally fielded requests exactly like this one. The story was always the same: The breathless caller had just sifted through the possessions of a recently deceased relativea grandparent, sayand had found what appeared to be a valuable artifact, perhaps an official-looking document bearing a date from the 1700s. Heart thrumming, the heir began making phone calls to figure out whether it was real, and if so, how much it might be worth. Sometimes one of these people found their way to Bickford and Bowling.

The two experts usually played along, even though the First Federal Congress Projects staff has more than enough to do and was not in the business of authenticating historical documents. The documents were rarely what they appeared to be. Countless copies and counterfeits had bubbled into the marketplacesome of them extraordinarily convincing forgeries on paper that was expertly aged and faded. Bickford and Bowling could quickly flush out a flaw that was invisible to a novice: The paper was too new, the handwriting not quite right.

More often it was a case of mistaken identity: People will buy one of the copies of the Constitution that they sell at the National Archivesyou know, they sell these reproductionsand stash it away in their papers, Bickford says. When they die, somebody in their family finds this thing and thinks its the original.

Put it this way, says Bowling, coeditor of the project and Bickfords longtime colleague. Weve been shown a printed, footnoted version of the Bill of Rights and told that it was an original copy. So one never expects much.

The notion that someone in Topeka might unearth a priceless relic beneath a nimbus of attic dust was mostly sheer folly. And so, unlike tourists charmed by the cherry blossoms or moved by the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, these types of guests of the First Federal Congress Project often left Washington disappointed.

The day of the Bill of Rights appointmentFebruary 24, 2000was typically prosaic. Bickford had a new graduate intern who needed her ears and eyes as he built the projects first website. The staff faced the ongoing task of assembling and editing volumes fifteen through seventeen of First Congress documents. Bickford confronted the usual mlange of paperwork necessary to keep the project in the blackno small task for one of the tiny quasi-governmental entities struggling to stay afloat in the backwaters of the nations capital. At times the project barely had enough funds to pay staff salaries, and in lean years it was in peril of getting zeroed out, as Bickford termed it. The suite of offices was often cluttered with cases of spring water and soda purchased at Costco.

Although the project would eventually produce the most thorough documentation ever of the federal governments creation, it wasnt particularly sexy. Few outside a small circle of fellow academics and history buffsBickford called them our groupieswould notice. Still, Bickford loved the job. She initially studied French history in graduate school, then landed a job as a clerk-typist at the First Congress Project to help pay her tuition. She never left. If you ask where she grew up, shell reply, A place called Adams, New York. In Jefferson County. If the listener hasnt caught on, she might add, Sort of aproposwe work with people named Adams and Jefferson all the time.

Bickford built her life around routine and continuity. She moved to Arlington, just across the Potomac, when she arrived in Washington in 1967. For more than thirty years shed had the same commute: She walked to the Metro for the seven-minute train ride to the Foggy Bottom-GWU stop. When you devote your life to a cast of characters who lived more than two centuries ago, there arent a whole lot of surprises in your day-to-day existence. But the steadiness of her world agreed with her.