Joseph Klett wrote:
Dear Colleagues:
I thought you all might like to see the responses to my message about the original bills of rights (excerpted below, from north to south). Also, in case you’re interested, my remarks from Saturday are attached. They include a summary of this survey and make some general observations about what happened in New England, the Mid-Atlantic and the South. (A few references come from Charlene Bickford of the First Federal Congress project.)
Thanks to everyone and Happy Thanksgiving,
Joe Klett
From New Hampshire (telephone conversation with Ben Shoja):
New Hampshire’s bill is stored in the State Archives’ vault, with a digital reproduction on display in the State House.
From Massachusetts (John Warner):
The Bill of Rights sent to Massachusetts is on display in our Commonwealth Museum. It is in a climate-controlled, titanium and glass case beside other "foundation documents" such as the 1629 and 1692 Royal charters and the 1780 State Constitution. Website: http://www.sec.state.ma.us/sec/mus/museum/treasures_gallery/treasuresidx.htm
The transmittal document that was sent with the Bill was signed by George Washington as President of the Constitutional Convention and endorsed as received by John Adams.
From Rhode Island (R. Gwenn Stearn):
Rhode Island's copy resides at the State Archives Division. As far as we know it has always been in the custody of the (now) Secretary of State.
As a point of reference, the 1647 Code of Laws records:
Touching the General Recorder [the forerunner of the Secretary of State]
Be it enacted by this present Assembly, that the general recorder's office, shall be in the general, to keep a copy of all the records or acts of the General Assembly, general and particular courts of judicature, rolls of the freemen of the Colony, records, evidences, sales and bargains of land, wills and testaments of the testator, and orders of the townsmen touching the intestate, records of the limits and bounds of towns, their highways, driftways, commons and fencings, privileges and liberties. And forasmuch as matters of greatest concernment, ought to be kept and preserved with the greatest diligence, be it enacted, that the general purchases which are all we can show for our rights to our lands, and the charter which is that which gives us who are subjects, right to exercise authority one over another, be kept in a strong chest, having four several locks annexed thereto, and that each town keep a key thereof, that so, as there is a common right and interest therein, there may be no access unto them in a divided way, (lest also they be divided,) but with common consent. And let it be further enacted, that this chest be placed in the safest place of the Colony, and the general recorder, also, shall have the key to the room in which it is placed.
From Connecticut (Mark Jones):
Connecticut's copy was lent to the USIA for the World's Fair Expo at Seville, Spain in 1992.. NEDCC examined it and helped with specifications for a climatically controlled exhibit case. See the following for work done by NEDCC: http://www.cool.conservation-us.org/coolaic/sg/bpg/annual/v12/bp12-07.html. The Bill of Rights was returned in excellent condition and is safely in storage.
From New York (Jim Folts):
I determined that President George Washington transmitted the proposed amendments to the states on Oct. 2, 1789. The papers of Governor George Clinton contain several "circular letters" from President Washington. Those circular letters concern a variety of topics, but none of the surviving letters contains the text of the proposed amendments. I say "surviving" because the Clinton Papers were very heavily damaged, and partly destroyed, in the Capitol fire of March 29, 1911.
Archivist William P. Gorman, who prepared an item-level calendar to the Clinton Papers some years ago, confirms that a circular letter containing the texts of the amendments is not present in the Clinton Papers.
The original circular letter from President Washington may have been forwarded to the New York State Legislature. If it was, I can also state that it is not present in the surviving records of the Legislature, most of which were destroyed in the 1911 fire.
For your information, the New York State Archives does hold the manuscript proceedings of the convention of delegates of New York which met in Poughkeepsie in 1788 and voted to ratify the proposed Constitution. The journal of the Poughkeepsie convention includes the texts of proposed amendments to the Constitution, some of which resemble provisions of the Bill of Rights.
For New Jersey see attachment.
From Pennsylvania (David Haury):
This is a very long story. PA's copy is one that is missing. It is believed to be the copy at the NY Public Library and to have been taken from PA and sold through a New York dealer sometime just after the Civil War. Currently the document is headed to Quantico for DNA analysis and ink transfer analysis. We have already sent a half dozen of our early 1790s documents to the lab for similar analysis and comparison with the Bill of Rights. One assumption is that they were stored in the same building for nearly a century and would reveal this context if studied by modern DNA analysis.
The other missing copies are NY and Georgia. NYs copy seems to have burned when a state office building burned down. So the NYPL copy either has to be ours or Georgia's. I believe it is Delaware which sent their copy back to Washington. The other copies are all accounted for in the remaining 9 original colonies.
Also from David Haury to several state archivists, January 2009, courtesy of David Carmichael:
Recent events, primarily related to North Carolina's copy of the Bill of Rights, have interested me in the whereabouts of Pennsylvania's missing copy of this document. I am assuming most of you are much better informed regarding this set of 18th century documents than I am although my former assistant, Harry Parker, who retired this summer, had investigated the matter extensively.
Here is a brief account as I understand it. On September 25, 1789, Congress passed the Bill of Rights (actually twelve amendments to the Constitution - numbers 1 and 2 were never approved) and on October 2, 1789, copies were sent out for the required ratification of 3/4 of the states. Fourteen copies were made and one sent to each state (one kept by the feds- I understand it is at the Library of Congress). Eight states have their copies of this document. Delaware ratified their copy and sent it back (NARA has it). Four states are missing their copies - Pennsylvania, Georgia, Maryland, and New York. Various accounts mention that New York's copy burned. Of course, the reason I mention all of this is that one of the missing copies from our states is in the New York Public Library - is it Pennsylvania's copy (in which case I want it back), or Georgia's or Maryland's? Virginia became the 10th state to ratify the amendments 3-12, which became the Bill of Rights on December 15, 1791 (the final three states, including Georgia, I believe, ratified them in 1939).
I am sure most or all of you know far more about this issue than I do - please feel free to correct the story. However, one reason for my interest is that I understand some of the forensic analysis of North Carolina's copy during its recent adventure may have gone a long way toward establishing whose copy is in the New York Public Library. Someone a few weeks ago even implied that the FBI lab at Quantico may still be investigating this very question.
I have no idea what the New York Public Library's position is (or what documentation they have of the provenance of their copy), but if I were certain they had Pennsylvania's copy I would not hesitate to urge our Attorney General to pursue its recovery. I assume you would have a similar interest if it were determined to be your state's copy. The stakes are high - I believe the Constitution Center in Philadelphia was willing to pay as much as $30 million for North Carolina's copy when it was on the market. Perhaps this has all been determined to be a dead end, but I wanted to check in with the potentially interested parties to determine what information and interest exists. This might not make a good plot for a James Bond movie, but it would be an interesting book to research.
From Delaware (James Frazier):
Delaware’s copy is in the custody of NARA and has been exhibited here on loan for various periods of time over the last two decades. Image is attached as well as some background info prepared for the first of those exhibitions in the early 1990s.
From Maryland (Ed Papenfuse):
President Washington sent out the proposed 12 amendments to the states for ratification (his secretary of state was not in place). The copy for consideration by Maryland was sent to Governor John Eager Howard at the State House. Howard sent it downstairs to the General Assembly. The Maryland General Assembly ratified the 12 amendments and the engrossed copy (Maryland's official copy) is among the original acts of the Legislature. We have it and have had it on exhibit a number of times.
We also have Jefferson's signed copy notifying the states that 10 amendments passed: http://msa.maryland.gov/msa/stagser/s1259/121/7989/html/amend01.html
We do not have what Washington sent for the consideration of the Maryland Legislature. Howard's letter telling the president Maryland ratified is at the National Archives. No one knows what happened to the copy Washington sent to Maryland. It may have ended up at the Library of Congress where a number of fugitive items stolen by Peter Force turned up, but I have not had a chance to examine it in person.
From Virginia (Tom Camden):
The Commonwealth of Virginia's copy of the Bill of Rights, featured in a fifty-state Bill of Rights bicentennial tour in 1990-1991, is Virginia's original copy of the 12 constitutional amendments proposed by Congress in 1789. Virginia's handwritten copy, on fine parchment and inscribed with iron gall ink, was signed by Pennsylvania Congressman Frederick Augustus Muhlenberg, who was speaker of the House of Representatives, and John Adams of Massachusetts, who as vice president of the United States presided over the Senate. The other signatures appearing on the document are those of Samuel A. Otis of Massachusetts, secretary of the Senate, and John Beckley of Virginia, clerk of the House of Representatives. Beckley previously served as clerk of the Virginia House of Delegates and later became the first librarian of Congress.
On October 19, 1789, Virginia Governor Beverly Randolph sent the document by executive communication to the General Assembly for consideration and ratification as a document worthy of the attention of the legislature. However, it was not until December 15, 1791, that Virginia's General Assembly ratified articles 2 through 12. In doing so, Virginia was the eleventh and final state needed for ratification of the 10 amendments which became our Bill of Rights.
The document, almost 28 inches by 34 inches, had been folded down to the size of a 5 x 7 inch reference card. Most legal documents of the time were folded this way to fit into a triple-fold drawer, later called a Woodruff file. The document was folded four times vertically, and then accordion-folded horizontally, much like highway road maps are folded today.
Like many other important documents of our nation's early history, the whereabouts of the Virginia copy of the Bill of Rights was unclear for most of the 19th century. Exactly when Virginia's copy was rediscovered is unclear, although it is thought to have been around 1904 when the Virginia State Library and Archives (now the Library of Virginia) became a separate agency. At that time all of Virginia's executive communications were transferred to the library for safekeeping. The Bill of Rights and other historic documents were then unfolded and flat-filed. The Virginia copy of the Bill of Rights was restored to near-original condition in 1987 by The Conservation Center for Art and Historic Artifacts in Philadelphia.
From North Carolina (Jeff Crow):
North Carolina’s copy of the Bill of Rights is in its State Archives. It was out of custody from 1865, when a Union soldier stole it from the State Capitol, until 2003 when an FBI sting recovered it in Philadelphia. The sting was followed by five years of litigation in federal and state courts that determined that North Carolina indeed owned its copy of the document.
See the essay by Dale Talbert and Karen Blum in Kenrick Simpson, ed., Liberty and Freedom: North Carolina’s Tour of the Bill of Rights (Raleigh, 2009). Also Charlene Bickford, director of the First Federal Congress Papers at George Washington University, can provide details on the status (a number now lost) of the original copies of the Bill of Rights.
Also from Dick Lankford to David Haury, January 2009, courtesy of David Carmichael:
In North Carolina much of the investigative work focused on developing a chain of custody for the Bill of Rights beginning with its initial receipt in 1789, the document being taken from the Capitol building in April 1865, and its travels outside our state up to the document’s return in 2005. We were blessed to have two outstanding assistant attorney generals assigned to the case that were very skilled and proficient in research in primary source material available at the Archives. Additionally, the testimony of handwriting experts about the 1789 docketing of the Bill of Rights by a legislative clerk coupled with a word by word comparison of surviving original copies of the Bill of Rights were critical components of the case in North Carolina. There is one distinct unique change in wording in North Carolina’s copy that identifies it from other state copies of the document. I will give you a call this week, and we can talk in more detail about this matter.
From South Carolina (W. Eric Emerson):
South Carolina's copy of the Bill of Rights is located at the South Carolina Department of Archives and History. Secretary of State William R. Huntt saved it and a substantial number of the state's records from theft or destruction by having them boxed, placed in a railcar, and transported to Charlotte just before Sherman's army captured Columbia on February 17, 1865. The story of Huntt's efforts can be found in the South Carolina Historical Magazine, Volume 87, Number 4 (October 1986), pp. 259-63.
From Georgia (David Carmichael)—see also PA above:
Georgia does not have its copy and has never determined what happened to it.
