For now, at least.
No less a personage than George Washington sent the handwritten document down here in a successful effort to get the residents of the Tar Heel State, zealous of their liberties and suspicious of big government even back then, to approve the new Constitution and join the Union.
Fast-forward nearly a century. It’s 1865. The Civil War is grinding to its bitter conclusion, and Union troops are closing in on Raleigh. Gov. Zebulon Vance orders all the important documents in the state’s archives moved out of town for safekeeping, but somehow that all-important gift from George Washington is overlooked in the hurried evacuation.
But it wasn’t overlooked by a Yankee soldier who took part in the looting of Raleigh, and it turned up years later ignominiously hanging on the wall of a building in Indianapolis, of all places. During sporadic, unsuccessful efforts over the years to bring the document back home, it bounced around from a library to a bank to a nursing home.
A legal battle began in 1995 and escalated to the point that FBI agents ended up seizing the artifact in 1995. And now it has been physically returned to North Carolina, where it has been securely locked away in a vault in the state archives.
The legal wrangling over the relic, valued as high as $40 million, is not over yet — though possession still counts for a lot. Questions of legal ownership remain unresolved, and the federal courts will soon have to decide on Northern claims that North Carolina forfeited all claims to the piece of parchment when it left the Union. For now, Gov. Mike Easley jokes that he’s got the Highway Patrol “locked and loaded” in case anybody tries to sneak in and spirit it away again.
Hooray for our side. And may the physical presence of this priceless document in our midst spark a renewed appreciation at all levels of government for the rights and liberties enshrined therein.
