Lost Rights: The Misadventures of a Stolen American Relic »

DAVID HOWARD is a freelance journalist and writer whose work has appeared in the New York Times, Travel + Leisure, Backpacker, Outside, Men's Journal, and other publications. He is the executive editor of Bicycling.

April 1865. Robert E. Lee surrenders at Appomattox, Lincoln is assassinated, and Sherman’s army marches into Raleigh. Sometime amid that tumultuous stretch of days, an unknown infantryman rifles through the North Carolina statehouse hunting for Confederate mementos—but what he finds is no ordinary souvenir. He returns home with a touchstone of our Republic: one of the fourteen original copies of the Bill of Rights.

Lost Rights follows that document’s epic passage over the course of 138 years, from the Indiana businessman who purchases the looted parchment for five dollars to the antique-furniture dealer who tries to peddle it more than a century later for $5 million. The parchment drifts from the living room wall of a midwestern family into the corruptible world of high-end antiquities before its journey ends with a dramatic FBI sting on the thirty-second floor of a Philadelphia office tower.

For fans of The Billionaire’s Vinegar and The Lost Painting, Lost Rights is “a tour de force of antiquarian sleuthing” (Hampton Sides).

Publishers Weekly

This remarkable American story by Howard, executive editor of Bicycling magazine, follows the long, shadowy trail of a single document, North Carolina's wayward copy of the Bill of Rights. With ratification of the first 10 amendments to the Constitution in 1789, 14 elegantly handwritten copies were drafted, one for each of the original states and one for the federal government. Seventy-six years later, at the end of the Civil War, it is believed a soldier with Sherman's army pilfered North Carolina's copy and carried it home to Ohio. The following year it ended up in the possession of Indiana businessman Charles Shotwell, who bought it for only $5. After 134 years in the Shotwell family's possession, the document in 2000 was purchased for $200,000 by a boastful Connecticut antique collector and an ethically dubious business partner, both hoping to sell it for millions. How the parchment ended up back in North Carolina state archives is an intricate tale involving high-powered antique dealers, businessmen, historians, manuscript experts, auction houses, elite attorneys, governors of three states, the FBI, a U.S. Attorney's office, and Philadelphia's National Constitution Center. The tale pulsates with dynamic personalities greatly affected by their connection to one of the rarest, most influential and valuable documents in American history. Howard has produced a marvelously compelling read. (July)