Rare copy of US Constitution, found in a file cabinet, is up for auction

By Hank Sanders

Ken Farmer, an antiques appraiser, opened a folder that had been stored for decades in a dusty file cabinet in an old mansion in North Carolina and pulled out a creased, worn sheet of paper. He could tell almost immediately that he was looking at a print dating back to the 18th or 19th century.

On that day in 2022, his excitement grew and the hairs on his arms stood up as he recognized the words at the top of the page.

“WE the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union,” it read.

But it wasn’t until he looked at the bottom of the document and saw the signature of Charles Thomson, the secretary of Congress at the time of the Constitutional Convention, that Farmer realized how momentous this finding could be. He believed he was holding one of the first copies made of the Constitution of the United States.

“I’ve never found anything this exciting,” Farmer said.

Two years later, experts believe that Farmer, who had been hired to appraise the value of the historic home where the document was found, had stumbled upon a rare original copy of the Constitution, and its sellers predict that it will be sold for millions at an auction this week.

“I think it’s really neat and extraordinary a copy has been found,” said Michael J. Gerhardt, a law professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with an expertise in the history of the U.S. Constitution.

The document is more valuable as a historical artifact, Gerhardt said, because it is well-preserved, has Thomson’s signature on it and is a ratified version. He called it “probably the most important copy of the Constitution that would exist.”

After the Constitutional Convention came to a close and the complete draft of the Constitution was finalized in 1787, the founders’ last step was to have the document ratified by at least nine of the original 13 colonies, making it binding to the government of the new nation. As part of that process, Congress printed out 100 copies and sent them around the country, John Kaminski, an expert in the document’s history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said in an email.

The printed archetype of the Constitution found in the filing cabinet in North Carolina would have been one of those copies, according to Brunk Auctions, an auction house based in Asheville, North Carolina, which describes it as “the only located privately held copy” on its sale page.

The governors of the 13 colonies at the time received copies of the legal framework that would constitute the supreme law of the land so that they could review it and have it reprinted for their residents to read and discuss, Kaminski said.

Samuel Johnston, who was the governor of North Carolina from 1787-89, had owned the home where Farmer found the document. Johnston also served as the president of the North Carolina ratifying conventions of 1788 and 1789, and as the first US Senator from North Carolina from 1789-93.

The home, known as the Hayes house, in Edenton, a town in northeast North Carolina, was first settled in the late 18th century by Johnston and was later given in 1865 to one of his son’s business partners, Edward Wood. The Hayes house was also part of a slave plantation that occupied about 1,400 acres of farmland and had six cottages where enslaved people were held.

The home stayed in the Wood family for more than 150 years until they sold the home and its 194 acres to the state of North Carolina in 2022 for over $6 million, according to The Carolina Journal. The Wood family hired Farmer to appraise the value of the items in the house, including those that were not for sale, he said.

The Wood family, which is putting the document up for auction, declined to be interviewed for this story.

‘Adopted It Must Be’

On the day he found the document while examining property in the house, Farmer took out his magnifying glass and looked at how the ink from Thomson’s name had bled into the fibers of the paper. That was when realized it was an original signature.

Creased in the center, indicating where the sheets were folded during storage, the document’s front and back pages have become yellowed like a newspaper that was left out in the sun. But the text remains in remarkably good condition. The document was recently exhibited at the US Courthouse in New York City’s Manhattan borough. Each printed word is still legible. Dashes and notes in the margins bring the paper to life.

“Adopted it must be & shall be,” a handwritten comment on the margin reads.

The right side of the front page, the entire back page and the left side of the front page make up the Constitution and the resolution of the Constitutional Convention. The middle of the front page has a letter from George Washington urging people to ratify the document and Congress’ ratification resolution.

Another early version of the Constitution, one that was printed before Congress added the ratification resolution, was bought in 2021 by billionaire Ken Griffin, a hedge fund founder, for more than $43 million, according to a statement.

Farmer estimated that the value of the new find lies between $100,000 and $40 million.

After Farmer explained what he thought the document was, the Wood family contacted Brunk Auctions to determine its value. The auction house reached out to Seth Kaller, a historical documents expert. He determined the document to be an authentic version of the official ratification copy of the Constitution.

Thomson probably signed only 27 of the copies — two for each governor and one probably for the Congressional archives, Kaller said in a telephone interview.

Only eight of these signed copies are known to have survived and North Carolina was one of two states, along with Rhode Island, that voted against adopting the Constitution in the initial ratification process, Kaller said. Those details contribute to the novelty of the document, he added.

The state reviewed the find and did not deem it to be public property, the auctioned item’s description reads.

Kaller said that, as payment for his expertise, he would earn a percentage of the document’s sale, but he said he was prohibited by the terms of that agreement from specifying how much the payment would be. The auction house will keep 23 per cent of the proceeds from the sale.

On Sept. 28, coming 237 years to the day after the copy of the Constitution was printed in New York in 1787 and two years after Farmer discovered the document, there will be a live auction presented at Brunk Auctions in Asheville.

“When you first see it, it takes a minute for it to really sink in because it’s not the big, florid ‘We the People’ most people picture,” Andrew Brunk, a principal for Brunk Auctions, said in a telephone interview. “Part of what is so powerful about it is that it’s just this thin piece of paper. It’s a simple thing.”

The starting bid has been set at $1 million.