Abstract:
North Carolina refused to ratify the new Constitution in 1788, unless a list of rights for all citizens was added to it. To win over North Carolina and other states, James Madison sent twelve handwritten copies of the rights to the states; they were accepted. Today this list is known as the Bill of Rights. After the Civil War, the state's handwritten copy was stolen by a Union soldier and carried to Ohio. Johnson follows the document's trail from there until it was recovered in Philadelphia by the FBI in 2003.