In Walt Disney’s 2004 movie National Treasure , Benjamin Franklin Gates, played by actor Nicholas Cage, races against time to steal one of America’s most sacred and guarded documents †the Declaration of Independence †lest it fall into dangerous hands.
Two of Maine’s state attorneys will travel to Fairfax, Va., next month, not to steal a copy of the storied document, but to try to reclaim what their state contends is a piece of its history. If successful, they will wrest the document not out of dangerous hands, but out of the collection of Richard L. Adams Jr, a Virginia collector who believes he rightfully acquired it for $475,000 in 2001.
At a January 14 hearing at the county court in Fairfax, plaintiff Adams will try to show that what has been called the Salem, Massachusetts-Bay printing of the Declaration of Independence should remain in his hands. For their part, the state of Maine’s representatives, Assistant State Attorney General Thomas Knowlton and Deputy State Attorney General William Stokes, will brandish a statute that prohibits the sale of a public document, as well as the successful repatriation in 2001 of a similar copy of the Declaration of Independence that had once belonged to the town of North Yarmouth.
“We have a strong replevin law in Maine,” said the state’s archivist David Cheever, referring to the Anglo-Saxon term describing an action to recover personal property said to be unlawfully taken. “In the 1999 case involving the North Yarmouth copy, we were successful in stopping its sale and preventing it from leaving the state,” confirmed Knowlton.
According to the complaint filed in the circuit court of Fairfax County, the currently contested document contains the following attribution on its face: “Salem, Massachusetts-Bay; Printed by E. Russell, by Order of Authority.” The copy was printed in July 1776 and bears handwritten notations on the reverse side making reference to the Town of Pownalborough, which in 1802 became the town of Wiscasset.
The genesis of the contention for the 1776 copy circles back to the last descendant of Wiscasset’s town clerk Sol Holbrook, who died in 1929, according to Cheever. “It was a case of not knowing what they had,” he said. Apparently, Holbrook’s daughter, Anna Plumstead, and her sister unwittingly ended up with the important document in their attic, where it was discovered in 1994 following Plumstead’s death and consigned to a local southern Maine auction house. It sold there in 1995 for $77,000, purchased on behalf of White Plains, N.Y., historic documents dealer Seth Kaller, and then passed on in a series of transactions involving London antiquarian book seller Simon Finch to its current owner Adams.
“We did not learn of this copy until 2003 when an anonymous individual called the state archivist,” said Knowlton.
The most valuable edition of the Declaration of Independence fetched $8.14 million in an online auction at Sotheby’s in July 2000. That document, purchased by Norman Lear, television writer/producer, and Internet entrepreneur and philanthropist David Hayden, was one of only 25 copies extant from John Dunlap’s very first printing, which took place on the evening of July 4, 1776. Dunlap was the original printer of Thomas Jefferson’s text and ran off broadsides of the Declaration for the Continental Congress.
Whatever the outcome of this particular tug of war, the increasing frequency of battles between state and municipal governments and private individuals over ownership of such public documents is having a chilling effect on auctions. Said one southern Maine auctioneer, who did not want to be identified due to the current litigation, “I’ve had people come and offer these kinds of items since this whole thing began, and I’ve told them, ‘Look, you may want to show this to your public or municipal officials, because it is more of a local interest.'”
Kenneth Krawcheck, a Charleston, S.C., attorney who successfully represented the private consignor of Civil War-era documents in a case in which the state of South Carolina asserted ownership, said that this is possibly the best way to handle these cases. “When an auction house sees that there is bound to be some kind of legal entanglement, they are better off insisting some kind of assurance from the consignor that there is clear title,” he said.
