A rare copy of the U.S. Constitution found in North Carolina is likely worth millions

A rare, printed copy of the U.S. Constitution discovered in a North Carolina family filing cabinet is expected to fetch millions at auction. Signed by Charles Thomson, a Philadelphian who served as Secretary of the Congress of the Confederation, the document is one of only eight known surviving signed copies of the Constitution sent to the 13 original states for ratification. It is the only one that remains in private hands. The last recorded sale of a similar document occurred over 130 years ago.

“I don’t want to say holy grail, but it’s such an extraordinary rarity,” said Andrew Brunk, president of Brunk Auctions in North Carolina, which is auctioning the historic jewel later this month. “You can go through a whole lifetime in the business and not have a moment like this.”

The broadsheet includes a copy of George Washington’s 1787 letter asking the leaders of the newly formed states to put their individual interests aside for the “greater good of all.” Bidding has already started at $1 million, and is expected to stretch into the tens of millions, Brunk said.

With such a meaningful find, it’s about more than just money, he said.

“This has monetary value, of course,” Brunk said. “But it’s also such an incredibly rich historic document — the understanding of what this really represents. This is the tangible moment where ‘We the people’ becomes a reality.”

The Sept. 28 auction will take place 237 years after the Congress of the Confederation, meeting in New York as the new country’s governing body, resolved to send the Constitution to the states for debate. As secretary, Thomson, an Irish-born patriot leader who also taught Latin at the Philadelphia Academy, an ancestor school of the University of Pennsylvania, ordered 100 copies of the printed archetype of the Constitution. He signed only a fraction of them to be sent to states.

“They are basically asking the people to say, ‘yes,’ we want a central government,” Brunk said. “But as James Madison, one of the people that drafted the Constitution, said, ‘This is nothing but a dead letter until the will of the people is imposed on it.’”

The rare document was found while cleaning out historic Hayes Farm in North Carolina. The 184-acre plantation was the former home of Samuel Johnston, who served as governor of North Carolina from 1787 to 1789 and presided over the state’s two ratification conventions.

In 2022, a family that had lived in the home for seven generations was preparing the estate to be used as a public historic site, when they discovered the copy of the Constitution in a yellow file folder in a storage room. The find was especially surprising since many of Johnston’s historic documents had been given to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill four decades earlier, Brunk said.

“Somehow this group of documents got missed,” Brunk said.

It is unknown exactly how the copy wound up in the discarded drawer, Brunk said. But after nearly 240 years, the four-page folio is in fragile, but beautiful shape, he said. Handwritten checkmarks, written long ago, dot each section of the Constitution, he said.

“It really puts you in the moment,” Brunk said.

The original, handwritten copy of the Constitution of the United States remains on display at the National Archives in Washington. The National Constitution Center here in Philadelphia houses a rare first public printing of the Constitution, as well as early drafts.

In 2021, Sotheby’s sold a rare first-edition copy of the Constitution for $43.2 million to billionaire investor Kenneth Griffin.

The ratification copy, representing the Founding Fathers’ calls for unity and compromise, and containing Washington’s written hopes that the Constitution would come to “promote the lasting welfare of that country so dear to us all,” is arguably more significant, Brunk said. Especially now, with a divided country in the grip of a heated election.

“There are only maybe a small handful of American documents that are of this importance,” he said.