I spent many happy and instructive afternoons cataloguing pamphlets and other material in the Department of Rare Books and Manuscripts at the University of Virginia, working under the direction of L. Gayle Cooper, the very knowledgeable head cataloguer of Special Collections, who had done much of her training at the Library Company of Philadelphia. During a project to make a collection of broadsides more accessible, and on an afternoon when much of the material was of primarily local interest, I came unexpectedly to a playbill for a performance of Our American Cousin at Ford's Theatre. And the playbill had a banner note: "This evening the performance will be honored by the presence of President Lincoln."



It's difficult to describe, but I've never forgotten, the rush of emotion I felt at having such an artifact suddenly before me. A vivid link to that great man and to that Good Friday in 1865. And I continue to be grateful for the experience, even though the playbill proved to be, in fact, only one of the many reprints and forgeries issued after the assassination of President Lincoln.



What's brought the memory to me today was the news that North Carolina's copy of the Bill of Rights, stolen that same day at the close of the Civil War, has been recovered in Philadelphia. The Philadelphia Inquirer covered the story. Here's an excerpt.



Sting Nets Stolen Piece of History



By Joseph A. Slobodzian

Inquirer Staff Writer



It's Good Friday, April 14, 1865, five days after Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered the Confederacy at Appomattox, Va. Abraham Lincoln has just hours left to live.



In North Carolina, Union Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman's troops have arrived in Raleigh on the way home from their fiery march through the South. An obscure Ohio soldier helps himself to a souvenir: North Carolina's copy of the Bill of Rights.



Yesterday, 138 years after it was looted from North Carolina's capitol, the faded, handwritten relic of the nation's founding was again on public view, in Philadelphia. It was recovered in a dramatic FBI sting that involved Gov. Rendell, officials of the National Constitution Center, and one of the city's preeminent lawyers.