Good morning. It’s Wednesday. Today we’ll look at the mystery behind a 238-year-old printed copy of the Constitution that was marked up by a future senator from New York. We’ll also get details about communications devices found near the United Nations that the Secret Service said could have crashed cell service.
The mystery is how a four-page document that a lawyer from New York wrote notes on in the 1780s ended up with another lawyer’s possessions in New Hampshire.
Did the New York lawyer leave it behind after a meeting, and the New Hampshire one pocketed it?
The document matters because it was one of 60 copies of a printed working draft of the Constitution — one that carried the defining phrase “we the people of these United States.” An earlier version had begun “we the people of,” and had named the 13 colonies one by one.
Other changes in the margins of the later one were scribbled in by the New York lawyer, Rufus King, a delegate to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787. The New Hampshire lawyer, Nicholas Gilman, was also a delegate.
The document was printed amid high drama. There was no guarantee that the Constitution as printed and amended would be ratified. When George Washington took the oath of office as president — in Lower Manhattan in 1789 — two of the original 13 colonies, North Carolina and Rhode Island, had not yet followed the lead of the others and gone along with the Constitution, said Peter Klarnet, a senior specialist for manuscripts and Americana at Christie’s, which is preparing to sell the printed copy that King marked up.
It is one of 12 copies that still exist from 60 that were printed, and the only one not in an institution. The Library of Congress has four of the others. The National Archives has one, as do the New York Historical and the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, both in New York.
“How it got to New Hampshire is a bit murky,” Klarnet said.
It surfaced in 1903, when a descendant of Gilman gave it to the New Hampshire Society of the Cincinnati, that state’s chapter of an organization for descendants of officers who fought in the Revolutionary War.
“We don’t know exactly how it got from Rufus King to Nicholas Gilman,” Klarnet said. “For all we know, he left it in the Philadelphia Statehouse — Independence Hall — and maybe Gilman didn’t have a copy, and it was convenient.” But Klarnet said he had not come across correspondence indicating that they were friendly.
Another unknown: why King wrote out the changes in the first place.
Was he drafting suggestions he wanted to make, or was he playing secretary to the delegates? “There was no official journal or minutes of the convention,” Klarnet said. “It was meant to be done in secret so everyone could speak freely.” Historians “depend on unofficial journals kept by various delegates and letters” to reconstruct what played out, he said.
He wasn’t a New Yorker yet
King attended the Confederation Congress from Massachusetts after growing up in Maine (still a part of Massachusetts then) and opening a law practice in Newburyport, Mass.
Others had been asked to go to the convention and had said no, Klarnet said: “They finally got to Rufus. He said: ‘A trip to New York? Yay.’” While there, he met the woman he would marry and became a New Yorker himself — so much of a New Yorker that in 1789, he became one of the state’s first two United States senators.
As time passed, “junior senators were always asking him, ‘Hey, what did you guys mean by this in the Constitution?’ because the language, even back then, was pretty purposefully obfuscating in a number of ways,” said Kelsey Brow, the executive director of King Manor Museum, on what was once King’s farm in Jamaica, Queens.
“A lot of that was about slavery” — which she said King opposed. “His record isn’t 100 percent pure,” she added, but “some historians have said he was the first politician to get up and say that slavery was immoral.” She also said that some of the changes he wrote on his copy of the Constitution “were only the beginning of edits he felt needed to be made. It became clear to him early on that the Electoral College was not functioning as intended, and he wanted it eliminated.”
Weather
Expect a partly sunny day with possible showers and thunderstorms and temperatures nearing 78. Tonight, the chance of rain persists with a low around 68.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
Suspended today (Rosh Hashana).
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SIM cards and servers near the U.N. could have disrupted cell towers, Secret Service says
On the day that President Trump told other world leaders at the United Nations General Assembly that “your countries are going to hell,” the Secret Service said it had discovered and dismantled a network of more than 100,000 SIM cards and 300 servers that could have disabled cellular towers and disrupted emergency response services.
Investigators found the equipment last month at several locations within 35 miles of U.N. headquarters. “This network had the potential to disable cellphone towers and essentially shut down the cellular network,” said Matt McCool, the top agent at the New York field office of the Secret Service.
Secret Service officials said they had no specific information that the network posted a threat to the General Assembly session, which is accompanied year after year by what has been called the Super Bowl of spy games. My colleague Eileen Sullivan writes that initial analysis of the data on some of the SIM cards has identified ties to at least one foreign nation, as well as links to criminals already known to U.S. law enforcement officials, including some cartel members.
James Lewis, a cybersecurity researcher at the Center for European Policy Analysis in Washington, said that only a handful of countries could pull off such an operation, including Russia, China and Israel.
The network was located after a monthslong investigation into what the Secret Service called anonymous “telephonic threats” to three high-level U.S. government officials in the spring, one of whom works at the White House. McCool said the agency expected to find that other senior government officials had also been targeted as investigators work their way through the SIM cards and the servers.
McCool said the agency would continue “working toward identifying those responsible and their intent, including whether their plan was to disrupt the U.N. General Assembly and communications of government and emergency personnel.” In addition to the Secret Service, the New York Police Department, the Justice Department, Homeland Security Investigations and the office of the director of national intelligence are investigating.
Metropolitan Diary
Big night out
Dear Diary:
It was summer 2007. My best friend, Jane, and I were in our early 30s and, unbelievably, enduring simultaneous divorces from men we had thought we would be with forever.
I visited her in Brooklyn, where she was living at the time while navigating her newly single life in the city.
My trip coincided with Jane’s birthday, so we made a reservation at Gramercy Tavern to mark the occasion even though we felt sad and unmoored as we faced our suddenly uncertain futures.
Although it didn’t feel like there was much to celebrate, we showered, shaved, slathered and spackled ourselves in preparation for the evening. I slid into a tight coral-colored dress and three-inch nude heels.
We took a taxi to Manhattan, an extravagance for us at the time. When the car pulled up to the restaurant and I stepped out onto the pavement, a passing stranger said, “Wow, that dress looks amazing on you.”
My uncertain future suddenly felt full of potential. It turned out to be an unforgettable night.
— Amy Burke
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Tell us your New York story here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.
P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.
Davaughnia Wilson and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].
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James Barron writes the New York Today newsletter, a morning roundup of what’s happening in the city.
The post A Rare Draft of the Constitution Shows It as a Work in Progress appeared first on New York Times.
