Who owns the original copy of the bill of rights and why?

They said it was theirs. They said it was stolen. They said more than once that they would never, ever pay to get it back.

And now, 138 years after it vanished, North Carolina officials are poised to reclaim their treasured copy of the Bill of Rights, which had fallen into the hands of Connecticut Yankees.

It is a long story, beginning in April 1865, in the final throes of the Civil War, when a Union soldier lifted the sheepskin document from the North Carolina Statehouse and marched home to Ohio with it on his back. The document, one of only 14 copies, then disappeared, surfacing on a handful of occasions, sometimes decades apart. In March, two Connecticut antique collectors tried to sell it to a museum at a carpetbagger profit. That is when an F.B.I. agent, posing as a philanthropist, swooped in and snatched it.

But who really owns the 27-by-31-inch sheet of history, thought to be worth as much as $30 million? North Carolina? The federal government? The treasure hunters who rediscovered it?

On Monday, the case goes to court and a federal judge here will begin to sift through a sheaf of Civil-War-era papers to settle this North-South dispute. It may seem like a slam-dunk for North Carolina. But there are many legal twists, including the sticky little fact that the state denounced the Constitution, including the Bill of Rights, when it seceded from the Union.

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