The Confederate States adopted their Permanent Constitution on March 11, 1861. The original document consisted of five vellum sheets pasted together to form a scroll over twelve feet long. The original document, along with many other documents of the Confederacy, was found at a train station in 1865 by a war-time correspondent, Felix DeFontaine. In 1883, he sold the manuscript to Mrs. George Wymberley Jones DeRenne. In 1939, the DeRenne family sold the document to the University of Georgia, where it now resides.