Wilmington and Weldon Railroad Company v. King/Opinion of the Court

by Stephen Johnson Field

United States Supreme Court

91 U.S. 3

Wilmington and Weldon Railroad Company  v.  King

The contract between the defendant and the plaintiff's testatrix, upon which the present action was brought, was made in North Carolina during the war. By its terms, the wood purchased by the railroad company was to be paid for in Confederate currency. Contracts thus payable, not designed in their origin to aid the insurrectionary government, are not invalid between the parties. It was so held in the first case in which the question of the validity of such contracts was presented,-that of Thorington v. Smith, 8 Wall. 1,-and the doctrine of that case has been since affirmed in repeated instances. The treasury-notes of the Confederate government, at an early period in the war, in a great measure superseded coin within the insurgent States, and, though not made a legal tender, constituted the principal currency in which the operations of business were there conducted. Great injustice would, therefore, have followed any other decision invalidating transactions otherwise free from objection, because of the reference of the parties to those notes as measures of value. Hanauer v. Woodruff, 15 Wall. 448; and the Confederate Note Case, 19 id. 556.

But as those notes were issued in large quantities to meet the increasing demands of the Confederacy, and as the probability of their ultimate redemption became constantly less as the war progressed, they necessarily depreciated in value from month to month, until in some portions of the Confederacy, during the year 1864, the purchasing power of from twenty-one to upwards of forty dollars of the notes equalled only that of one dollar in lawful money of the United States. When the war ended, the notes, of course, became worthless, and ceased to be current; but contracts made upon their purchasable quality existed in large numbers throughout the insurgent States. It was, therefore, manifest, that, if these contracts were to be enforced with any thing like justice to the parties, evidence must be received as to the value of the notes at the time and in the locality where the contracts were made; and, in the principal case cited, such evidence was held admissible. Indeed, in no other mode could the contracts as made by the parties be enforced. To have allowed any different rule in estimating the value of the contracts, and ascertaining damages for their breach, would have been to sanction a plain departure from the stipulations of the parties, and to make for them new and different contracts.

In the case at bar, the State court of North Carolina declined to follow the rule announced by this court, and refused to instruct the jury that the plaintiff was entitled to recover only the value of the currency stipulated for the wood sold, and instructed them that he was entitled to recover the value of the wood, without reference to the value of that currency. This was nothing less than instructing them that they might put a different value upon the property purchased from that placed by the parties at the time. In this ruling the court obeyed a statute of the State, passed in March, 1866, which enacted, 'that in all civil actions which may arise in courts of justice for debts contracted during the late war, in which the nature of the obligation is not set forth, nor the value of the property for which such debts were created is stated, it shall be admissible for either party to show on the trial, by affidavit or otherwise, what was the consideration of the contract; and the jury, in making up their verdict, shall take the same into consideration, and determine the value of said contract in present currency in the particular locality in which it is to be performed, and render their verdict accordingly.'

This statute, as construed by the court, allowed the jury to place their own judgment upon the value of the contract in suit, and did not require them to take the value stipulated by the parties. A provision of law of that character, by constituting the jury a revisory body over the indiscretions and bad judgments of contracting parties, might in many instances relieve them from hard bargains, though honestly made upon an erroneous estimate of the value of the articles purchased, but would create an insecurity in business transactions which would be intolerable. It is sufficient, however, to say that the Constitution of the United States interposes an impassable barrier to such new innovation in the administration of justice, and with its conservative energy still requires contracts, not illegal in their character, to be enforced as made by the parties, even against any State interference with their terms.

The extreme depreciation of Confederate currency at the time the wood, which is the cause of the suit, was purchased, gives a seeming injustice to the result obtained. But, until we are made acquainted with all the circumstances attending the transaction, we cannot affirm any thing on this point. The answer alleges that the wood was to be cut by the defendant's hands, and that the plaintiff's testatrix was only to furnish the trees standing. It may be that under such circumstances the cost of felling the trees and removing the wood was nearly equal to the value of the wood by the cord as found by the jury, which was fifty cents. Be that as it may, it is not for the court to give another value to the contract than that stipulated by the parties, nor is it within the legislative competence of a State to authorize any such proceeding.

The judgment of the Supreme Court of North Carolina must be reversed, and the cause remaded for further proceedings.

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