[DOWNLOAD] "Wilmington and Weldon Railroad Company v. King" by United States Supreme Court ~ Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Wilmington and Weldon Railroad Company v. King
- Author : United States Supreme Court
- Release Date : January 01, 1875
- Genre: Law,Books,Professional & Technical,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 67 KB
Description
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 The treasury-notes of the Confederate government, at an early period in the war, in a great measure superseded coin within the insurgent States, and, though not made a legal tender, constituted the principal currency in which the operations of business were there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.