White 7 Wallace 700 (1869).The case was Texas v. White. The state of Texas brought suit in the United States Supreme Court to have certain United States government bonds declared the property of the state, and to prevent the present holders of the bonds from collecting upon them. Texas had owned the bonds before the Civil War. As a means of financing during the war, while Texas was a member of the Confederacy, the bonds were sold. Texas now claimed that the sale was void and the bonds still belonged to the state.The suit raised two formidable constitutional questions. First, Texas had brought suit directly in the Supreme Court. Under the Constitution, only a state may do this. These were the days of Reconstruction, and Texas had a military government; it did not yet have representatives in the United States Congress. Was Texas a state within the meaning of the Constitution so that it could bring this suit? Second, the bonds had been sold during the Civil War by the duly organized government. If Texas was at that time no longer a state of the Union in legal contemplation, then the sale was perfectly proper. If, on the other hand, Texas was legally a state, then its government during the Confederacy was a usurpation and its action was void. Was Texas legally a state of the Union during the Civil War? The Court ordered the bonds restored to Texas. The implication of this decision reached far beyond the precise legal question answered: the United States is one nation, and the ties uniting the states cannot be severed by any of them. And there was another implication, less important but still significant: the southern states were enabled to stand as states in the Union, and to assert their rights as states. The days of Reconstruction and Carpetbag Rule were numbered.The case was this:In 1851, the United States issued its bonds -- five thousand bonds for $1,000 each, and numbered successively from No. 1 to No. 5,000, and thus making the sum...
