APPEAL from the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia.
This was a suit in equity for the specific performance of a contract for the sale of certain real property situated in the city of Washington, in the District of Columbia, and adjoining the hotel owned by the complainant, Willard, and known as Willard's Hotel.
The facts out of which the case arose were as follows:
In April, 1854, the defendant leased to the complainant the property in question, which was generally known in Washington as 'The Mansion House,' for the period of ten years from the 1st of May following, at the yearly rent of twelve hundred dollars. The lease contained a covenant that the lessee should have the right or option of purchasing the premises, with the buildings and improvements thereon, at any time before the expiration of the lease, for the sum of twenty-two thousand and five hundred dollars, payable as follows: two thousand dollars in cash, and two thousand dollars, together with the interest on all the deferred instalments, each year thereafter until the whole was paid; the deferred payments to be secured by a deed of trust on the property, and the vendor to execute to the purchaser a war ranty deed of the premises, subject to a yearly ground-rent of three hundred and ninety dollars.
At the time of this lease gold and silver, or bank bills convertible on demand into it, were the ordinary money of the country, and the standard of values. In 1861 the rebellion broke out, lasting till 1865. In the interval, owing to the influx of people, property in the metropolis used for hotels greatly increased in value, and as was alleged by Tayloe, who produced what he deemed a record to show the fact, the complainant, Willard, assigned an undivided half of the property which had been leased to him as abovementioned to a brother of his. In December, 1861, the banks throughout the country suspended payments in specie, and in 1862 and 1863, the Federal Government issued some hundred millions of notes, to be used as money, and which Congress declared should be a tender in the payment of debts. Coin soon ceased to circulate generally, and people used, in a great degree, the notes of the government to pay what they owned.
On the 15th of April, 1864, two weeks before the expiration of the period allowed the complainant for his election to purchase the property having greatly increased in value since 1854, the year in which the lease was made-the complainant addressed a letter to the defendant, inclusing a check, payable to his order, on the Bank of America, in New York, for two thousand dollars, as the amount due on the 1st of May following on the purchase of the property, with a blank receipt for the money, and requesting the defendant to sign and return the receipt, and stating that if it were agreeable to the defendant he woul have the deed of the property, and the trust deed to be executed by himself, prepared between that date and the 1st of May. To this letter the defendant, on the same day, replied that he had no time then to look into the business, and returned the check, expressing a wish to see the compliant for explanations before closing the matter.