The plaintiff in error, who was plaintiff below, sued the defendant for the sum of $40, which he had paid in lawful money under protest for taxes due the State of Tennessee, after he had tendered to the defendant that sum in the circulating notes of the Bank of Tennessee, which defendant refused to receive.
The suit was commenced before a justice of the peace, taken by appeal to the Common-Law Chancery Court of Madison County, and from there to the Supreme Court of Tennessee, and by writ of error from this court it is now before us for review.
In all the trials in the State courts, judgment was rendered against the plaintiff. The jurisdiction of this court is denied again, though it was affirmed in the analogous cases of Woodruff v. Trapnall, 10 How. 190, and Furman v. Nichol, 8 Wall. 44.
As the same facts are involved in the question of jurisdiction and the issue on the merits, it may be as well to state them.
They appear in a bill of exceptions taken at the trial on the first appeal, which was a trial de novo before a jury. The defendant was a collector of taxes, to whom plaintiff had tendered $40 of the bills of the Bank of Tennessee, which, with other lawful money tendered at the same time, was the amount due. The offer of plaintiff was founded on the twelfth section of the charter of the bank, enacted in 1838 by the legislature of the State, which reads thus:--
'Be it enacted that the bills or notes of the said corporation originally made payable, or which shall have become payable on demand, in gold or silver coin, shall be receivable at the treasury of this State, and by all tax-collectors and other public officers, in all payments for taxes or other moneys due to the State.'
It was proved that the bills were issued subsequently to May 6, 1861, and were known as the 'Torbet or new issue,' and were worth in the brokers' market about twenty-five cents on the dollar.
The court charged the jury that if the notes tendered were issued subsequently to May 6, 1861, and during the existence of the State government established at that date in hostility to the government of the United States, then defendant was not legally bound to receive them in payment of plaintiff's taxes. And the reason given for this was, that while the Constitution of the United States protected the contract or the section of the charter we have cited from repudiation by State legislation as to notes issued prior to the act of secession of May 6, 1861, it conferred no such protection as to notes issued while the State was an insurrectionary government; and that consequently the provisions of sect. 6 of the schedule to the constitutional amendment of 1865, which declared that all the notes of the bank issued after the date above mentioned were null and void, and forbade any legislature to pass laws for their redemption, was a valid exercise of State authority. On this instruction the jury found a verdict for the defendant.
In the Supreme Court the judgment rendered on this verdict was affirmed, without any opinion or other evidence of the grounds on which it was so affirmed.
There can be no question that the charge of the trial judge to the jury decided against the plaintiff in error a question which gives this court jurisdiction; and this is admitted by counsel, who ask us to dismiss the writ of error.
The ground assumed in support of the motion is, that we ought to presume that the Supreme Court did not decide the question which the court below did, but affirmed the judgment, on the ground that, by the laws of Tennessee, no suit could be brought against the State or against the collector of taxes, and that the justice of the peace who first tried the case, and the court to which the appeal was taken, had no jurisdiction. It would follow, say counsel, that as this was a question of State law, it could not be reviewed in this court.
The answers to this are several and very obvious.
1. Where an appellate court decides a case on the ground that the inferior court had no jurisdiction, it in some mode indicates that it was not a decision on the merits, to prevent the judgment being used as a bar in some court which might have jurisdiction. Barney v. Baltimore City, 6 Wall. 280; House et al. v. Mullen, 22 id. 42; Kendig v. Dean, supra, p. 423.
2. In Tennessee v. Sneed (96 U.S. 69), this court decided that the courts of Tennessee did have the jurisdiction which this suggestion denies them; and we will not presume, without very strong reason for it, that the Supreme Court of Tennessee disagreed with this court on that point.