Texas v. White

Texas v. White
Supreme Court of the United States
Argued February 5, 1869 Decided April 12, 1869
Full case name	Texas v. White, et al.
Citations	74 U.S. 700 (more) 7 Wall. 700; 19 L. Ed. 227; 1868 U.S. LEXIS 1056; 1868 WL 11083
Holding
Texas (and the rest of the Confederacy) never left the Union during the Civil War, because a state cannot unilaterally secede. US Treasury bond sales by Confederate Texas during the war, originally owned by pre-war Texas, were invalid, and the bonds were therefore still owned by the post-war state.
Court membership
Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase Associate Justices Samuel Nelson · Robert C. Grier Nathan Clifford · Noah H. Swayne Samuel F. Miller · David Davis Stephen J. Field
Case opinions
Majority	Chase, joined by Nelson
Concurrence	Clifford, Davis, Field
Concur/dissent	Swayne, joined by Miller
Dissent	Grier
Laws applied
U.S. Const. art. IV

Texas v. White, 74 U.S. (7 Wall.) 700 (1869), was a case argued before the United States Supreme Court in 1869.^[1] The case involved a claim by the Reconstruction government of Texas that United States bonds owned by Texas since 1850 had been illegally sold by the Confederate state legislature during the American Civil War. The state filed suit in the United States Supreme Court, which, under the United States Constitution, has original jurisdiction on certain cases in which a state is a party.

In accepting original jurisdiction, the court ruled that, legally speaking, Texas was and remained a state of the United States ever since it first joined the Union in 1845, despite it later purporting to join the Confederate States of America and despite it being under military rule at the time of the decision in the case. In deciding the merits of the bond issue, the court further held that the Constitution did not permit states to unilaterally secede from the United States, and that the ordinances of secession, and all the acts of the legislatures within seceding states intended to give effect to such ordinances, were "absolutely null".^[2] The purported bond sale during the civil war was thus void and the reconstructed Texas remained the legal owner.