Source: https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/Thomson_v._Lee_County
Timestamp: 2019-04-21 23:20:59+00:00

Document:
'The General Assembly shall not in any manner create any debt or debts, liability or liabilities, which shall singly or in the aggregate, with any previous debts or liabilities, exceed the sum of one hundred thousand dollars, except in the case of war, &c., unless the same shall be authorized by some law for some single object or work to be distinctly specified therein, &c. No such law shall take effect until at a general election it shall have been submitted to the people and have a majority of all the votes cast for and against it at such election.'With this constitution in force and after certain statutes had been passed by the General Assembly relative to the corporate powers of counties, their right to execute bonds for railroads, &c., it was decided, or so said to be, at an election held in Lee County, Iowa, in 1856, to take stock and issue bonds to three different railroads; one hundred and fifty thousand dollars to each.
Soon after the bonds were issued the county laid a tax to meet the interest due on the coupons. The legality of the tax was denied by some tax-payers of the county, but the court of last resort in the State having declared it lawful,  the money was collected and the coupons paid for a short time. The court, however, subsequently reviewed and reversed its former decision; and the tax being no longer levied the coupons were no longer paid. A number of them being now in the hands of Mr. Edgar Thomson, of Philadelphia, cut off from the bonds to which they had been originally attached, he brought suit in the Federal courts of Iowa to recover them; not producing, however, the bonds to which they had originally belonged.
2d. That the 'Curative Act,' of January, 1857, gave no validity to the bonds.
The county having had judgment, the matter was now on error here, where the same kind of questions that have been so abundantly discussed in this court, of late, in Gelpcke v. City of Dubuque;  Meyer v. Muscatine;  Mercer County v. Hackett;  Seybert v. City of Pittsburgh;  Van Hostrup v. Madison City;  Murray v. Lardner;  Sheboygan Co. v. Parker;  Havemeyer v. Iowa Co.,  were raised and discussed by briefs anew; Mr. Allison, for Lee County, who sought to distinguish this case from any of those, contending that the constitution of Iowa restricted the legislature from authorizing the bonds; that this was now the construction given to the constitution by the Supreme Court of Iowa; that the vote and proceedings by which the bonds were authorized were irregular; that the 'Curative Act' of 1857 was inoperative, and that if this were all otherwise yet that Thomson, who appeared to own nothing but the coupons, could not recover on them, without producing the bonds themselves.
Messrs. Howell and Grant, contra.
^1 McMillen v. The County Judge, 6 Iowa, 391.
^8 3 Id. supra 93.
^10 Nelson, J., not having sat-having been indisposed-and Miller, J., not taking part in the decision.

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