Myra Clark Gaines, Appellant v. Duncan Hennen

• Decision Date: 01 December 1860
• Citation: 65 U.S. 553,16 L.Ed. 770,24 How. 553
• Parties: MYRA CLARK GAINES, APPELLANT, v. DUNCAN N. HENNEN
• Court: U.S. Supreme Court

65 U.S. 553

24 How. 553

16 L.Ed. 770

MYRA CLARK GAINES, APPELLANT, v. DUNCAN N. HENNEN.

December Term, 1860

[Syllabus from pages 553-555 intentionally omitted]

THIS was an appeal from the Circuit Court of the United States for the eastern district of Louisiana.

The case had been frequently before this court in various aspects; first, in 13 Peters, 404, then in 15 Peters, 9, 2 Howard, 619, 6 Howard, 552, 15 Howard, 473. In some of these reports large extracts are made from the record, illustrating the points of law and fact then under consideration, and also the evidence in support of them. All of this past history was brought again to the notice of the court in the argument of the present case, which cannot be again recited in the present report. The reader who wishes to understand all the points which are discussed in the opinion of the court must turn back to the preceding volumes above cited, and follow the case through its successive developments. He will then be able to appreciate the concluding remark in the opinion of the court, which is as follows:

'When hereafter some distinguished American lawyer shall retire from his practice to write the history of his country's jurisprudence, this case will be registered by him as the most remarkable in the records of its courts.'

It was argued by Mr. Cushing and Mr. Perin for the appellant, and Mr. Janin and Mr. Hennen for the appellee.

The record in this case consisted of a thousand printed pages, and the records in the preceding cases were introduced, also, into this. The reporter is saved from the almost hopeless task of following the counsel through this wide range of inquiry by the minute examination of the points of the case contained in the opinion of the court and dissenting opinion of Mr. Justice CATRON.

Mr. Justice WAYNE delivered the opinion of the court.

We will first give some of the facts of this case, that the litigation which has grown out of the wills of Daniel Clark may be correctly understood. Without them it could not be.

They have been the subject of five appeals to this court. This is the sixth. It presents the controversy differently from what it has been before. It also presents points for decision which were not raised in either of the preceding cases. Some of those that were, however, will necessarily be mentioned in this opinion to illustrate their connection with this case. They may be so considered without our coming at all into conflict with any judgment heretofore given concerning the rights of the parties in any antecedent appeal. Our conclusion will differ from one of them on account of testimony in this case which was not in that, but they will not be contradictory; and because we have information in this, concerning a piece of testimony then relied upon, which we shall exclude in this, as inadmissible for any purpose.

Four of the five appeals were decided by this court substantially in favor of Mrs. Gaines. The fifth was adverse, not in anywise excluding the re-examination of the only point then ruled by the use of the same testimony, and that which is new. Considered in connection, both have impressed us with a different impression of the status of Mrs. Gaines's legitimacy from that which this court did not then think was sufficiently proved, as we now think it has been. Now she is here with a support which her cases have not had before. She comes with a decision of the Supreme Court of Louisiana, directing, upon her application, that the will of Daniel Clark, dated at New Orleans, July 13, 1813, as set forth in her petition, should be recognised as his last will and testament, and that it should be recorded and executed as such. In that will her father acknowledges that his beloved Myra, then living in the family of Samuel B. Davis, is his legitimate and only daughter, and bequeaths to her all the estate, real and personal, of which he might die possessed, subject only to the payment of certain legacies named in the will.

Her petition for the probate of that will was first addressed

to the second district court of New Orleans, in which Judge J. N. Lea presided.

After asserting that such a will had been made by her father, its contents were set out as they were recollected by witnesses who had read it, and by other persons to whom it had been shown by the testator, with whom he spoke of it in the last moments of his life, as his last will and testament, in favor of his legitimate daughter, Myra, charging them to take care of it, and telling them it would be found locked up in a trunk, describing it, which he had placed in a certain room in his house.

The will is then stated in the petition to have been olographic; that is, altogether written and signed in her father's handwriting, with his seal attached to the same; that immediately after his death diligent searches were made for it; that it could not then be found; that it has not been since, and that it had been mislaid, lost, or destroyed.

She then declares, that when her father died she was a minor, absent from New Orleans, and living with Samuel B. Davis, to whom and whose lady she had been confided in the year 1812. Judge Lea took cognizance of her petition, proceeded throughout its pendency with great judicial exactness and caution, and, as the whole record shows, with official liberality to every one concerned in resisting the application, without in any particular having denied to the petitioner her rights.

The Judge, however, finally decided against the sufficiency of the proof to establish the will according to the requirements of the Civil Code of Louisiana, but without prejudice to the right of the petitioner to renew her application, with such proofs as might be sufficient to establish an olographic will. She applied for a new trial, and upon that being denied, solicited an appeal to the Supreme Court, and that was allowed.

The Supreme Court tried the case. It differed with Judge Lea as to the proof which was required by the Code to establish a lost or destroyed olographic will. It reversed the judgment of the court below, and decreed that the will of Daniel

Clark, dated on the 13th July, 1813, should be recognised as his last will and testament, and ordered it to be recorded and to be executed as such, it being posterior to the will of May, 1811, which Relf and Chew had presented for probate, under which they had taken possession of the property of Daniel Clark, and had disposed of it to the entire exclusion of Mrs. Gaines from any part of it—an estate shown by the proof in the cause introduced by the defendants, which had been registered or inventoried a short time before Clark's death, at more than seven hundred thousand dollars, in which Clark and Coxe were interested, and an estate exclusively belonging to Clark of two hundred and ninety-six thousand dollars.

But to return to the decree of the Supreme Court establishing the will of 1813; it must be understood, that its admission of the will to probate does not exclude any one who may desire to contest the will with Mrs. Gaines from doing it in a direct proceeding, or from using any means of defence by way of answer or exception, whenever she shall use the probate as a muniment of title. And the probate does not conclude Relf and Chew, or any other parties having any interest to do so, to oppose the will, when it shall be set up against them, by such defences as the law will permit in like cases. It was with those qualifications of the probate of the will of 1813 that the case was tried in the court below, and they have been constantly in our minds in the trial of the appeal here.

Upon the rendition of the probate by the Supreme Court, Mrs. Gaines filed her bill in this case. It shall be fully stated hereafter, with the defences made against it.

Before doing so, it is due to the merits of the controversy to advert to the decisions of the probate court of the second district of New Orleans, and to that of the Supreme Court reversing it, more minutely than has been done. Especially, too, as they are coincident with our conclusions upon the testimony regarding the execution by Mr. Clark of his olographic will of 1813, and of the concealment or destruction of it after his death.

The Supreme Court adopts the prepared statement of the facts of the case as it was made by Judge Lea in the court below. Its accuracy has never been denied by any one of the parties interested in this suit, nor by any one else.

It is as follows: 'The petitioner alleges, that on the 16th of August, 1813, the late Daniel Clark, her father, departed this life, having previously, on the 13th of July, executed an olgraphic will and testament, by which he recognised her as his legitimate and only daughter, and constituted her universal legatee. That the will was wholly written, dated, and signed, in the handwriting of the testator, and was left among his papers at his residence; that after his death search had been made for it, but that it was not found, and that it had been mislaid, lost, or destroyed.'

The learned Judge then proceeds: 'To entitle the petitioner to a judgment recognising the existence and validity of the will, it is necessary that she should establish affirmatively, by such testimony as the law deems requisite, that Daniel Clark did execute a last will containing testamentary dispositions as set forth in the petition, and that he died without having destroyed or revoked it.' 'That looking for the testimony which might solve the question, whether such a will had ever been executed or not, a reasonable inquirer would naturally turn for information to those who were most intimate with the deceased in the latter part of his life, and especially, if they could be found, to those who were with him in the last moments of his existence, when the hand of death was upon him, if they had no interest in directing his property into any particular channel, as they might be considered as the...