Families who had inherited unpaid Mississippi bonds for 90 years gave them to the Prince of Monaco to sue, and the Supreme Court said a foreign state cannot

In the 1830s Mississippi backed its banks with state bonds. The Planters' Bank bonds were dated 1 March 1833 and paid 6 percent. The Union Bank was chartered after the Panic of 1837, and Governor Alexander McNutt had the state buy $5 million of its stock with 5 percent state bonds, issued in June 1838. After 1840 seventeen Mississippi banks closed within two years. In 1842 Governor Tilghman Tucker signed an act allowing the state not to pay holders of some $20.5 million in bonds. In 1852 the state's High Court of Errors and Appeals ordered payment, but the legislature never appropriated the money. An 1876 amendment to the state constitution barred payment of the Union Bank and Planters' Bank bonds. On 26 September 1933 holders gave 55 of the bonds, $100,000 in face value, to the Principality of Monaco at its Paris legation. Their letter said the bonds had "been handed down from their respective families" who bought them at issue, and that holders had waited about 90 years. They had been advised that only a foreign government or another state could sue Mississippi. Monaco asked the Supreme Court for leave to sue. On 21 May 1934 Chief Justice Hughes wrote for the Court that a state cannot be sued by a foreign state without its consent. In the mid-1990s a group of mostly British holders sued Mississippi, and the Mississippi Supreme Court ruled against them. The bonds remain unpaid.