and creditors, and that as to all other persons a transfer of stock, good at common law, is good under the federal statutes; and that under said statutes the rights of a transferee under an unrecorded transfer, good at common law, are superior to the rights of a subsequent attaching creditor of the transferrer without notice. It remains, then, only necessary to ascertain what effect, if any, a state statute can have in limiting the mode of transfer of such stock.
It was settled by the case of Black v. Zacharie, 3 How. 483; that the validity of an assignment of corporate stock depended upon the law of the state where the corporation was located, and not upon the law of the state where the assignment was made. Authority is hardly necessary upon the proposition that the sovereignty which creates the corporation must have the exclusive right to direct the manner in which the stock of such corporation must be transferred, at least when the corporation is located and doing business exclusively within the jurisdiction of the creating sovereignty. The effect to be given state statutes, so far as they may interfere with or limit the transferability of national bank stock, is, of course, purely a federal question, and we ought to be governed in this matter by the decisions of the United States courts. In Continental Nat. Bank v. Eliot Nat. Bank, supra, a party residing at Boston, Mass., assigned and forwarded certificates of stock in Eliot National Bank, located at Boston, to the plaintiff bank, located at New York. Subsequently, and before any transfer was made-upon the books of the Eliot National Bank, that bank attached the stock as the property of the transferrer. United States Circuit Judge Lowell, sitting in Massachusetts, said: “It has been very ably urged that, by the law of Massachusetts, the attachment would have the preference. This I consider doubtful; but the decision does not depend upon the law of Massachusetts. It is not important to consider whether the contract was consummated in Massachusetts or New York. The negotiability or transferable quality of the stock of a national bank depends upon the laws of the United States.” Citing, Dickinson v. Bank,
