In 1883, President Chester A. Arthur signed the Tariff Act, which placed a ten percent tax on imported vegetables while allowing foreign fruits to enter American ports duty-free. Enter John Nix, founder of the John Nix & Co.
fruit commission, who imported a shipment of West Indian tomatoes into New York Harbor. Custom collector Edward L. Hedden assessed the import duty, arguing that tomatoes were vegetables.
Nix paid under protest and sued Hedden, setting off a legal battle that climbed all the way to the Supreme Court in Nix v. Hedden (1893). Nix argued using botanical definitions: because tomatoes develop from the ovary of a flowering plant and contain seeds, they are botanically berries, and thus fruits.
Justice Horace Gray delivered the unanimous opinion of the court, acknowledging the botanical argument but rejecting it for trade classification. The Court ruled that statutes must interpret words according to their ordinary, everyday meaning in trade and commerce. Justice Gray noted that in common speech, tomatoes are grown in kitchen gardens, served at dinner alongside soup, meat, or fish, and never consumed as a sweet dessert like fruits.
Therefore, for the narrow purpose of the 1883 Tariff Act, the tomato was legally classified as a vegetable. The precedent still influences how courts interpret ordinary language versus technical scientific definitions in modern trade law.