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The Crop, the Rent, and the Lien: Law and Society in the New South

Harold Woodman's attention to the complexities of economic life has made his work, especially King Cotton and his Retainers: Financing and Marketing the Cotton Crop of the South, 1800-1925 (1968), required reading for students of the nineteenth-century United States. His new work, New South, New Law, continues in that tradition, at once informing specialists and enlightening the general reader. Based on hundreds of cases from all over the postbellum South, New South, New Law describes the legislative and judicial forces shaping agricultural labor and credit in the post-Civil War era. It offers thoughtful and often illuminating analyses of the development of lien laws and sharecropping, restoring depth and particularity to a story that has often been rendered overly stark and static. Much of this slim volume is devoted to discussion of crop liens, arrangements under which a crop became security for supplies or other resources advanced for its planting. All recent writing on postbellum southern agriculture has acknowledged the importance of these laws, but Woodman's new book is the first systematically to examine their development in legislatures and courts throughout the South. Perhaps its greatest contribution to the existing literature is its nuanced state-by-state analysis of this process. In its broad outlines, the story of the development of lien laws was much the same throughout the South. When the planter-legislators of presidential Reconstruction enacted lien laws, they were seeking to preserve antebellum privileges under changed circumstances. Seeking access to credit and control over nominally free laborers, legislators stipulated that those who provided cash or supplies necessary to plant a crop would receive a lien on the crop produced. They hoped to reassure merchants that, despite the loss of slaves as laborers and collateral, postbellum planters would produce crops and pay their debts. At the same time, the planters planned to use the supply credit thus obtained to exert leverage over their workers. Formers slaves usually