Research Catalog

Title

New South, new law : the legal foundations of credit and labor relations in the postbellum agricultural South / Harold D. Woodman.

Author

Woodman, Harold D.

Publication

Baton Rouge : Louisiana State University Press, c1995.

Items in the Library & Off-site

Holdings

Details

Description

x, 124 p.; 24 cm.

Summary

• "New South-New Law begins with a consideration of the origins of crop lien laws, which conservative southern legislators enacted as a means for landowners to obtain credit at a time when they had little in the way of tangible assets. However, the lien laws soon proved to have unanticipated and troublesome consequences, primarily because many of the laws were construed in such a way that several different parties - not only landowners but also tenants and workers - could give a lien on the same crop. Woodman examines the evolution of lien laws in every southern state and the ways in which the laws created new problems, and then how efforts to solve them produced additional conflicts that the legislatures and the courts sought subsequently to resolve. The new free labor and credit systems that gradually emerged operated within the boundaries that the formal law established, but only in the course of sharp political struggles reflecting the different economic interests and the changing political power of landowners, merchants, and landless farmers, black and white.".
• "The book also examines the legal development of a free labor system to replace the old master-slave system. This took the form primarily of landowner-tenant and landowner-sharecropper relations. Woodman explains how the laws governing these relations - particularly the laws that distinguished between tenants and croppers and that dictated how and when they were paid for their work - eventually created a repressive labor system that gave landlords almost complete control of their work force. Indeed, after the departure of the Freedmen's Bureau and the fall of the radical regimes, agricultural laborers saw whatever hard-won rights they had steadily erode." "Woodman's valuable study sheds light on many matters that concern nineteenth-century historians: the process of creating the post-emancipation society in the South; the debate over continuity and change after the Civil War; the political, economic, and social significance of Reconstruction; and the problem of the relationship between law and social change."--BOOK JACKET.

Series Statement

The Walter Lynwood Fleming lectures in southern history

Uniform Title

The Walter Lynwood Fleming lectures in southern history.

Subject

• Agricultural credit > History > Southern States > 19th century
• Agricultural laborers > History > Southern States > 19th century
• Agricultural laws and legislation > Southern States > History > 19th century
• Farm tenancy > Southern States > History > 19th century
• Liens > Southern States > History > 19th century

Genre/Form

History.

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references and index.

Processing Action (note)

• committed to retain

Contents

Ch. 1. "For the Encouragement of Agriculture": The Origins of the Crop Lien Laws -- Ch. 2. "To Regulate the Law of Liens": The Evolution of the Crop Lien Laws -- Ch. 3. "An Obvious Distinction Between a Cropper and a Tenant": The Legal Status of Landlords, Croppers, and Tenants -- Ch. 4. "The Important Business of Farming with Hired Labor": Law and Postbellum Southern Society.

ISBN

0807119415 (cloth : alk. paper)

LCCN

^^^94031543^

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library