New South, new law

by Harold D. Woodman

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 pol