Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-42gr6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-23T09:54:35.528Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Every Man His Own Avenger: Landlord Remedies and the Antebellum Roots of the Crop Lien and Chattel Mortgage in the United States

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 December 2016

Adam Wolkoff
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

The crop lien was more than a strange fruit of emancipation, a hard-fought compromise, or a pragmatic choice. Its legal logic rested on several generations’ experience with capitalist social relations in the antebellum North, where intense pressures on land use in urban cores and their agricultural hinterlands promoted contestation and experimentation in the ancient body of landlord–tenant law. Northerners designed the crop lien as a way to disentangle contract from property: to strip the lease of its common law guarantee of exclusive possession and shift the burden onto tenants to bargain for it.1

Type
Articles
Information
Law and History Review , Volume 35 , Issue 1 , February 2017 , pp. 131 - 154
Copyright
Copyright © the American Society for Legal History, Inc. 2016 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

He thanks Mia Bay, Elizabeth Blackmar, Christopher Clark, Elizabeth Dale, Ann Fabian, Judge Glock, Hendrik Hartog, Nate Holdren, Alison Isenberg, Beryl Satter, Justin Simard, Caroline Vazquez Wolkoff, the anonymous reviewers at Law and History Review, and participants at the Business History Conference, the Agricultural History Conference, and the University at Buffalo Humanities Institute's City and Society Research Workshop for their helpful comments on this article.

References

1. A vast literature traces the transition from slavery to sharecropping in the South, including Ransom, Roger L. and Sutch, Richard, One Kind of Freedom: The Economic Consequences of Emancipation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977)Google Scholar; Shlomowitz, Ralph, “The Origins of Southern Sharecropping,” Agricultural History 53 (1979): 557–75Google Scholar; Jaynes, Gerald, Branches Without Roots: Genesis of the Black Working Class in the American South, 1862–1882 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986)Google Scholar; Royce, Edward, The Origins of Southern Sharecropping (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993)Google Scholar; and Wright, Gavin, Old South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy Since the Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996)Google Scholar. Historians continue to debate the contours of the “standard” narrative of sharecropping's rise: its prominence in comparison with wage labor, its variations by region, its relative impact on the lives of white and black families, and its relation to patterns of landownership by former masters and slaves. McKenzie, Robert Tracy, One South or Many: Plantation Belt and Upcountry in Civil War-Era Tennessee (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002)Google Scholar. For all of attention paid to this topic, few have analyzed sharecropping's relation to Northern antebellum tenancy or labor law. Exceptions to this pattern are Woodman, Harold D., New South–New Law: The Legal Foundations of Credit and Labor Relations in the Postbellum Agricultural South (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995)Google Scholar; Schmidt, James D., Free to Work: Labor Law, Emancipation, and Reconstruction, 1815–1880 (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1998)Google Scholar; and Steinfeld, Robert J., Coercion, Contract, and Free Labor in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001)Google Scholar.

2. Wilson, Catherine Anne, Tenants in Time: Family Strategies, Land, and Liberalism in Upper Canada, 1799–1871 (Montreal: McGill–Queen's University Press, 2009), 129–40Google Scholar; Englander, David, Landlord and Tenant in Urban Britain, 1838–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 25 Google Scholar.

3. John Bouvier, comp., A Law Dictionary, 6th ed., 1856, s.v. “distress.” http://www.constitution.org/bouv/bouvier_d.htm (September 16, 2016); and John Bouvier and Francis Rawle, comp., A Law Dictionary, 15th ed., 1892, s.v. “distress.”

4. Woodman, Harold D., “Post-Civil War Southern Agriculture and the Law,” Agricultural History 53 (1979): 324–25Google Scholar.

5. Morgan v. Campbell, 89 U.S. 381 (1874).

6. Trollope, Frances, Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832; repr., New York: Dover, 2003), 147 Google Scholar.

7. Foreman, Clarence, Rent Liens and Public Welfare: An Economic and Legal Adjustment of Industry (New York: Macmillan, 1932), 6 Google Scholar.

8. “On the Sidewalk with Her Children,” New York Times, May 18, 1894, p. 8 Google Scholar

9. Day, Jared N., Urban Castles: Tenement Housing and Landlord Activism in New York City, 1890–1943 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 7–29 Google Scholar.

10. Du Bois, W.E.B., The Souls of Black Folk (1903; repr., New York: Dover, 1994), 78 Google Scholar.

11. Ibid., 90.

12. Atack, Jeremy, Bateman, Fred, and Parker, William N., “Northern Agriculture and the Westward Movement,” in The Cambridge Economic History of the United States, vol. 1, ed. Engerman, Stanley L. and Gallman, Robert E. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 317–18Google Scholar.

13. Bouton, Terry, Taming Democracy: “The People,” the Founders, and the Troubled Ending of the American Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; McCurdy, Charles W., The Anti-Rent Era in New York Law and Politics, 1839–1865 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001)Google Scholar; Lause, Mark A., Young America: Land, Labor, and The Republican Community (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005)Google Scholar; and Hahn, Steven, The Roots of Southern Populism: Yeoman Farmers and the Transformation of the Georgia Upcountry, 1850–1890 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983)Google Scholar.

14. Levy, Jonathan, Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Clark, Christopher, “The Agrarian Context of American Capitalist Development,” in Capitalism Takes Command: The Social Transformation of Nineteenth-Century America, ed. Zakim, Michael and Kornblith, Gary J. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012)Google Scholar; and Balleisen, Edward J., Navigating Failure: Bankruptcy and Commercial Society in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001)Google Scholar.

15. By contrast, the study of twentieth century urban tenancy is broad and continues to expand. Recent contributions include Gold, Roberta, When Tenants Claimed the City: The Struggle for Citizenship in New York City Housing (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014)Google Scholar, and Fogelson, Robert, The Great Rent Wars: New York, 1917–1929 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013)Google Scholar. In addition, a vast literature captures the history of public-sector rental housing in the United States and around the world. Kwak, Nancy and Purdy, Sean, “New Perspectives on Public Housing Histories in the Americas,” Journal of Urban History 33 (2007): 357–74Google Scholar.

16. Korngold, Gerald, “Whatever Happened to Landlord–Tenant Law?,” Nebraska Law Review 77 (1998): 704 Google Scholar.

17. Legal histories of tenancy include Glendon, Mary Ann, “The Transformation of American Landlord–Tenant Law,” Boston College Law Review 23 (1982): 503–76Google Scholar; and Phillips, Earl and Quinn, Thomas M., “The Legal History of Landlord–Tenant Relations,” in Tenants and the Urban Housing Crisis, ed. Burghardt, Stephen (Dexter, MI: The New Press, 1972)Google Scholar. An example of the stagnation thesis is Donohue, Charles Jr., “Change in the American Law of Landlord and Tenant,” The Modern Law Review 37 (1974): 242 Google Scholar.

Horwitz, Morton, The Transformation of American Law, 1870–1960: The Crisis of Legal Orthodoxy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 145–68Google Scholar.

18. Banner, Stuart, American Property: A History of How, Why, and What We Own (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 101 Google Scholar; Fried, Barbara H., The Progressive Assault on Laissez Faire: Robert Hale and the First Law and Economics Movement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001)Google Scholar; Ellickson, Robert, “Unpacking the Household: Informal Property Rights Around the Hearth,” Yale Law Journal 116 (2006): 226–328 Google Scholar; and Kennedy, Duncan, “The Stakes of Law, or Hale and Foucault!” Legal Studies Forum 15 (1991): 327–66Google Scholar.

19. Edwards, Laura F., The People and Their Peace: Legal Culture and the Transformation of Inequality in the Post-Revolutionary South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 134 Google Scholar.

20. Benton, Lauren, A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009)Google Scholar; and Tomlins, Christopher and Mann, Bruce, ed. The Many Legalities of Early America, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001)Google Scholar.

21. Although not framed as studies of “remedy,” I take inspiration from Cohen, Andrew Wender, The Racketeer's Progress: Chicago and the Struggle for the Modern American Economy, 1900–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)Google Scholar; and Willrich, Michael, City of Courts: Socializing Justice in Progressive Era Chicago (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003)Google Scholar.

22. Blackmar, Elizabeth, Manhattan For Rent: 1785–1850 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990)Google Scholar; Montgomery, David, Citizen Worker: The Experience of Workers in the United States with Democracy and the Free Market during the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)Google Scholar; McCurdy, The Anti-Rent Era; and Huston, Reeve, Land and Freedom: Rural Society, Popular Protest, and Party Politics in Antebellum New York (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000)Google Scholar.

23. “Mercer Whig Convention,” State Gazette (Trenton, NJ), October 21, 1850, p. 2 Google Scholar.

24. Gamber, Wendy, The Boardinghouse in Nineteenth Century America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 3 Google Scholar.

25. Jared Day urges historians to consider “the intense conflict that existed within the real estate industry between property owners of all classifications.” Day, Urban Castles, 3.

26. Ibid., 15.

27. Noxon v. Glaze, 11 Colo. App. 503 (1898).

28. Gunn, Thomas Butler (Falik, David, ed.), The Physiology of New York Boarding-Houses (1857; repr., New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2009), 155 Google Scholar.

29. Note that some states did not recognize distress, but did adopt analogous remedies, such as the mesne process of Massachusetts. Potter v. Hall, 3 Pick 368 (Mass. 1825).

30. Kent, James, Commentaries on American Law, 2nd ed., 4 vols. (New York: O. Halstead, 1832), 3:485Google Scholar.

31. Taylor, John Neilson, A Treatise on the American Law of Landlord and Tenant (New York: John S. Voorhies, 1844), 227 Google Scholar.

32. Baltimore Patriot, January 1, 1824, p. 2.

33. 2 N.Y. Rev. Stat. 501 § 3 (1829).

34. Taylor, Treatise, 242–43.

35. Ibid., 246, 268.

36. Blackmar, Manhattan for Rent, 249.

37. 2 N.Y. Rev. Stat 504 § 24 (1829).

38. McCurdy, The Anti-Rent Era, 163–67

39. Blackmar, Manhattan for Rent, 226 n.30; and Stansell, Christine, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789–1860 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986)Google Scholar.

40. 2 N.Y. Rev. Stat 503 § 17 (1829).

41. Dent v. Hancock, 5 Gill 120 (Md. 1847).

42. 2 N.Y. Rev. Stat. 503 § 18 (1829).

43. Van Ness Yates, John, A Collection of Pleadings and Practical Precedents (Albany: Gould, Banks, 1837), 573 Google Scholar; Taylor, Treatise, 448.

44. 11 George II, c. 19, § 7; Miss. Rev. Stat., Part III, c. VIII, Title 8, Article 1 § 28 (1836); and Woodfall's Law of Landlord and Tenant (New York: Banks & Brothers, 1890), 1:723Google Scholar.

45. A System of Civil and Criminal Law for the District of Columbia and for the Organization of the Courts therein, S. Doc. No. 22–85, at 203 (1833).

46. Taylor, Treatise, 355–93.

47. Ibid., 250–60.

48. Commercial Advertiser (New York), February 13, 1816, p. 2; and Blackmar, Manhattan for Rent, 224.

49. Blackmar, Manhattan for Rent, 225.

50. “Pennsylvania Governor's Message,” New York Herald-Tribune, January 9, 1874, p. 7.

51. Guest v. Opdyke, 31 N.J.L. 552 (1864).

52. 1860 United States Census, Somerset County, New Jersey, population schedule, Bedminster Township, 42, dwelling, 318, family, 325, Peter Gulick and dwelling, 319, family, 326, Abraham Guest, digital image, Ancestry.com, http://ancestry.com (January 30, 2015).

53. Elmer, Lucius Q.C., A Digest of the Laws of New Jersey, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1855), 204 Google Scholar.

54. Annotation, “Subject-Matter Covered by Landlord's Statutory Lien for Rent,” 9 American Law Reports 300 (1920).

55. Kilbourne, Richard, Debt, Investment, Slaves: Credit Relations in East Feliciana Parish, Louisiana 1825–1885 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1995), 156 Google Scholar.

56. News & Observer (Raleigh), September 18, 1880, p. 2.

57. Rogers, Henry Wade, “Farming on Shares,” Central Law Journal 15 (1882): 465–69Google Scholar.

58. Levy, Freaks of Fortune, 104–29.

59. Jaynes, Branches Without Roots, 46–48, 224–49.

60. Raleigh Register, April 30, 1884, p. 2.

61. Gwathmey v. Etheridge, 99 N.C. 571 (1888).

62. “The Crop Lien Law,” Southern Cultivator, January 1883, p. 2.

63. Domat, Jean, The Civil Law in Its Natural Order, trans. William Strahan (1720; repr., Boston: Little and Brown, 1850), 1:684–85Google Scholar.

64. Otis v. Sill, 8 Barb. 102 (N.Y. Sup. 1849).

65. Kilbourne, Debt, Investment, Slaves, 139.

66. “The Crop Lien Law,” Southern Cultivator, January 1883.

67. Whitaker, R. H., Whitaker's Reminiscences, Incidents and Anecdotes (Raleigh: Edwards & Broughton, 1905), 102 Google Scholar.

68. News & Observer (Raleigh), April 29, 1892, p. 2.

69. United States Industrial Commission, Report of the Industrial Commission on Agriculture and Agricultural Labor, H.R. Rep. No. 57–179, vol. 10, at 380 (1901).

70. As a North Dakota judge bemoaned: “To the profession the policy of authorizing a party to thus indefinitely incumber his future crops may appear of doubtful benefit and of dangerous tendency, but these considerations are for the legislature, and not for the courts.” Merchants' Nat. Bank of Devils Lake v. Mann, 2 N.D. 456 (1892).

71. Jones, Leonard A., A Treatise on the Law of Liens, Common Law, Statutory, Equitable, and Maritime, 2nd ed. (New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1894)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Phillips, Samuel L., A Treatise on the Law of Mechanics’ Liens on Real and Personal Property, 2nd ed. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1874)Google Scholar.

72. After his bosses failed to pay him $138.25 in wages, one Chinese farm worker filed a lien on their threshing machine in Chuck v. Garrison, 75 Cal. 199 (1888).

73. Texas Bank & Trust Co. v. Smith, 108 Tex. 265 (1917).

74. Doane v. Eddy, 16 Wend. 523 (N.Y.1837).

75. For a skeptical view, grounded in a detailed empirical review of credit in Louisiana, see Kilbourne, Debt, Investment, Slaves, 157.

76. Ellenberg, George B., Mule South to Tractor South: Mules, Machines, and the Transformation of the Cotton South (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2007), 20–24 Google Scholar.

77. Holt, Sharon Ann, Making Freedom Pay: North Carolina Freedpeople Working for Themselves, 1865–1900 (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2003), 39 Google Scholar.

78. Otken, Charles H., The Ills of the South (New York: G.P. Putnam, 1894), 172 Google Scholar.

79. Hahn, The Roots of Southern Populism, 195.

80. Rosengarten, Theodore, All God's Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 27–31 Google Scholar.

81. North Carolina Bureau of Labor Statistics, Seventh Annual Report (1893), 73 Google Scholar.

82. Cf. Maine, Henry Sumner, Ancient Law: Its Connection with the Early History of Society, and Its Relation to Modern Ideas (London: John Murray, 1861)Google Scholar.