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New South-New Law: The Legal Foundations of Credit and Labor Relations in the Postbellum Agricultural South
Journal of Social History, Summer, 1996 by Alex Lichtenstein
In four concise and lucid chapters, New South-New Law explores the controversies spawned by postbellum southern crop lien laws and considers their political implications. Based almost entirely on his close reading of 200 cases from Southern appellate courts, Woodman contends that laws initially designed to reinstitute planter control of labor and credit in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War generated unforeseen consequences. Two particular disputes frequently adjudicated in Southern courts constitute the bulk of his analysis. The first was "lien priority," as landlords and merchants competed to extract the dwindling returns of Southern agriculture from those who actually worked the fields. The second was the increasingly significant differentiation of the legal status of tenants and sharecroppers.
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In the immediate aftermath of the Civil War the crop lien became a widespread instrument of credit in a land shorn of capital. The lien made collateral of a crop yet to be planted and harvested; against their share of the future crop tenants and sharecroppers could borrow supplies, seed, fertilizer, tools, mules, and so on. The lien was intended both to renew Southern agriculture and to reinstitute planter control of credit and labor. But as Woodman perceptively notes, former slaves saw in this arrangement the opportunity to "decrease their dependence upon employers"(p. 23) by going to merchants for advances on the crop. The result in the courts of every Southern state was a legal struggle between landlords and merchants to determine whose lien would be satisfied first, a crucial matter as the price of cotton increasingly proved incapable of meeting all the debts incurred to grow it.
With the end of Radical Reconstruction, and the evaporation of the meager protection of the laborers' lien for wages it afforded the freedmen, "landowners moved quickly to strengthen their position"(p. 37) against both merchants and workers. They did so successfully, securing in the legislatures and even more so in the courts legal protections against competing creditors and overly independent employees alike. Not only did landlords win priority for their liens over those of merchants, but new laws increased the reach of debt, so that a creditor could literally take everything from an indebted tenant save the shirt on his back.
Even while landlords increased their grip on tenants who paid them rent, the courts also widened the scope of the very different status of "croppers." Sharply distinguished from tenancy, in sharecropping a portion of the crop or its proceeds was paid by the landowner to the laborer as wages. This vested control of the crop in the landowner, who "owned the product of [the sharecroppers'] labor"(p. 76) and retained managerial control. In distinguishing between croppers and tenants Southern courts adjudicated and articulated the most pressing issue of political economy: to whom did the fruits of labor belong, the owner of capital or the provider of "bone and muscle?" All too frequently the answer was the former.
Such an illustrious planter as William Alexander Percy had the audacity to refer to his sharecroppers as "partners"(p. 67) in his enterprise, but Woodman demonstrates that the civil law came to define sharecroppers as wage workers, effectively denying them any claim to ownership in the crop. The criminal law offers the starkest illustration of the practical outcome of this arrangement: if a sharecropper removed and sold his "share" of the crop without the planter's permission he could be prosecuted for theft. Between lien laws, increasingly restrictive definitions of land tenure, and the use of criminal sanctions, Woodman concludes that the legal barriers thrown up around Southern agricultural workers "created a repressive labor system that gave property-owning landlords almost complete control of their workforce."(p. 93)
Yet Woodman emphatically repudiates the notion that this outcome could be categorized as "a continuation of slavery under a new guise."(p. 93) To the contrary, he suggests that the new law of the New South accommodated the region to "bourgeois labor relations on the plantations."(p. 107) Mechanisms used by Southern employers to control labor made "the croppers part of a rural proletariat on the pattern of the industrial proletariat in the North,"(p. 105) he writes. But Woodman's striking contention that "postbellum southern law differed little from that in the North"(p. 104) remains unconvincing, and his reluctance to examine the contemporaneous conflicts in Northern courts over master-servant law undermines his brief against Southern exceptionalism. If nothing else, the all-pervasive system of white supremacy fundamentally shaped the South's political economy, and gave employers both a degree and kind of control over their employees that must have been the envy of Northern capitalists.
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