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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
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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 

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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.

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