294 READINGS IN RURAL ECONOMICS 



months ahead of harvest in return for advances made by these 

 factors, but they have told us little concerning the terms of the 

 contracts or the extent of the practice. Later writers who have de- 

 scribed the credit system have often overlooked the fact that this 

 system existed previous to the war, and have seemed to indicate 

 that liens on crops are a phenomenon which has been produced 

 by the changes wrought in Southern agriculture since 1865. 



Yet agricultural credit is no new phenomenon in the South. 

 The custom of "anticipating crops by engagements founded upon 

 them " existed in South Carolina, according to Ramsay, even 

 before the Revolution, when advances seem to have been made 

 by the English merchants. The desolation in the South caused 

 by the war for independence increased the planter's need of ob- 

 taining credit, although the securing of this credit was rendered 

 more difficult, "for the indulgence formerly granted to subjects 

 in Carolina has seldom been extended to citizen planters." " The 

 merchants, knowing the value of the staple commodities of Caro- 

 lina, were very liberal of credit to the planters ; but on terms of 

 enhanced price, as a security against loss and protracted pay- 

 ments." And thus the obtaining of credit, which at first was a 

 result of the necessity of beginning agriculture at all, continued 

 either because of the lack of economy on the part of the planter, 

 or because the dependence upon one crop, which often failed, 

 compelled the cotton growers to pledge future crops in order to 

 continue planting. "A few of the most shrewd and laborious 

 (planters)," wrote Mr. James H. Lanman in 1841, "manage to 

 accumulate large fortunes ; yet the liberal and free indulgence of 

 much the greater part scarcely enable them to pay their expenses 

 from year to year, and often, as is well known, the harvest of one 

 year is, as it were, mortgaged for the expenses of the next, and 

 those means which in the hands of some would be a source of 

 vast profit, become in their hands a cause of mere competence." 



The chief borrowers in the cotton belt were the large planters. 

 The small farmers in the hill country who raised their own pro- 

 visions, and who bought little and sold little, had small use for the 

 mechanism of credit, even if they had been considered desirable 

 debtors. Negroes were usually sold on credit, even to the small 



