From the publisher’s description:
Examines the legal and economic strategies adopted by southern landowners to cultivate and profit from their land when the abolition of chattel slavery deprived them of their primary form of wealth and credit. Woodman (history, Purdue U.) explores the evolution of these strategies and how they affected the landowners, former slaves, merchants, and lenders.
Woodman, Harold D. (NHC Fellow, 1983–84). New South, New Law: The Legal Foundations of Credit and Labor Relations in the Postbellum Agricultural South. The Walter Lynwood Fleming Lectures in Southern History. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995. ISBN 9780807119419.