Property and Credit in the Early Republic

This chapter focuses on the federal structure of debtor/creditor law in the founding era. In gaining independence from British rule, the colonists rejected the extractive taxes and trade policies that they felt would suppress economic growth. But independence posed the question of what role the new federal government would play in regulating state legislatures and how much power it would have to standardize state laws on property rights, the credit markets, and the economy. In America after the Revolution, the vast differences in local preferences on the issue of creditors' remedies expressed themselves not through occupational categorization, but instead through interstate variation and hostility toward federal government policies that might have imposed a uniform regime reminiscent of the Debt Recovery Act. Federalism emerged, in part, in response to the hostility toward Britain's colonial policies. The legacies of these policies — and of the reactions to them — still affect American economic, social, and political developments today.