mann - republic of debtors; bankruptcy in the age of american independence (2002)

[...]... legal sense of the term, as mortgages did—although deposited notes bear a passing resemblance to a later device, the chattel mortgage Rather, they secured creditors by giving them other people to sue if their debtors failed to repay them The value of the security thus rested on the creditworthiness of the sureties and of the makers of the notes given in pledge Little wonder, then, that creditors often rejected... and the repayment of loans The guarantee lay in their in terrorem effect Failure to perform the condition made the obligor liable for the full amount of the bond, which was typically twice the sum lent or twice the value of the items to be delivered The law acknowledged the coercion inherent in conditioned bonds by referring to the difference between the amount promised and the value received as the. .. and insolvency were the antithesis of republican independence, yet they pervaded all reaches of American society Everyone stood somewhere on the continuum of indebtedness that ran from prosperity to insolvency, whether in their own right or by their dependence on a husband, a father, a master, or an owner That had always been the case in early America But whereas the problem of insolvency had once... of a debt The most important legal consequence of the mortgage is that the mortgagee the creditor who holds it—has dibs on the mortgaged property That is, if the debtor fails to pay the debt, the mortgagee-creditor has priority over all other creditors in using the property to repay the debt it secures Other creditors may lay claim only to whatever is left over If several creditors hold mortgages in. .. almost invariably did, he had to pay court costs as well as the debt However, since interest on promissory notes was tolled from the date the debtor was first sued to the date of final judgment, the savings in interest justified debtors in stretching out the proceedings and suffering the attendant costs In practice, the benefits of procedural delay were unavailable to poorer debtors The law required losing... trifling Actions that affect a Man’s Credit, are to be regarded Creditors are a kind of People, that have the sharpest Eyes and Ears, as well as the best Memories of any in the World George Fisher, The American Instructor () D r John Morgan of Philadelphia understood the essence of credit His advertisement in the Aurora in  informed the public that he “continues practice as usual in the Venereal... circulating “a most infamous false Report” that they were Catholics to undermine their business, they hastened to restore their reputations—and their credit—by assuring their correspondents in Virginia and Maryland that they and their families “as far back as we have any knoledge of them” were “firme Protestants” and that they had “not one Roman Catholick Relation in the World.” Whether Beekman and the. .. for release from their debts, short of repayment in full? Samuel Moody answered these questions one way, the festive debtors in the New Gaol another Between them lay a culture of debt that changed in the eighteenth century, and with it the responses to insolvency The book I have written is about those changes Put briefly, the rapid spread of written credit instruments in the increasingly commercialized... well In the chapters that follow we will observe debtors, creditors, lawyers, judges, legislators, ministers, writers, and others struggling with how the law should address the inability of men and women to repay their debts, whether through insolvency, bankruptcy, or imprisonment At bottom, they were struggling with the place of failure in the new republic {} G  H d e bto r s an d c r e d i to r s The. .. debtors and other debtors to one another in complex interrelations Individual decisions to sue could rest as readily on the actions of third parties as on the debtors and creditors themselves Creditors pressed to pay their own debts dunned their debtors more insistently, not because they feared the “safety” of the debt but because of their own necessity Facing demands themselves, creditors called in debts . reserved Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging -in- Publication Data Mann, Bruce H. Republic of debtors : bankruptcy in the age of American independence / Bruce H. Mann. p debtors, the resulting debate went to the heart of what the character of the new na- tion should be. {} The fundamental dilemma was that debt and insolvency were the an- tithesis of republican independence, . Creditors   The Law of Failure   Imprisoned Debtors in the Early Republic   The Imagery of Insolvency   A Shadow Republic   The Politics of Insolvency   The Faces of Bankruptcy