Common Sense or Commonwealth? The Fence Law and Institutional Change in the Postbellum South

Abstract

Rarely have Southern historians devoted as much attention to a simple question of torts as they have in the instance of fence laws: would owners livestock be held liable for damages to other people's crops if they did not fence in their animals (referred to as the "stock law"), or did crop owners have to fence out other people's cattle and swine (known as the "fence law")? In most of the sparsely settled pre-Civil War South, the open-range, or fence-law, position prevailed. Post-Civil War state legislation allowed voters in counties or subcounty districts to adopt laws that shifted rights to crop growers and town dwellers and away from owners of livestock, which effectively closed the range.

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