Planter-legislators of the post-Civil War southern United States enacted crop lien laws stipulating that those who advanced cash or supplies necessary to plant a crop would receive, as security, a claim, or lien, on the crop produced. In doing so, planters, most of whom were former slaveholders, sought access to credit from merchants and control over nominally free laborers--former slaves freed by the victory of the northern Union over the southern Confederacy in the United States Civil War. They hoped to reassure merchants that despite the emancipation of the slaves, planters would produce crops and pay debts. Planters planned to use their supply credit to control their workers, former slaves who were without money to rent land or buy supplies. Planters imagined continuation of the pre-Civil War economic hierarchy: merchants supplying landlords, landlords supplying laborers, and laborers producing crops from which their scant wages and planters' profits would come, allowing planters to repay advances. Lien laws frequently had unintended consequences, however, thwarting the planter fantasy of mastery without slavery. The newly freed workers, seeking to become self-employed tenant farmers rather than wage laborers, made direct arrangements with merchants for supplies. Lien laws, the centerpiece of a system designed to create a dependent labor force, became the means for workers, with alternative means of supply advances, to escape that dependence.