Managing Risk through Property

This chapter investigates the fee tail, or entail, the principal private means by which individuals could shield wealth from creditors. In particular, it examines how the legal device of holding property in fee tail was used in some colonies as a means of designating some forms of property as outside the reach of creditors. Historical scholarship on the fee tail during the colonial period has typically looked backward from the founding era, when states' decisions to abolish the fee tail became a symbol of the power of republican ideology and its hostility to legal forms that might support an aristocracy. The chapter looks at the fee tail through a different lens: as a legal means to reduce risk. This practice had particular importance in Virginia, where the current historiography suggests that a significant amount of land was entailed at the time of the American Revolution, and thus shielded from English creditors and removed from market exchanges.

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