OF- DEBTOR AND CREDITOR, IN THE UNITED STATES AND CANADA, ADAPTED TO THE WANTS OF MERCHANTS AND LAWYERS. BY JAMES P. HOLCOMBE, AUTHOR OF A " digest of the DECISIONS OF THE SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES," 66 UPON COMMERCIAL LAW," ETC. ST...... NEW-YORK: D. APPLETON & COMPANY, 200 BROADWAY. PHILADELPHIA: GEO. S. APPLETON, 148 CHESNUT-STREET. MDCCCXLVIII. ENTRRED, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1848, BY D. APPLETON & COMPANY, In the Clerk's Office of the District Court for the Southern District of New-York. PREFACE. THIS Volume has been prepared with the hope of supplying a general and acknowledged want, not only of the professional, but of the business men of our country. Its object is to present in a popular but faithful form, the most important principles of law, regulating the mercantile relation of debtor and creditor, in the States of the American Union, and in the British Provinces of Canada. The intimate commercial relations subsisting between the people of these various regions, and the great diversity of their local jurisprudence, render the information which it embodies matter of daily interest and value to our merchants and lawyers. Next in importance to a uniform system of mercantile law, is the diffusion of a knowledge of its points of conflict. In the arrangement of the work, the leading distinction between rights and remedies, more or less prominently marked, has been every where preserved. A separate chapter is devoted to the law of each State, those provisions being discussed which seemed to possess the greatest practical value. The dignity of the several species of instruments, the rights of their respective holders, having received the same bona fide and for a valuable consideration, the order in which they are to be paid out of the assets of a decedent's estate, the period within which suits may be instituted upon each, the cases within which a writing is |