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Tax Strike Tactics

Disrupt Trials, Break Resisters out of Confinement

Some tax resistance campaigns made it difficult for the government to put resisters on trial, either by disrupting the trials or by spiriting away the defendants.

Example Tax Resistance before the Young Turk Revolution

During the tax revolts in Turkey in 1906–07, the government tried to quietly round up the leaders of the rebellion in the dead of night. That didn’t work out too well, as the rebels turned the tables:

Haci Akif Agha, one of the important local notables and a leader of the revolt… offered a successful resistance to the gendarmes who came to arrest him. His resistance publicised the arrests, and the citizens immediately organised themselves for the release of the prisoners. The morning after the arrests, a large crowd of furious Muslims surrounded the Governor’s residence, demanding the return of the exiles. The Governor escaped to a private house, but was captured and kept prisoner in the İbrahim Pasha Mosque.

The crowd took revenge against the local police (beating the Chief of Police to death), and went to retrieve exiled resistance leaders, “the Governor having been compelled under the threat of death to give orders for their return.”

Example The Whiskey and Fries Rebels

Alexander Hamilton complained of the American Whiskey Rebels that “armed banditti ventured to seize and carry off two persons who were witnesses against the rioters… in order to prevent their giving testimony…”

The American tax rebels in the Fries Rebellion a few years later did what they could to break their comrades out of custody:

As soon as it became known the arrests were made, the leaders of the opposition to the law determined to rescue them… Notices were carried around the evening before and left at the houses of those known to be friendly to the movement. By ten o’clock a number of people had assembled, and considerable excitement was manifested. The general sentiment was in favor of immediate organization and marching to Bethlehem to take the prisoners from the hands of the Marshal. The crowd was formed in a company, and John Fries elected captain. They were variously armed; some with guns, others with swords and pistols, while those with less belligerent feelings carried clubs.

Fries led a group of about 140 armed rebels to the building where the prisoners were held, and after a tense standoff with the Marshal and about twenty of his posse, the rebels won the release of the prisoners. Victory was sweet, but brief, as this event provoked President John Adams to send in federal troops. (Fries and some of his companions were captured, convicted of treason, and sentenced to be hanged; Adams pardoned them.)

Example Jack a Lents

The “Jack a Lents”—18th century English forefathers to the Welsh Rebecca Rioters—rescued two of their number who had been arrested for toll booth destruction. A news account said:

[They] demanded the said prisoners, threatening, in case of refusal, to pull [their captor’s] house down, and burn his barns and stables, and immediately discharged several loaded pieces into the house, which happily did no damage. The justice finding himself and family beset in such a manner, discharged several blunderbusses and fowling-pieces at them, whereby one was shot dead on the spot, and several so wounded that ’tis not believed they will recover. At this the rioters fled with precipitation, leaving their two companions behind them.

But the Jack a Lents weren’t giving up. A later dispatch says that about twenty of them confronted the keeper of the county jail:

…and demanding his reasons for detaining those two men in custody, without giving him time to return an answer, dragged him out of the inn into the street, knocked him down several times, and almost murdered him, notwithstanding all that the innkeeper and his servants could do to prevent it, who were used in a very cruel manner for assisting him. The villains immediately carried the keeper to Wilton’s Bridge, where at first they concluded to throw him into the river Wye; but at length they agreed to carry him to a place where they would secure him till they themselves had fetched the prisoners out of custody. The better to complete that design, they dragged him four miles in his boots and spurs, to a place called Horewithey, a public-house, where he was kept prisoner, beat in a shameful manner by those merciless wretches, and obliged to write a discharge to the turnkey, being threatened, in case of refusal, to be hanged upon the spot.

Example British Constitutionalists

In 2011 hundreds of British “constitutionalist” tax protesters “stormed a courtroom and attempted to make a citizens’ arrest on a judge in support of a man challenging his council tax bill.” One of them shouted “seal the court” and another sat in the judge’s seat and officiously ordered the accused to be released. A number of protesters then staged a sit-down blockade of the police vehicles that were summoned to the courthouse. The court hearing was postponed.

Notes and Citations