Tax resistance in the “Peace Churches” →
Quakers →
18th century Quakers →
Joshua Evans
was all about the pre-revolutionary tax resistance against Great Britain practiced by rebellion-minded American colonists in an organized swadeshi-like campaign against the use of taxed imports.
When the American Revolution became a hot war this raised tax resistance issues of a different sort: from the pacifist Christian sects, particularly the Quakers, who were a major presence in the colonies, and who had to resist considerable pressure to support the patriot cause.
Not only were war taxes demanded in areas held by the revolutionary army, but the rebel Congress’s fiat currency was wildly inflationary and itself represented a war tax.
As one Quaker group put it:
A concern having often arisen in this committee and [being] livingly reviewed at this time, that Friends might exert themselves in laboring to have their brethren convinced of the pernicious consequences of continuing to circulate the Continental currency, so called, it being calculated to promote measures repugnant to the peaceable principles we profess to be led by, and having [as we believe] greatly increased our sufferings, and brought dimness over many, by continuing in the use thereof; it is therefore agreed to mention it to the Quarterly Meeting for consideration.
Ezra Michener adds, using language that reminds me very much of that used by modern critics of American fiat money:
Friends had strong reasons for objecting to the use of this Continental money.
The creation by law of a circulating medium of fictitious value, for the purpose of a gradual depreciation, cannot be reconciled with truth and justice, however necessity may seem to require it.
To say to the people you shall pass this paper for a certain nominal value to-day, but only at a less value tomorrow, and still less the day following, till it becomes entirely valueless, is a repudiation of a contract, — a refusal to pay a debt by the Government.
As a substitute for taxation, its operation is extremely unequal, and therefore to the same degree unjust.
Viewed in this light, it was strictly a requisition for carrying on the war, which Friends could not consistently pay.
Some Quakers refused to use the Continentals, which was an extremely dangerous form of tax resistance.
It was seen by the rebel authorities as a variety of treason, and could be punished by death.
(One Quaker was nearly hanged for refusing to accept Continentals in return for supplies the rebel army had forcibly requisitioned, when in fact his principles would not have allowed him to accept remuneration of any kind under the circumstances.)
Job Scott wrote of what he believed to be his duty under the circumstances:
Much close exercise of mind I had for a considerable length of time, on account of some particular scruples, which from time to time revived with weight, and so pressingly accompanied me, that I could not get rid of them.
It being , and preparations for war between Great Britain and America; and the rulers of America having made a paper currency professedly for the special purpose of promoting or maintaining the war; and it being expected that Friends would be tried by requisitions for taxes, principally for the support of war; I was greatly exercised in spirit, both on the account of taking and passing that money, and in regard to the payment of such taxes; neither of which felt easy to my mind.
I believed a time would come, when Christians would not so far contribute to the encouragement and support of war and fightings as voluntarily to pay taxes that were mainly, or even in considerable proportion, for defraying the expenses thereof; and it was also impressed upon my mind, that if I took and passed the money that I knew was made on purpose to uphold war, I should not bear a testimony against war that for me, as an individual, would be a faithful one.
I knew the people’s minds were in a rage against such as, from any motive whatever, said or acted any thing tending to discountenance the war: I was sensible that refusing to pay the taxes, or to take the currency, would immediately be construed as a pointed opposition to the present war in particular; as even our refusing to bear arms was, notwithstanding our long and well-known testimony against it; and I had abundant reason to expect great censure and some suffering in consequence of my faithfulness, if I should stand faithful in these things; though I knew that my scruples were unconnected with any party considerations, and uninfluenced by any motives but such as respect the propriety of a truly Christian conduct, in regard to war at large.
I had no desire to promote the opposition to Great Britain; neither had I any desire on the other hand to promote the measures or success of Great Britain.
I believed it my business not to meddle with any thing from such views; but to let the potsherds of the earth alone in their smiting one against another; I wished to be clear in the sight of God, and to do all that he might require of me, towards the more full introduction and coming of his peaceable kingdom and government on earth.
I found many well-concerned brethren, who seemed to have little or nothing of these scruples; and some others who were like-minded with me herein.
Under all these considerations the times looked somewhat gloomy; and at seasons great discouragement came over my mind.
But after some strugglings, and a length of close exercise, attended with much inward looking to the Lord for direction and support, I was enabled to cast my care upon him, and to risk myself and my all in his service, come whatever might come, or suffer whatever I might suffer, in consequence thereof.
I was well aware of many arguments and objections against attending to such scruples; and some seemingly very plausible ones from several passages of scripture, especially respecting taxes; but I believed I saw them all to arise from a want of clear understanding respecting the true meaning of those passages; and I knew I had no worldly interest, ease, or honour, to promote, by an honest attention to what I believed were the reproofs and convictions of divine instruction.
I well knew, not only by reading, but experimentally, that “He that doubteth is damned (condemned) if he eat;” and that which is contrary to faith and conviction is sin: therefore I chose rather to suffer in this world, than incur the displeasure of him from whom come all my consolation and blessings.
Things turned out just fine:
Having for declined taking the paper currency, agreeably to the secret persuasion which I had of my duty therein, as before mentioned, I have now the satisfaction of comparing the different rewards of obedience and disobedience.
For though, from the very first circulation of this money, I felt uneasy in taking it; yet fears and reasonings of one kind or another prevailed on me to take it for a season; and then it became harder to refuse it than it would probably have been at first; but growing more uneasy and distressed about it, at length I refused it altogether, since which I have felt great peace and satisfaction of mind therein; which has, in a very confirming manner, been increasing from time to time, the longer I have refused it: and although I get almost no money of any kind, little other being in circulation, yet I had much rather live and depend on divine Providence for a daily supply, than to increase in the mammon of this world’s goods, by any ways or means inconsistent with the holy will of my heavenly Father: and the prayer of my soul to him is, that I and all his children may be preserved faithful to him in all his requirings; and out of that love of things here below, which alienates from the true love of and communion with him.
In general, he found tax resistance to be less daunting than he had anticipated it to be:
About , an old acquaintance of mine, being now collector of rates, came and demanded one of me.
I asked him what it was for.
He said, to sink the paper money.
I told him, as that money was made expressly for the purpose of carrying on war, I had refused to take it; and, for the same reason, could, not pay a tax to sink it, believing it my duty to bear testimony against war and fighting.
I informed him, that for divers years past, even divers years before the war began, and when I had no expectation of ever being tried in this way, it had been a settled belief with me, that it was not right to pay such taxes; at least not right for me, nor, in my apprehension, right in itself; though many sincere brethren may not at present see its repugnancy to the pure and peaceable spirit of the gospel.
I let him know I did not wish to put him to any trouble, but would be glad to pay it if I could consistently with my persuasion.
He appeared moderate, thoughtful, and rather tender; and, after a time of free and pretty full conversation upon the subject, went away in a pleasant disposition of mind, I being truly glad to see him so.
Divers such demands were made of me in those troublesome times for divers years: I ever found it best to be very calm and candid; and to open, as I was from time to time enabled, the genuine grounds of my refusal; and that, if possible, so as to reach the understandings of those who made the demand.
The tough nut to crack, as it often seemed to be for Quakers, was taxes “in the mixture” — that is, taxes that were paid into a general fund that the government used for a variety of activities, including war.
Quakers typically felt that they couldn’t pay war taxes, but also felt that they were required to pay ordinary taxes without complaint.
At what point does a tax cross the line from being a benign “mixed” tax to being a war-tax?
How little does the government have to disguise the use of a tax that’s meant to support war before a Quaker must stop being concerned about the morality of paying it?
Job Scott again:
At our Yearly Meeting this year, , the
subject of Friends paying taxes for war, came under solid consideration.
Friends were unanimous, that the testimony of truth, and of our Society, was
clearly against our paying such taxes as were wholly for war; and many solid
Friends manifested a lively testimony against the payment of those in the
mixture; which testimony appeared evidently to me to be on substantial
grounds, arising and spreading in the authority of truth.…
Joseph Walton relates the case of Eli Yarnall, who was drafted to be a tax
collector (something that seems to have been done to Quakers out of spite
from time to time by a revolutionary administration that interpreted their
pacifism as Toryism):
In , when he
was about twenty-six years of age, and while the various exercises which were
preparing him for the work of the ministry were heavy upon him, he received
notice of an appointment from the commissioners of Chester County as
collector of the taxes in the district he resided in. Besides the taxes at
that time assessed — most of which must go to the support of war — there were
to be collected fines for not taking the test oath or affirmation. Of course
Eli Yarnall could not conscientiously do aught under the commission, which
had, no doubt, been conferred upon him with an evil intent.
On considering the subject, it seemed to him best, in refusing to act, to
furnish the commissioners with his reasons for so doing, and he accordingly
addressed a letter to them. In this letter he says: “Ye may read, that it was
said of old, by way of comparison, ‘The fig-tree said unto them, Should I
forsake my sweetness and my good fruit, and go to be promoted over the
trees?’ In like manner, I say unto you, shall I forsake that spirit of
calmness, tenderness, and humility that breathes peace on earth and good-will
toward all men, with which I am, through mercy, measurably favored, and
accept of that power offered by you, and exercise the same by tyrannizing
over the consciences of my brethren, violently distressing and spoiling their
goods? Nay, surely, I dare not do it, let my sufferings in consequence
thereof be never so great. I make no doubt but ye have been informed, that we
cannot, consistently with our religious principles, have any hand in setting
up or pulling down governments. Part of this, that is called a tax, is a fine
for not taking a test of fidelity to one government and abjuration of the
other, which would immediately make us parties.”
The letter is throughout well written, and sets forth the blessed, peaceable
nature of the Christian religion, and the contradiction manifested by its
professed believers in their oppressing tender consciences and spoiling the
goods of their brethren, whose only fault lay in their endeavors to be
faithful to what they deemed the commands of their God. Soon after, Eli
Yarnall was called on to exhibit Christian patience in suffering. For his
refusal to collect these taxes, he was fined by the commissioners, and on
, a valuable horse was taken from him to satisfy that fine.
This was but the beginning of this kind of trial, for he had afterward to
witness various parts of his property seized, because he could not muster as
a militia man, and because he was as much opposed in conscience to paying
another to fight for him as to fighting himself.
James Mott went so far as to stop corresponding by mail when Congress added
a war tax to the price of postage:
Must our correspondence by mail be at end, in consequence of the extra
postage? or shall we pay it, and thereby contribute a mite to the support of
measures calculated to destroy men’s lives and property? Perhaps I may be
alone in refusing to pay postage on letters. Only a few cents — what can this
do, it may be said, towards enabling government to prosecute the war? Very
little, I own: but the great sum required is made up of littles; and if all
those littles are withheld, the effusion of human blood may be at an end. To
have much or little company in doing what we believe to be wrong, in itself
is of no avail. I have endeavoured carefully to weigh and examine the
consistency of paying taxes and imposts that are expressly for carrying on
war (which the present increased ones, doubtless are) not only with our
principles and belief as a society, but with the precepts and example of him
who is or ought to be our guide and judge; and I cannot, consistently with my
idea of either, believe it best for me to pay the present demand of
additional postage, little as it is, and alone as I may stand.
After the patriots won independence, Congress tried to pay off its war debts
by increasing import duties, and so the old revolutionary tactic of eschewing
imports became a tool of the careful pacifist tax resister. Joshua Evans
related:
, I understood a law was made
for raising money to defray the expenses of war, by means of a duty laid on
imported articles of almost every kind. This duty, I believed, was instead of
taxing the inhabitants, as had been done some time before. I had felt myself
restrained, , from
paying such taxes; the proceeds whereof were applied, in great measure, to
defray expenses relating to war: and, as herein before-mentioned, my refusal
was from a tender conscientious care to keep clear in my testimony against
all warlike proceedings. When the matter was brought under my weighty
consideration, I could see no material difference between paying the expenses
relating to war, in taxes, or in duties.
Although for several years past, I had made very little use of goods imported
from foreign countries, because of the corruption attending the trade in
these things; yet, on hearing of this duty, and considering the cause of its
being laid on imported goods, my mind was much exercised. I saw clearly that
the blessed Truth stood opposed to all wars and blood-shedding; teaching us
to do unto all as we would have them do unto us. Though I had much refrained
from using imported goods, in general; yet, as I was frequently engaged in
travelling in the service of Truth, I saw great difficulty, as I thought, in
refraining from the use of salt; as people generally used it in almost every
kind of food.
On this subject my mind was again led into deep exercise; but as I
endeavoured to apply, as at the footstool of my heavenly Father, for counsel
and preservation upon the right foundation, I was made sensible, that it
would be better for me to live on bread and water, than to balk my testimony.
I likewise believed he would not lead me forward, though in an uncommon path,
without giving me strength to maintain my ground, as I humbly put my trust in
him. I therefore thought it right for me to make a full stand against the use
of all things upon which duties of that kind were laid. Since which, I have
to acknowledge, my way has been made much easier than I looked for.…
Joshua Evans () left a record in his journal of his war tax resistance around the time of the American Revolution, which led him eventually to avoid all imported goods so as not to pay an excise tax which would go to military spending and paying off war debts.
In , he wrote:
Although I was thus led by precept and example, I was much reproached by some on account of my testimony against war, because I could not pay my money in a way which I believed was to defray, in a measure at least, the expenses of shedding human blood.
This exercise came on me in ; at the time a bloody war subsisted between France and England.
A number of our young men being drafted as soldiers to go on an expedition, some of the inhabitants concluded to open a subscription for money to hire volunteers in their stead.
This seemed plausible, even to some under our profession, and a number were taken therewith: but when it was proposed or demanded of me, I felt a scruple, and told them, if on considering the matter, I could be free to pay money for such a purpose, I could hand it forward.
On this occasion I had none to confer with; but it was opened clearly to me, that to hire men to do what I could not, for conscience’s sake, do myself, would be very inconsistent.
This led me, in deep humility, to seek for wisdom to guide me rightly; and I found it best for me to refuse paying demands on my estate, which went to pay the expenses of war: and although my part might appear but as a drop in the ocean, yet the ocean, I considered, was made up of many drops.
…although my part might appear but as a drop in the ocean, yet the ocean, I considered, was made up of many drops.
Thus I had to pass through reproach, because I had enlisted under his banner who declared his kingdom was not of this world, or else his servants would fight.
When my goods were taken to answer demands of a military nature, (which I was not free to pay voluntarily) and sold perhaps much under their value, some would pity me, supposing it likely I should be ruined.
Others would term it stubbornness in me, or contrary to the doctrine of Christ, concerning rendering to Caesar his due.
But as I endeavored to keep my mind in a state of humble quietude, I was favored to see through such groundless arguments; there being nothing on the subject of war, or favorable to it, to be found in that text.
Although I have been willing to pay my money for the use of civil government, when legally called for; yet have I felt restrained by a conscientious motive, from paying towards the expense of killing men, women and children, or laying towns and countries waste.
Through all my trials in these cases, my wife encouraged me to be faithful, saying, “If we suffer in a right spirit, we shall obtain that peace which the world can neither give, nor take away.”
I found, when closely attentive to the pointings of the true Light, I was enabled, at times, to pray for my opposers and persecutors, and to magnify the name and power of God.
So let all be encouraged to hold on their way, who are given up to serve him in sincerity.
In this situation, no weapon formed against them shall prosper.
After these trials, some of my greatest opposers in time came to own my testimony, and great was my peace in having attended to my tender scruples; yet I had still many baptizing seasons to pass through.
I cannot see how to reconcile war, in any shape or color, with the mild spirit of christianity; nor that devouring disposition, with the peaceable, lamblike nature of our blessed Saviour.
It seems to me we might as well suppose, theft and murder do not contradict his royal law, which enjoins the doing to others as we would have them do to us.
Whilst these storms on account of my peaceable principles, were permitted to continue, I endeavored to keep close to the heavenly Light within.
But afterwards, I was told, it was concluded, that as I gave myself up very much to the service of Truth, it was not proper I should be troubled on account of military demands; and I understood my name was erased, or taken from their list.
, he wrote:
I have sometimes apprehended I felt that love which proceeds from the inexhaustible Fountain, to flow in my heart towards all people; and under these feelings I have craved that all, through christian vigilance, may be prepared to harmonize in singing praises to him who in the beginning made all things good; and I have longed that this pure influence may spread more and more, until it comes to cover the earth as the waters cover the sea.
Oh! the sweetness, that would thereby be introduced among the children of men.
The hungry would be fed, and the naked, clothed.
Liberality would be found among those who are possessed of outward substance, and relief would be extended to the different situations of the depressed and afflicted poor.
There would be no hard thinking one of another; nothing like jangling or contending in lawsuits or otherwise, about worldly interest, either among near connections or others.
These and all other animosities would disappear, together with the unchristian spirit of strife by which so many garments come to be stained with blood, — and many houses, great and fair, to be left desolate.
Alas! how many souls, the numbers of whom are not to be reckoned, are hurried into eternity, I fear, in an unprepared state, through the unrighteous ambition or lusts of potentates and rulers, many of them being yet willing to be called by the name of him who is Prince of peace, notwithstanding they are thus actuated by a cruel anti-christian spirit.
Under these considerations, which to me have been awfully alarming to think of, I have, as before mentioned, been induced to refrain from any voluntary contributions, either in the way of taxes on my property, or other demands, unless I was clearly informed that such demands had no connection with warlike proceedings; — let the consequence of loss of goods, or property taken and sold under value, be whatever it might.
, after the American Revolution had come and gone, Evans was still staying true to his war tax resistance:
About , I understood a law was made for raising money to defray the expenses of war, by means of a duty laid on imported articles of almost every kind.
This duty, I believed, was instead of taxing the inhabitants, as had been done some time before.
I had felt myself restrained, , from paying such taxes; the proceeds whereof were applied, in great measure, to defray expenses relating to war: and, as herein before-mentioned, my refusal was from a tender conscientious care to keep clear in my testimony against all warlike proceedings.
When the matter was brought under my weighty consideration, I could see no material difference between paying the expenses relating to war, in taxes, or in duties.
Although for several years past, I had made very little use of goods imported from foreign countries, because of the corruption attending the trade in these things; yet, on hearing of this duty, and considering the cause of its being laid on imported goods, my mind was much exercised.
I saw clearly that the blessed Truth stood opposed to all wars and blood-shedding; teaching us to do to all as we would have them do to us.
Though I had much refrained from using imported goods, in general; yet, as I was frequently engaged in travelling in the service of Truth, I saw great difficulty, as I thought, in refraining from the use of salt; as people generally used it in almost every kind of food.
On this subject my mind was again led into deep exercise; but as I endeavored to apply, as at the footstool of my heavenly Father, for counsel and preservation upon the right foundation, I was made sensible, that it would be better for me to live on bread and water, than to balk my testimony.
I likewise believed he would not lead me forward, though in an uncommon path, without giving me strength to maintain my ground, as I humbly put my trust in him.
I therefore thought it right for me to make a full stand against the use of all things upon which duties of that kind were laid.
Since which, I have to acknowledge, my way has been made much easier than I looked for.
Blessed be the Lord my Redeemer: He has renewed my faith and confidence in him, and has preserved me hitherto; — he has not left me to the will of those who waited for my halting; but has given me victory through patient suffering; insomuch that people appear more loving towards me now, than ever, and bear my plain doctrine much better than formerly.
I can, with thankfulness, say, I love the brethren, with mankind; universally, and the Lord above all.
Let his great name be praised and magnified forever and ever.
Amen, says my soul.
As internet telephony started to become a real option several years ago, some American war tax resisters realized they could avoid the federal excise tax on telephone service by getting rid of their phone lines and switching over to such internet-based plans.
In , as the U.S. was launching its attack on Iraq, anti-war activists from other countries began to promote a boycott of the products of U.S. government contractors, and even of U.S. companies in general.
“The U.S. economy is strung out across the globe,” wrote Arundhati Roy.
“Its economic outposts are exposed and vulnerable.
Our strategy must be to isolate Empire’s working parts and disable them one by one.
No target is too small.
No victory too insignificant.”
When the Continental Congress imposed a tax on postage stamps to help pay for the revolutionary war effort, Quaker James Mott decided to stop using the mail.
He wrote to a friend:
Must our correspondence by mail be at end, in consequence of the extra postage?
or shall we pay it, and thereby contribute a mite to the support of measures calculated to destroy men’s lives and property?
Perhaps I may be alone in refusing to pay postage on letters.
Only a few cents — what can this do, it may be said, towards enabling government to prosecute the war?
Very little, I own: but the great sum required is made up of littles; and if all those littles are withheld, the effusion of human blood may be at an end. …
I cannot… believe it best for me to pay the present demand of additional postage, little as it is, and alone as I may stand.
Many years later, Congress issued revenue stamps that had to be purchased and applied to certain types of documents.
One Quaker wrote in :
I am one of those (I suppose there are others), who have felt an extreme unwillingness to help maintain our wars by the use of the revenue stamps, which were legalized expressly for war uses.
Our forefathers would have made an emphatic protest against it, if indeed they would not have refused entirely to use the stamps, and borne the consequences, whatever they might have been.
… at least we could restrict the use of checks (for example) wherever possible, and diminish in this way our contributions to the war fund.
Other Quakers began refusing to use or to deal in imported goods, so as to avoid paying import duties that were being directed to military expenses.
Joshua Evans wrote:
About , I understood a law was made for raising money to defray the expenses of war, by means of a duty laid on imported articles of almost every kind. …
I had felt myself restrained, for thirty or forty years, from paying such taxes; the proceeds whereof were applied, in great measure, to defray expenses relating to war: and, as herein before-mentioned, my refusal was from a tender conscientious care to keep clear in my testimony against all warlike proceedings.
Quaker shopkeeper Isaac Martin decided to stop dealing in imported goods rather than pay an import duty:
[A] weighty concern attended my mind on account of a tax on shop keepers, who dealt in foreign articles, to be appropriated towards carrying on the war against England.
I felt much scrupulous in my mind, respecting the consistency thereof with our peaceable principles. …
I believed my peace of mind would be affected, if I paid the said tax.
So I resigned myself to the Lord’s will, let the event be as it may.
But scarcely a day passed, that I had not to turn customers away, who applied for articles which I had on hand, but could not sell, on account of the heavy penalty.
Quaker meetings also had a policy of warning their members against “sharing or partaking in the spoils of war by purchasing or selling prize-goods” — that is, goods seized from the ships of enemy nations by government-sanctioned pirates.
Government bonds are an obvious boycott target for people trying to restrict the resources available to the government.
John Payne wrote a tract in entreating Quakers to divest from government bonds that went to pay for wars:
[T]he King [once] had the power of summoning the barons to the field, and the barons their retainers: by these means armies were raised, fields fought, and blood-stained laurels acquired.
But now immense sums are wanted; and without them War would be an impossibility.
The magnitude of the money necessary, infinitely exceeds any resource which the kingdom can immediately supply: therefore the ingenuity of ministers has recourse to the aid of Funding; that is, of establishing a fictitious capital, which shall bear a certain rate of interest; and any person, purchasing of Government a portion of this fictitious capital, is put into the receipt of interest according to the sum he purchases, and the country is burthened with taxes to support the payment of such interest.
No man hazards his veracity by saying that War cannot be now supported without the Funding System.
As no man then can deny this solemn truth, is it not astonishing to find Quakers holders of stock, not only in their individual, but in their collective capacity?
What then is the conclusion?
The Quakers, at the time they declare their fundamental principles prohibit War, are actively and voluntarily supplying the only prop by which the modern system of War is supported.
Payne himself went even further.
Eager to avoid as much as possible paying money to the British government that was fighting the American revolutionary war, he bricked up a third of the windows of his home to reduce his property tax (which was assessed based on the number of windows), he disabled his coach to avoid its license fee, and he rode miles out of his way to avoid road tolls.
Upset at the government siphoning off a portion of pew rents in establishment churches “to relieve the embarrassments in the city finances, occasioned by an extravagant self-elected magistracy,” some people in Edinburgh around the time of the Annuity Tax resistance there proposed also refusing to rent pews until government spending were to become more responsible.
The “Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions” movement aims to boycott businesses that profit from Israeli settlement expansion in occupied Palestine.
The “Potato Movement” in Greece is trying to circumvent the over-taxed middle-men of the above-ground commercial market by directly connecting producers and buyers in a way that is mutually-beneficial to them and less profitable to the state.
The British government’s enforced monopoly on tea imports into the American colonies was “equal to a tax” in the eyes of Samuel Adams and his fellow patriots.
Boycotts of monopoly tea were widespread, and were famously backed up by acts like the Boston Tea Party, in which monopoly tea was destroyed in bulk.
Other monopoly British imports that suffered from American boycott included house paint, cloth, glass, paper, and dye.
One patriotic song included the lyric:
The use of the taxables, let us forbear:—
(Then merchants import till your stores are all full,
May the buyers be few, and your traffic be dull!)
Boycotts of British-monopoly goods like salt were also, of course, big parts of the Indian independence campaign led by Gandhi.
During the tax resistance and protests that accompanied the campaign for the Reform Act of , “associations were proposed of persons who would undertake to use no excisable articles.”
In Russia around the time of the Vyborg Manifesto, a report noted that “the peasants are deciding to boycott all state-owned businesses.”
For example: “they have undertaken a concerted abstention from vodka, the manufacture and sale of which intoxicant was made a Government monopoly… [which] has since constituted one of the principal sources of the public revenue.”
Another report said that “[t]he leaders of the workingmen’s organization have taken the lead in placing fresh obstacles in the way of the government raising money at home by advising their followers to refuse to use spirits upon which the government collects an enormous tax.”
In the Vietnam era, “[o]ne pacifist, imprisoned for draft refusal and therefore lacking income to refuse taxes on, gave up smoking because the cigarette tax brings the [U.S.] government more revenue than any other single consumer-commodity tax.”
Another possibility is to obstruct the sale of such goods:
In Wales, truckers blockaded a Chevron refinery and called upon the tanker operators to join them in shutting it down, to protest the government’s tax on fuel.
Farmers in Argentina decided in to “halt sales of grains and livestock for a week, setting up roadblocks and hampering exports to press for lower taxes.”
In Greece, recently, resisters to taxes that were added to utility bills have barricaded the offices of utility companies.
One way a tax resistance campaign can claim victory is by convincing the government to either formally rescind the tax, or to recognize the legal validity of tax resistance.
Charles Ⅰ went around Parliament to create a new property tax, and John Hampden famously said “no” in .
He lost his court case, but the next Parliament legalized his resistance by voiding the “ship-writs” tax and declaring the court judgment against him invalid.
American Amish, after a long campaign of lobbying, lawsuits, civil disobedience, and public relations, successfully won an exemption to the U.S. social security system, including its tax, and also canceled the outstanding social security tax bills of 15,000 Amish resisters.
A number of pacifist groups, frequently including war tax resisters, have been trying to get their governments to recognize or legally formalize a right to conscientious objection to military spending that would permit conscientious objectors to pay their taxes in a way that would not pay for the military portion of the government’s budget: a “Peace Tax” as it were.
So far, none of these long-standing efforts — which have included legal challenges using a variety of arguments, lobbying, and appeals to international legal bodies — have borne much fruit.
Governments seem universally hostile to the idea, and those international legal bodies with any clout have been unwilling to push the point.
Besides this, it is difficult to separate a government’s military budget from the rest of its budget in a way that would make a separate “Peace Tax” plausible.
The American version of the “Peace Tax” legislation, for instance, would ironically result in more taxpayer money going to military projects.
Italy has an otto per mille tax, which people can designate either for their church or for “humanitarian and cultural projects” of the government’s choosing — this resembles the sort of plan the “Peace Tax” promoters have in mind, but Italy’s government cunningly declared its participation in the Iraq War a “humanitarian and cultural” project and siphoned the funds off that way.
A tax resister who was opposed to the death penalty came to an agreement with the state of Delaware in which the state permitted him to pay his state taxes into a fund designated for paying state tax refunds of other taxpayers, rather than into the general fund that funded the prison system and executions.
American Quaker war tax resister Joshua Evans was so persistent that eventually the tax collector gave up.
“I was told it was concluded that as I gave myself up very much to the service of Truth, it was not proper I should be troubled on account of military demands; and I understood my name was erased, or taken from their list.”
Occasionally something similar happens today, when because a war tax resister has so few assets, or those assets would take too much trouble to discover, the IRS formally lists the resister’s file as “uncollectible” and gives up the attempt to force payment.
After ten years, a delinquent income tax payment hits a statute of limitations and the U.S. government is generally forbidden to pursue the matter further.
American suffragist activist Sarah E. Wall resisted her taxes for 25 years, when finally, according to Susan B. Anthony, “I do not know exactly how it is now, but the assessor has left her name off the tax-list, and passed her by rather than have a lawsuit with her.”
Something similar happened to English suffragist tax resister Charlotte Despard and some others: “[T]he Government rather than go to the trouble of selling up the recalcitrant ‘debtor,’ and attracting attention to the principle involved, had quietly dropped the matter in several instances.
Mrs. Despard had had no application for taxes since she had been sold up last year.”
Ellen C. Sargent patiently pursued legal challenges in California to try to promote women’s suffrage with a “no taxation without representation” argument.
She began by petitioning the San Francisco Board of Supervisors for a refund of her property taxes, and then filed a lawsuit when this petition was denied (the lawsuit also failed).
When farmers in drought-ravaged regions of Argentina threatened a tax strike in , the government responded with a clever bit of ju-jitsu — it declared an agricultural emergency in the area which exempted those farmers from paying taxes.
Utah governor J. Bracken Lee stopped paying his federal income taxes in the hopes of prompting a Supreme Court test case that would invalidate what he considered to be extraconstitutional federal spending.
(The court declined to take his case.)
A group referred to as “the Texas housewives” resisted paying the social security tax on the salaries of their household help, and pursued a two-year parallel legal challenge to have the tax invalidated, before finally being turned down by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Property tax resisters in Depression-era Chicago won a court case that found property assessments in the city to have been performed incorrectly — with $15 billion in property held by wealthy, well-connected Chicagoans somehow left off the rolls — thus effectively legalizing the resistance.
“As the matter stands,” a newspaper account put it, “citizens howled about their taxes, refused to pay them and a court upheld them.
They are in revolt with legal sanction.”
During the Land League’s rent strike in Ireland, Charles Stewart Parnell reported that “a large majority of landlords” reduced the rents on their properties, “[which] shows that they did finally recognize the situation, and that they determined to make the best of it.”
When the Prussian quasi-autocracy tried to ignore the legislature and govern on its own, the legislature formally declared tax resistance to be legal, and said that the autocrats had no authority to raise or spend money.
Something similar happened in Russia half a century later, when the Czar dissolved the legislature, which then reconvened in Vyborg and called on the citizens to refuse to pay any more taxes to the Czar.
According to a book on war tax resistance: “In Russia became the first country to establish legislation exempting pacifists from paying war taxes.
Thirty British citizens were invited by Czar Alexander Ⅰ to establish a cotton mill.
Because some of the employees were Quakers, a petition was submitted to the Czar from the employees asking for freedom of conscience and an exemption from military service, church taxes for war, etc. The Czar issued a certificate which read ‘His Imperial Majesty has given his gracious assent to this petition … all … shall be exempted from all civil and military taxes … the sect of Quakers may now and in future be freed from war taxes for the support of the Military…’ Two English Quakers visiting Russia in found these provisions still in effect.”
The Great Confederated Anti-Dray and Land Tax League of South Australia began as a tax resistance and mutual insurance group, but was soon successful in convincing the government to rescind the offensive tax.
But history is also full of lessons about the foolishness of trusting the government when it responds to your tax resistance campaign by insisting that it’s on your side and wants to help.
For example:
When tax resistance leader Wat Tyler was assassinated while negotiating with the King in , the king boldly went out to the enraged crowd and told it that he would be their leader and would press for their demands.
Instead, he waited for the fuss to die down, then executed some of the other leaders of the rebellion.
When the Whigs were whisked into power in the wake of the Reform Act agitation around , the tax resistance movement celebrated its victory… only to find that the Whigs could be just as tyrannical about prosecuting those who promoted tax resistance as their Tory cousins.
The recent American TEA Party was quickly coöpted by the Republican Party, which learned how to lead it by the nose with witless rhetoric, but conceded nothing on the tax-and-spend big government front.
During the Annuity Tax strike in Edinburgh, the government passed something called the “Edinburgh Annuity Tax Abolition Act.”
Despite its name, that act did not abolish the annuity tax, but merely concealed it with an aim to making it more difficult to resist.
War tax resistance in the Friends Journal in
Is the dilemma facing pacifist Quakers who are asked to pay a war tax best resolved by conscientious objection and civil disobedience, or by lawsuits and lobbying?
Both approaches could be found in the pages of the Friends Journal in .
On , the Supreme Court ruled, unanimously, in U.S. v. Lee, that an Amish person who conscientiously objected to the social security system did not thereby have a First Amendment right to opt out of it.
The tax system could not function if denominations were allowed to challenge it because tax payments were spent in a manner that violates their religious belief.
Because the broad public interest in maintaining a sound tax system is of such a high order, religious belief in conflict with the payment of taxes affords no basis for resisting the tax.
As a reductio ad absurdum on the losing legal argument, the court noted that if Lee were allowed to assert the right to opt out of social security on conscientious grounds, it would open the door to other similar challenges:
If, for example, a religious adherent believes war is a sin, and if a certain percentage of the federal budget can be identified as devoted to war-related activities, such individuals would have a similarly valid claim to be exempt from paying that percentage of the income tax.
A note in the issue of the Friends Journal noted that this had also slammed the door on the various First Amendment arguments for conscientious objection to war taxes that people had been pursuing:
In the light of a negative judgment rendered by the U.S. Supreme Court against an Amish employer on , the judicial action committee of the General Conference Mennonite Church has recommended to its General Board that a planned suit against the IRS on the issue of tax withholding “be put on indefinite hold.”
Having been turned away by the judicial branch, they decided to double-down on the legislative:
Rather than take a negatively-shrouded course of action at this time, the General Conference committee urged the General Board to make more money available “to promote the World Peace Tax Fund.”
an ad from the issue of Friends Journal
The issue reviewed two books on war tax resistance: Affirm Life: Pay for Peace from the Historic Peace Church Task Force on Taxes, and People Pay for Peace by William Durland.
The first of these opened with this challenging statement:
A wedge of contradiction is opening a wide fissure in our peace testimony.
While nearly all of us declare ourselves to be conscientiously opposed to war and preparations for war, and while many work tirelessly for its elimination, the overwhelming number of us continue voluntarily to pay for what we openly abhor.
The book, according to the review, covered the “biblical and historical basis for military tax refusal” and presented “a systematic exposition of the proposal for a World Peace Tax Fund.”
It also “gives large place to the significance and importance of achieving religious clarity and motivation.”
However, “[i]t does not… adequately address the mechanics of military tax refusal.”
That gap was filled by the second of the books, of which the reviewer said: “Most useful, I think, is the section entitled, ‘How to Refuse to Pay the Military Tax.’ ”
The same issue had an obituary for Lois Mae Handsaker which noted: “Before there were any peace marches in , she was apprehended during the picketing of the local post office to protest the use of income taxes for war.”
The issue announced that the Iowa Peace Network would be collecting money withheld from taxes by war tax resisters and using it to buy grain which it would submit to an IRS office in lieu of tactics to “symbolize opposition to taxes for the Pentagon and emphasize the need for funding human services.”
The article noted: “In the event that the IRS refuses to accept the grain, it will be donated to local meal programs for the needy.”
Alas, the notice followed-up that news with the silly idea of protesting against war taxes by writing “not for military spending” in the memo field of the check you write to the IRS.
“If enough people take this step, a class action suit against the IRS may be filed” — by some sort of magic, one supposes.
At Canada’s Parliament passed a “Constitution Act” which made it yet more independent of the British government.
The act enshrined “freedom of conscience and religion” as a fundamental freedom.
The Canadian Peace Tax Fund Committee said it was going to “test” this “by assuming that [our legislators] mean we can divert our defense taxes from killing to peaceful uses, on conscientious grounds.”
The notice of this, in the issue, didn’t give any details as to how this “test” would take place, but pretty quickly shifted to “hopes” that the legislature would enact a Peace Tax Fund in the spirit of the new Constitution Act, so lobbying may have been all the testing they planned to do.
ad from the issue of Friends Journal
Similarly vague was the report from the meeting of Carolina Conservative Friends, which decided on “asking ourselves and other American Friends to make some sort of statement against the use of tax money for military purposes, through coordinated activity in filing our returns .”
A report on the Lake Erie Yearly Meeting also vaguely mentioned “continued explorations within monthly meetings about war-tax resistance.”
Another report on the New York Yearly Meeting said that “[s]ome Friends planned to take further individual action supporting nonregistration and tax refusal.”
This consistent vagueness makes me suspect that there was some embarrassment and certainly no consensus about war tax resistance in these meetings.
Trudy Knowles brought things more in the brass tacks direction in the “Memoirs of a War Resister,” an article that concentrated mostly on the plight of Vietnam War veterans in the United States, that she shared in the issue.
Her resistance included tax resistance:
I do not pay the federal excise tax on my phone bill which is earmarked for the military.
I refuse to pay the 50 percent of my income tax that goes to preparing this country for war.
I put this money instead into an escrow account to be held until the government establishes a means by which this money can be used for the peaceful resolution of national and international conflicts — or until they take it by force.
There was a thoughtful overview of the “Holy Experiment” of William Penn’s founding of a colony run on Quaker principles in Pennsylvania by Margaret H. Bacon in the issue.
Toward the conclusion, it discussed war tax resistance as a possible way of advancing the experiment:
Through [John] Woolman we come to the most pressing unfinished business of our Holy Experiment: freeing ourselves from complicity in war.
Penn and his colonists hoped to govern without weapons, placing their hopes on “seeing what love can do,” as well as on the establishment sometime in the future of the instruments of arbitration, Penn’s Congress of Nations.
Neither the personal practice of nonviolence nor the best efforts of the United Nations have yet worked to rid the world of the threat of war, and now time is running out.
Earlier Friends were at least able to separate themselves from complicity in preparations for war by refusing to pay militia taxes as well as refusing to serve in the militia.
Today the principle of conscientious objection for the bodies of our young men (and perhaps young women) is well established with us, having been pioneered by a handful during the Civil War, a few hundred during World War Ⅰ, and some thousands in World War Ⅱ.
The idea of demanding conscientious objector status for our tax dollars is in its infancy.
In the past years, a few courageous souls have refused to pay the government that portion of their federal income taxes that supports war.
Today more and more monthly meetings and yearly meetings are beginning to wrestle with the problem.
Is it time for the Society of Friends as a whole to get behind this move?
Surely if we did it, and the Mennonites did it, and the Brethren did it, we could make a change in the law.
Is there not some simple, single forward step that we could make together in ?
Some Friends find this issue complicated, because the graduated income tax supports many good things, and Friends who designate their taxes solely for peace purposes are just making it necessary for others to pay solely for war.
The same arguments can be raised against conscientious objection to military service.
But is there not a deep and inward side to tax refusal?
Do some Friends feel, as Woolman felt, that they cannot pay these taxes and still keep in touch with the living and life-giving Holy Spirit?
Let us be tender before we argue with our tax refusers, for they may be pointing our way to new light.
The issue brought the news that “25 members of the Friends House staff in London” had embarked on war tax resistance.
The Meeting for Sufferings of London Yearly Meeting agreed to put 34% of the taxes withheld from the objectors into an escrow account, “the intention being to release it to Inland Revenue after assurances that it would be used for non-military purposes.”
An obituary notice of Roberta Dickinson in the same issue noted that “[s]he supported the peace testimony through organized war tax resistance.”
At the meeting of the Friends World Committee for Consultation, that group decided to refuse to submit withheld taxes to the government from its war tax resisting employees (according to a Journal report ).
Walter Ludwig reflected on contemporary and historical Quaker war tax resistance in an article he wrote for the issue.
Excerpts:
The writings from George Fox, John Woolman, Joshua Evans, Timothy Davis,
Moses Brown, and Samuel Allinson that are mentioned in Ludwig’s essay can be found in the book American Quaker War Tax Resistance.
Members of our meeting [Rahway and Plainfield (New Jersey) Monthly Meeting] several years ago began as individuals to withhold a percentage of their income tax in protest of its use for war.
No devastating consequences have resulted.
Courteous, almost sympathetic Internal Revenue Service agents have visited one member, telling her a red tab has been affixed to her folder in the file.
She hopes the IRS will soon run out of red tabs.
I have withheld the military third, sending it the first year to the American Friends Service Committee and since then to the Quaker Peace Tax Fund, custody of Albany (N.Y.) Monthly Meeting.
The first response from the IRS came just .
They want the “underpaid tax,” $939.58 in penalty and interest.
My refusal to support mass murder will likely be ignored, as have been my explanatory notes of “conscientious deduction” sent quarterly during the past three years
In my letters of refusal I have mentioned membership in the Religious Society of Friends.
Do I thereby leave with the IRS the impression that of course Quakers do not pay military taxes, as they once refused to pay tithes to a state church they could not in conscience support?
But has refusal to pay taxes for war been within the main stream of Quakerly testimony and practice?
May war-tax-resisting Friends today take aid and comfort from a tradition of military tax refusal?
George Fox was clear on the matter.
A restored portrait of Fox presents him as a man of property from a well-to-do family with enough investments to give him private means.
He paid his taxes.
If we pay we can plead with Caesar and plead with them who hath our custom and hath our tribute.
Refuse to pay and they will say: “How can we defend you against foreign enemies and protect everyone and their estates and keep down thieves and murders?”
And again:
To bear and carry weapons to fight with… the man of peace cannot act… but have paid their tribute [taxes] which they may still do for peace’s sake… In so doing Friends may better claim their liberty.
Sara Fell kept the Fox family account book after George married her mother, Margaret.
Her accounts disclose that the family paid the poll tax to carry on England’s war against the Dutch in .
When England fought the French, the entry reads: “ by M paid to the Poll Money by father and mother 1 pound 2 shilling.”
Robert Barclay, foremost Quaker theologian, wrote in :
We have suffered much in our country because neither ourselves would bear arms nor send others in our place, nor give our money for the buying of drums, standards, and other military attire.
Such “trophy money,” as these direct taxes were called, many early Friends refused to pay.
Most, however, paid the general or “mixed” taxes even in time of war.
Their willingness may be found in the advice of the gathering at Balby encouraging “all who are indebted to the world endeavor to discharge the same.”
As Fox put it in , “Keep out of debt; owe to no man anything but love… Pay to Caesar, as to your fellows, what is due.”
[H]omespun-clad John Woolman was given a cool reception by elegant London Friends.
They were securely of the propertied class with enterprises in heavy industry and were largely in control of the Atlantic trade.
They would not give their persons to the business of war-making, but did they make nice distinctions in how the empire used their tax money in extending colonial rule?
Philadelphia Friends, like London’s, were well placed in government and trade.
“The richest,” wrote a visiting London doctor, “talk only about selling of flour and the low price it bore.”
Using George Fox as authority, some Quakers tried to persuade others to pay a tax levied for an armed expedition against Canada in .
When war with the French and Indians finally came in , John Churchman, Anthony Benezet, John Woolman, and other Friends refused to pay war taxes that were mixed with taxes for civil uses.
In extenuation of Fox and early war-tax-paying Quakers in England Woolman said:
To me it appears that there was less danger of their being infected with the spirit of the world than is the case with us now.
[They] had had little share in civil government… our minds have been turned to the improvement of our country, to merchandise and the sciences… and a carnal mind is gaining among us.
When ten Quaker members of the Pennsylvania Assembly resigned rather than vote for the War Supply Bill of , the remaining “secular” Friends voted the war taxes and penalties for nonpayment.
The abdicating legislators and their supporters in the Society then began close cooperation with Mennonites, Dunkers, and other pacifist groups that carried on through the Revolution.
When military officers appeared in Mount Holly to draft for the French and Indian War, Woolman noted in his Journal, “In this time of commotion some of our young men left these parts and tarried abroad till it was over” (a prelude to Vietnam).
Woolman in had recorded his uneasiness about paying war taxes:
A few years past, money having been made current in our province for carrying on wars… by taxes laid on the inhabitants, my mind was often affected with the thought of paying such taxes… To refuse the active payment of a tax which our Society generally paid was exceedingly disagreeable but to do a thing contrary to my conscience appeared yet more dreadful.
Joshua Evans in wrote:
I found it best for me to refuse paying taxes on my estate which went to pay the expenses of war, and although my part might appear at best as a drop in the ocean, yet the ocean, I considered, was made up of many drops.
Committees appointed by Philadelphia Yearly Meeting agreed on an “epistle of tender love and caution to Friends in Pennsylvania” signed by those who felt free to do so and forwarded to monthly and quarterly meetings.
It was in keeping with William Penn’s earlier statement, made when he refused to send money to England for war against Canada:
No man can be true to God and be false to his own conscience, nor can he extort from it a tribute to carry on any war, much less offensive, nor ought true Christians pay for it.
I’ve tried many times to track down a source for this Penn quote, with no success.
The war was in full swing when queries sent annually by London Yearly Meeting to English Friends were adopted in by yearly meetings in Virginia, Maryland, Philadelphia, New York, and New England.
They asked:
Do you bear a testimony against bearing arms and paying trophy money or being in any manner concerned in privateers letters of mark, or dealing in prize goods as such?
Friends were expected not to pay voluntarily to hire a substitute for military service or voluntarily pay any tax solely and directly for military purposes.
Every other tax, even mixed taxes that would be used in part for the military budget, Friends were expected in conscience to pay.
The Revolution shifted the locus of tax-raising authority for Americans from London to state and federal governments.
Whereupon Timothy Davis in circulated his tract titled, “Advice of a Quaker to Pay Tax to American Revolution.”
War taxes, especially mixed ones, should be paid, wrote Davis, and he quoted a weighty Friend, Thomas Story, who had declared, “If the officer demand tax from me and tell me ’tis to maintain war, I’ll pay it.”
Sandwich (Mass.) Monthly Meeting took a dim view of the Davis publication and disowned its author.
Quaker books of discipline of the time counseled disowning members who paid war taxes.
During the Revolution Moses Brown reminded Friends:
Our ancient testimonies were and remain to be supportable of paying tribute and customs for the support of civil and yet refuse to pay trophy money and other expenses solely for war.
He suggested Friends might ask, with the war over, for a separation of taxes into their several budget purposes.
“If it should be refused we might be united in refusing even those the greater part of which may be for civil uses.”
The clearest Quaker statement on war taxes during the Revolution came from the pen of Samuel Allinson, a young Friend of Burlington, New Jersey.
In Allinson circulated manuscript copies of his “Reasons against War and paying taxes for its Support.”
War is not a defensible function of civil government, reasoned Allinson, and each generation must apply biblical truths to the issues of its own time.
Peace committees of monthly meetings might well spend a session with Friend Allinson’s cogent thinking.
Quaker support of withholders of war taxes was recorded in a minute approved by Philadelphia Yearly Meeting in , reaffirmed in , and used as model for a minute approved by New York Yearly Meeting.
It reads, in part:
Refusal to pay the military portion of taxes is in keeping with an honorable testimony, fully in keeping with the history and practice of Friends… We warmly approve of people following their consciences and openly approve civil disobedience in this matter under divine compulsion… We ask all to consider carefully the implications of paying taxes that relate to war-making… Specifically we offer encouragement and support to people caught up in the problem of seizure, and of payment against their will.
The same issue noted that a minute passed at the gathering of the New England Yearly Meeting “supported efforts to establish a World Peace Tax Fund and current forms of war tax refusal.”
Also in that issue was an announcement about the formation of a war tax resisters’ penalty fund:
The Tax Resister’s Penalty Fund is a network designed to distribute the burden of penalties or interest levied against military tax resisters.
For example, 200 people would share a $500 penalty at $2.50 each.
For information contact TRPF, Box 25, North Manchester, IN 46962.
The fund was still in operation at that address until fairly recently.
It has not formally disbanded, though it appears to no longer be operating effectively.
At the upcoming national gathering of NWTRCC at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, I’m going to be presenting a summary of the history of war tax resistance in the Society of Friends (Quakers).
Today I’m going to try to coalesce some of the notes I’ve assembled about how the Quaker practice of war tax resistance evolved, particularly in America, during the period of time surrounding and including the American Revolution.
The American Revolution and Aftermath ()
When Quakers resisted tithes, militia exemption taxes, explicit war taxes, and things of that nature, the government would usually respond by seizing the resister’s property and selling it at auction in order to recover the tax.
(In the earliest years of the Society of Friends, many such resisters were imprisoned, but this practice later became uncommon.)
Quaker meetings developed a protocol that good Quakers were supposed to follow when such property seizures took place.
They were not supposed to cooperate in any way, but neither were they supposed to resist.
They were not supposed to suggest which property the tax collector might seize, and they certainly were not supposed to leave the amount of the tax lying out on the table in plain view (some Quakers evidently tried this way of getting out of resisting).
Instead, when the collector came and said he was going to seize property for unpaid taxes, the Quaker was supposed to step aside and say something along the lines of “do as you think you must,” perhaps explaining the reason for his refusal to pay, but not otherwise interfering.
If the collector seized property worth more than the amount of tax, and was able to auction it off for more than the amount owed, the collector (if honest) might try to return the surplus to the resister.
A Quaker was not supposed to accept such money, it having been tainted by the process.
(However, if the collector seized too many items, and only auctioned off some of them, the Quaker could accept the return of the additional items themselves.)
This part of the protocol made Quakers especially vulnerable to particularly unscrupulous tax collectors.
Such a collector could seize the most valuable thing he could get his hands on, sell it, apply some of the proceeds to the tax, and then pocket the rest.
Many other collectors were also accused of selling property at cut-rate prices to themselves, to their friends, or in exchange for kick-backs.
The result of all of this meant that tax resisting Quakers were often setting themselves up for considerable financial losses.
These “sufferings” were part of the glory of being a Quaker, and, as such, were well worth the price to some Friends, but to others they were just an unwelcome financial hardship.
Meetings had to be diligent to keep wavering Friends from trying to sneak out from under the requirements to refuse to pay certain taxes, to refuse the return of surplus money, and to not cooperate with the tax collector as a way of trying to ameliorate the burden of the seizure process.
If a Friend failed in any of these ways, someone at their meeting might “produce a testification” against them.
The meeting would then investigate the charges and would send out a delegation to talk to the wayward Quaker and try to bring them back into compliance.
This often would include the Quaker standing up at a future meeting to read an acknowledgment of their error and promise never to do it again.
If the Quaker refused to get with the program, the meeting could “disown” them — basically kick them out of the meeting.
Simply not reporting any “sufferings” to the meeting for failure to pay war tax might be enough to start this process.
(“We notice thou hastn’t had any property seized this year for failure to pay the bounty tax, Friend Johnson.
Care to tell us how thou hast been so lucky?”)
American Quakers during the American Revolution were, in many places, pillaged ruthlessly by the authorities by this process of property seizure.
Several things contributed to this:
The Society of Friends was not united.
Dissident Quakers promoted paying taxes to the rebel government, and some “Free Quakers” even abandoned the peace testimony entirely to enlist in the rebel army.
This made it even harder for resisting Quakers to appeal to Quaker beliefs and practices as an explanation for their stand.
Quakers had wavered in their war tax resistance stand in the recent past, for instance when the Quaker-led Pennsylvania Assembly voted to tax the colony to pay for fortifications during the French & Indian War.
This was deployed as a precedent to argue that Quakers only have scruples against war tax paying at convenient times or depending on their sympathy with the particular war or government.
The Quaker peace testimony was often publicly expressed with an eye to being reassuring to the authorities.
So often it would include phrasing like this:
[T]he setting up and putting down kings and governments is God’s peculiar prerogative; for causes best known to himself: And that it is not our business to have any hand or contrivance therein; nor to be busy bodies above our station, much less to plot and contrive the ruin, or overturn of any of them, but to pray for the king, and safety of our nation, and good of all men, that we may live a quiet and peaceable life, in all godliness and honesty, under the government which God is pleased to set over us.
For this reason, some Quakers felt that to adhere to this testimony they could not cooperate in any way with the rebel government, as to do so would be to contribute “to plot and contrive” against the king (others disagreed, feeling that the rebel government had become the one “which God is pleased to set over us”).
Such absolutist resisters were easy targets for patriotic anger.
Both armies were authorized to take any property they needed during the course of their campaigns.
They were usually supposed to pay for what they took, but Quakers, being under an obligation not to supply goods to belligerents, could not accept money in such cases.
This made their farms and stores particularly tempting targets for thrifty officers.
Quakers who would neither serve in the military, pay war taxes, nor take oaths of allegiance to the rebel government (Quakers generally would not take oaths of any kind) were suspected of using their conscientious scruples as a cover for loyalist sympathies.
Speaking of oaths, Quakers could be fined for refusing to take an oath of allegiance to the new American government.
They were forbidden by Quaker discipline from paying such fines.
So this became another opportunity for plunder and to me it looks like this was used deliberately as a revenue-raiser or as a way of punishing Quakers for their lack of enthusiasm for the rebel cause.
An additional complication for Quakers at this time was the fuzziness over what counted as a “war tax.”
For example, one of the ways the Continental Congress funded its military campaign was to issue its own paper currency and make the acceptance of this currency as legal tender mandatory.
This was certainly easier than trying to raise the money through an explicit tax, but it amounted to just as much of an imposition: as the Congress issued more and more currency to finance the war, the value of the currency plummeted, taking resources away from people who were forced to use it.
Some Quakers refused to handle the continentals, and some were imprisoned and others were threatened with execution.
In other cases, such refusers were declared outlaws and boycotts were enforced against them — in one example “it was publicly proclaimed that there was no protection for him [John Cowgill], that all persons were forewarned at their peril to have no dealings with him.
Even the miller was threatened with the destruction of his mill if he ground for his family, and the school-master forbid receiving his children at school.”
The official stand of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting was neutral on the currency question, and asked Friends to come to their own decisions and not to chastise one-another about it.
The Virginia Yearly Meeting, on the other hand, formally forbade Friends from using continentals.
The official Philadelphia Yearly Meeting position on war taxes, as put forth in , was much as it had long been: “It is the judgment of this meeting that a tax levied for the purchasing of drums, colors, or for other warlike uses, cannot be paid consistently with our Christian testimony.”
Timothy Davis published a tract in laying out the case for why American Quakers should pay most of the taxes being demanded by the rebel congressional government.
He was disowned by his Monthly Meeting, both for the content of the tract and for publishing it without the Meeting’s approval.
He left and took a few other Quakers with him to found a rival Meeting.
This conflict was still dividing the Society a decade later, when the Revolution was over and American Quakers had pretty much all adjusted to the new government God was pleased to have set over them.
The tract was well argued.
Those Quakers who were trying to strengthen and broaden the practice of war tax resistance beyond what the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting was willing to advocate tried to come up with an authoritative and thoroughly scripturally-backed response.
Benjamin Mason, Anthony Benezet, Moses Brown, and Samuel Allinson all pursued efforts in this direction.
I’ve seen some drafts of their work and their correspondence, and Allinson’s draft, at least, seems to have been widely-distributed in manuscript form, but as far as I know, no official version ended up being published.
Benezet believed that because the stronger position they were advocating would demand more from Quakers than before, and would subject them to more persecution than before, it would make the Society of Friends stronger and less-corrupted by worldly riches:
[It] will not be like a passing storm but an abiding trial, which, as it will come heavier upon those who are most loaded & encumbered with the clay of this world, will have I trust a blessed effect to every one who will willingly receive it to keep us low & humble.
Part of what may have restrained them from publishing was caution about introducing new doctrinal innovations at a time when the Society of Friends was already beginning to show signs of fracturing on party lines.
Part also may be that the Meetings that would have to authorize the publication of such a pamphlet were probably hoping to quiet such debate rather than stir up a new hornet’s nest.
But there was also the emerging trouble of an ultra-radical war tax resistance position that was beginning to develop.
Moses Brown wrote to Anthony Benezet about this concern, saying:
[S]ome Friends refuse all taxes, even those for civil uses as well as those clear for war and others that are mixed, and thereby dropping our testimony of supporting civil government by readily contributing thereto, [and] it has been a fear whether this variety of conduct won’t mar rather than promote the work… I understand some Friends have fallen in with or been overpowered by the common argument that civil government is upheld by the sword, and therefore they decline paying to its support, which appears to me a great weakness…
Around this time, you start to see meetings supplementing their discipline about not paying explicit war taxes (“for drums, colors, and military attire”) with advice that Friends not criticize one another over their positions on whether or not to pay “mixed” taxes.
Apparently the arguments in Meetings had become troublesome and did not seem to be near a resolution.
The way Quaker Meetings recorded “sufferings” went something like this: When a Quaker was subjected to persecution of some sort for taking a conscientious stand required by Quaker discipline, that Quaker would report this to his or her Monthly Meeting.
That Meeting would periodically forward on a list of such reports to its Quarterly Meeting, which in turn would compile these into a report that it would submit to the Yearly Meeting.
At each stage, a Meeting might decide that some particular report wasn’t worth recording for some reason.
During this period, for instance, some Monthly Meetings were recording the sufferings of Quakers who were persecuted for resisting mixed taxes, as well as for explicit war taxes.
Some Quarterly Meetings dropped these reports from their submissions to the Yearly Meetings.
This could lead to debate in the Meetings, which would bring the issue of war tax resistance back on to the front burner.
The Rhode Island Yearly Meeting, for instance, decided to begin accepting such reports in .
The Salem Yearly Meeting debated the issue and eventually followed suit.
The war tax question didn’t end with the end of the fighting.
The war still needed to be paid for, and the continental currency that funded it needed to be redeemed, and the government used a variety of taxes to do this.
Among these were a new set of import duties instituted in to pay war debts.
A few Quakers took note of this and decided they could not pay.
For example, Joshua Evans stopped using imported goods.
Isaac Martin, who ran a drug store, stopped stocking and selling imported products.
The new government was also working on a unified militia law, which, though it enabled Quakers to be exempt from service, required any such conscientious objectors to pay a fine in lieu of service.
A representative of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting addressed Congress, telling them that Quakers would feel obligated to refuse to pay such a fine and to suffer the consequences.
Many Quakers did refuse to pay and were fined (and, as usual, the tax collectors took far more from them in property than the amount of the fines).
In one area, a law was passed exempting members of the volunteer fire department from militia service without necessity of paying a fine, and this led many Quakers to sign up.
Meanwhile, what was happening in England?
Quakers there were much more restrained than their American counterparts on the war tax question.
When they reprinted John Woolman’s Journal in , they omitted the parts where he talked about his war tax resistance.
There were some exceptions to this relative conservatism.
John Payne, for example, boarded up a third of the windows of his home to avoid a property tax, put his coach up on blocks to avoid a vehicle tax, and rode miles out of his way to avoid toll gates, all to avoid paying for the war to suppress the American rebellion.
He also wrote a tract chastising the Society of Friends for investing in government bonds, on the same grounds.
In the years before his death he gave away his property to members of his family so that he would not be liable for any estate tax.
The War of 1812 was largely funded, on the American side, by debt spending, and so explicit war taxes did not become such an acute issue, though the issue of “mixed” taxes again became a heated topic.
The military would again requisition supplies from Quakers, which Quakers felt obligated to refuse to voluntarily give them or to accept money for.
And Quakers were frequently fined (and then plundered for their refusal to pay) when they would not join the militia.
Influential Quaker Elias Hicks reported in (before the Hicksite/Orthodox split) that he had addressed his Meeting’s “meeting for discipline” to ask “whether while we were actively paying taxes to civil government, for the purpose of promoting war or warlike purposes in any degree, we were not balking our testimony in that respect and pulling down with one hand what we are pretending to build with the other.”
He compared this to abolitionist Quakers who nonetheless supported slavery by buying slave-produced goods.
In , several young Quaker men were imprisoned in Baltimore for their refusal to pay militia exemption fines.
The state court would not interfere, as they were imprisoned under a federal regulation at the pleasure of the military, and the judge recommended that they instead apply to President Madison for help.
They did, and the president said that he wouldn’t do anything about it, as the law was clear on the point.
But as the Quaker delegation was leaving the president’s makeshift office (the White House had been put to the torch by the British the year before), the president’s wife, Dolley Madison, called them aside and asked to speak with them.
She had been raised a Quaker.
When she heard what had happened, and what the president’s response had been, she told them “I am determined that the President shall never close his eyes in sleep until these children are liberated from confinement.”
It took the delegation two days to return to Baltimore, and when they got there they learned that the Quaker conscientious objectors had been released on the President’s orders.
I end this period, somewhat artificially, at .
This doesn’t represent a firm boundary in the evolution of the practice of war tax resistance in the Society of Friends, but it does mark a significant milestone in the Society itself.
By that year, the society had fractured into irreconcilable Orthodox and Hicksite factions that would each form their own structures of Meetings and would evolve separately in parallel for decades.
This was caused in part by a passion for strengthened religious purity among American protestant Christians that peaked in .
This striving probably both contributed to a strengthening of war tax resistance (among other traditional Quaker practices) and distracted from it by making other issues more central.
Here are a few more items concerning tax resistance that I found in back issues
from of Friends
Bulletin, the journal of the Pacific Yearly Meeting of Quakers.
The issue included an announcement
from the Orange County Monthly Meeting of
the launch of “The Conscience and Military Tax Resolution.”
This sort of thing is frequently proposed in modern war tax resistance circles,
but has yet to show much success. In this incarnation people who “are not ready
to resist now” could sign on to the resolution to “show that you are at least
ready to begin when 100,000 others agree to do so.” Once that target was
reached, signers of the Resolution would begin to refuse to pay at least a
certain percentage of their taxes. The goal of this was to pressure the
government into passing “the World Peace Tax Fund Bill or similar legislation
which would provide a legal alternative for taxpayers morally opposed to war.”
The issue had several items on
war tax resistance, beginning with this statement and commentary:
We express our love for God and all the peoples of this earth. A vital act of
this love is to refuse cooperation with registration for the draft and
payment of our tax money for war. We testify against rendering unto Caesar
that which is God’s. We, the individuals who serve on the Pacific Yearly
Meeting Peace Committee, join with those Friends who refuse to cooperate with
war taxes and registration. As a result of this call, we have chosen to
protest war taxes, some refusing at least a “Token Ten” dollars.
Friend — what canst thou say?
Lonnie Valentine
Betsy Eberhart
Gladis Innerst
Mike Turner
Ellen Lyon
Duane Magill
Franklin Zahn
Ed Flowers
Bonnie Wells
The above statement, written by the Pacific Yearly Meeting Peace Committee and
others came with labor over several minutes on conscription and peace from
monthly meetings as well as Friends General Conference
minute, Philadelphia Yearly
Meeting’s statement, and Sarasota Monthly Meeting’s Statement of Peace. The
intent was a minute of action in which our Peace Testimony would be not just
words but applied to our lives in .
Two suggestions came out of a subsequent threshing session: 1) that the
statement be made available for others to sign and 2) that the Peace Committee
be available to labor with monthly meetings on this statement.
All monthly meetings have previously received Franklin Zahn’s “War Taxes–Minus
a Token Ten” of which develops the
idea and makes suggestions on alternative uses of the token ten dollars. In
essence, withholding $10.00 in objection to the federal government’s use of
our tax money for war is similar to withholding the
U.S. Tax from
telephone bills which was done during the Vietnam War.
I am raising the question within monthly meetings and among Peace Committee
members whether
PYM Peace
Committee should sponsor a weekend conference at Quaker Center. Your
suggestions and/or responses would be appreciated.
Also, I hope that monthly meetings, meanwhile, are taking advantage of Lonnie
Valentine’s availability to provide workshops on War Tax Objection.
In peace and love,
Ellen Lyon, Clerk
PYM Peace
Committee
How can we who are above the draft age support Friends faced with
registration? In Our Peace Testimony it says:
Our witness to the way of peace requires that we refuse military service of
any kind, and challenges us to consider whether we can in any way submit to
that involuntary servitude which is conscription. Friends should work to
abolish state conscription — whether for military or other purposes — and
should refuse personally to cooperate with the draft.
Since many of us do not have this opportunity to refuse to register for the
draft, we must look to those other ways in which we can refuse cooperation
with the draft.
One way is refusing registration of our money for war through the taxation
system. When we willingly submit a tax form, we are supporting registration
for the draft; when we willingly pay taxes of which over half is used for war,
we are supporting registration for the draft. When we do these things, we are
withdrawing support from Friends who are refusing to register for the draft.
Therefore, one unequivocal way we who are above draft age can support Friends
resisting the draft is to resist payment of those taxes which, in part, go for
registration and conscription.
If we recognize our “involvement in militarism through the payment of taxes
used for military purposes” but do not act to end such involvement, then are
we not hypocritical to tell Friends faced with registration to refuse military
service? If draft age Friends take the Peace Testimony to heart and refuse to
cooperate with the draft, then is it not time that we who are no longer of
that age refuse to cooperate with the drafting of our money for war?
Perhaps our Peace Testimony states what we believe too rigidly when it calls
on Friends to refuse cooperation with the draft. Perhaps, however, the
testimony does not state what we believe with regard to the payment of war
taxes strongly enough. If we agree that we should refuse cooperation with the
draft, then it is time we should refuse cooperation with war taxes.
That issue also included this on-point notice from one Quarterly Meeting:
In these times of draft registration and military buildup, many persons may be
led to actions in harmony with the Quaker Peace Testimony. College Park
Quarterly Meeting supports those who feel spiritually led, for reasons of
conscience, to perform such actions, including non-registration for the draft
and war tax refusal.
A letter to the editor from Walter Klein
in that issue suggested that Quakers, instead of resisting war taxes, should
pay twice their normal tax, but pay the extra amount for a non-military
purpose, perhaps one chosen as a group. “It would be legal, it would be a
statement of conscience, wars and armament would continue; but the message
might be loud and clear and perhaps more effective.” He suggested the program
be called “ ‘The Better Use of Government’ Fund or
‘BUG’ Fund
for short.”
Lonnie Valentine reminded Quakers of their historical tradition of war tax
resistance in the issue:
A.J. Muste once remarked that “The two decisive powers of the government
with respect to war are the power to conscript and the power to tax.” Now it
can be claimed that the government’s ability to wage war depends decisively
upon its power to tax. After all, our nuclear age began beneath one airplane,
twelve men, and millions of drafted tax dollars.
As early as American Friends recognized the
connection between taxes and war. In an epistle to Pennsylvania Friends, John
Woolman, John Churchman, and others wrote:
As we cannot be concerned with wars and fighting, so neither ought we to
contribute thereto… though some part of the money be raised… is said to be
for such benevolent purposes, as supporting our friendship with our Indian
neighbors, and relieving the distresses of our fellow-subjects… we could most
cheerfully contribute to those purposes, if they were not so mixed, that we
cannot in the manner proposed, show our hearty concurrence therewith, without
at the same time assenting to… practices, which we apprehend contrary to the
testimony which the Lord hath given us to bear…
Indeed, the Friends’ clear apprehension of the connection of money and war was
reflected in the Constitutional debates (about whether to include a
conscientious objector amendment) with regard to the conscription of men and
money. Roger Sherman of Connecticut remarked that “It is well know that those
who are religiously scrupulous of bearing arms, are equally scrupulous of
getting substitutes or paying an equivalent. Many of them would rather die
then do either one or the other.” How much are we now ready to do for our
scruples about conscription?
If we were all to be subject to the military draft in the next war, we would
not pay a fee to hire someone in our place. However, we seem to have forgotten
that with the payment of taxes we are hiring substitutes. We are paying to
have someone go in our place. In being unable to say “No!” to the payment of
taxes used to register and conscript others, we nullify our ability to say
“No!” in other ways. After all, the government cares little if we leaflet post
offices, learn draft counseling, or even advocate draft resistance as long as
we continue to pay our taxes. Simply put, when we pay our taxes, we enable the
government to conscript.
If other Friends are concerned enough about conscription to contemplate saying
“No!” to the drafting of our tax dollars, please write me at 27122 Cipres,
Mission Viejo, CA
92692 to let me know [sic] about the many ways we can protest and
resist paying war taxes. Also, please feel free to ask those Friendly
questions about justifying suffering for such a witness!
Joshua Evans reflected my feelings long ago when he said: “I found it best for
me to refuse paying demands on my estate which went to paying the expenses of
war, and although my part might appear at best a drop in the ocean, yet the
ocean, I considered, was made of many drops.” Are there other Friends who are
willing to be drops in this ocean?
[Lonnie Valentine has travelled in the ministry among Friends in Pacific
Yearly Meeting this past year under the auspices of the Fund for Concerns to
share with Friends his concerns about paying taxes for war.]
A letter from Harold Waterhouse
in the same issue warned Quakers against making their war tax resistance “an
act so private in nature that sometimes its sole impact falls on some harassed
IRS clerk
[and, a]s an act of witness… is chiefly between us and God.” While such an act
“relieves our conscience… if it reduces our drive for peace to the point that
we fail to act in more effective ways, then war-tax-withholding, on balance, is
counter-productive.”
A letter from David & Janet Hartsough to the
IRS,
reprinted in the issue, explained why
the Hartsoughs were refusing outright to pay $10.40 of their federal taxes
(redirecting that to the Oakland Catholic Worker “to feed the hungry and house
the homeless”), and paying the remaining $747.60 but in the form of a check
made out to the Department of Health and Human Services instead of to the
U.S. Treasury, in
the hopes of thereby keeping the money out of the hands of the Defense
Department.
A letter from Elinor Gene Hoffman to the
IRS,
reprinted in the issue, explained why
she was withholding 33⅓% of her taxes (“approximately the amount we are
spending for future wars and present armaments”), redirecting them “to
organizations I believe are dedicated to peace and to furthering life on this
planet,” and declaring this on her tax return as a “Quaker Peace Witness” tax
credit. She wrote, in part:
Please observe that by withholding only one-third of my taxes, I demonstrate
my willingness to pay for past wars and veterans’ benefits. I believe we
should honor past debts and that veterans of all wars should receive our
cherishing care.…
I take this stand in full recognition of the many benefits we all derive from
our representative form of government and the freedoms it enables me to enjoy.
But I firmly believe nothing good my government has done or will do can endure
if we do not halt our military pollution of the planet.
A reprinted letter from DeAnne Butterfield and John Huyler,
Jr. of Boulder Meeting to
the IRS
explained why they were withholding 39% of their taxes and declaring a
credit in a similar manner to Hoffman’s action explained above. Excerpt:
We hope most fervently that legal options (such as the proposed World
Peace Tax Fund) may be available in the future and would gladly pay into
such a fund. Until then we see war tax refusal as the only avenue which
allows us to follow our religious principles.
We welcome your scrutiny of this return. You will find that we have been
forthright and complete to the best of our ability. Furthermore, we hope
that this commitment on our parts can be a useful catalyst for dialogue.
We will welcome you our your agents into our home in hopes that,
together, in a spirit of mutual concern and respect, we may discover
better ways to bring about an end to all wars.
A note appended to this letter added: “Through the efforts of DeAnne
Butterfield, John Huyler, and others, Boulder Meeting adopted a one-year
trial program of reducing war taxes and diverting them to peaceful uses
through hiring a part-time Peace Secretary who will help stimulate activity
in the Meeting and in the community.” (See
♇ 7 June 2018 for more information
about this.)
A reprinted letter from Gerald Morsello of Eugene Meeting to the
IRS
explained his tax refusal, which involved redirecting “a portion of my
Federal Income Tax” to “the Oregon Urban Rural Credit Union for use by
people most affected by recent Federal domestic budget cuts.” He said he
was doing this although he would prefer “to be able to place the money I
owe the Federal government in a legally recognized alternative, such as the
World Peace Tax Fund.”
An letter from Constance Jolly of the Berkeley Meeting to the
IRS,
excerpted from the newsletter of the National Council for a World Peace Tax
Fund, explained her redirection of 35% of her taxes to “an organization
that works for peaceful reconciliation, for human rights, and for
disarmament.” Excerpt:
I am not one who breaks the law lightly, but for me the law that commands
its citizens to do evil is less binding than the higher law that commands
that “Thou shalt not kill.”
An announcement for an upcoming conference on “A Religious Response to
Growing Militarism” sponsored by College Park Quarterly Meeting said that
it “will be a nurturing and supportive gathering for those Friends and
others who are facing issues related to draft and tax resistance,
[etc.]”
A note read:
The 1981 Tax Resistance issue of Newsletter is
available (40¢ each) from 331 17th
Ave.
E., Seattle
WA 94112. Contents
include information about forms of tax resistance or refusal, possible
penalties, resources for decision-making, a national listing of
counselors, Centers, and Alternative Funds.
Those contents sound like the sort of stuff
NWTRCC
puts out nowadays. But
NWTRCC
wasn’t founded until , so I don’t know
who was putting out such a newsletter in
.
An article concerning statements by Episcopalian and Catholic bishops on
nuclear weapons included this section:
[I]n Archbishop Raymond G.
Hunthausen of Seattle proposed that “a sizable number of people in the
state” undertake a taxpayers revolt to protest the buildup in nuclear
arms. He argued that refusing to pay fifty per cent of income taxes “in
resistance to nuclear murder and suicide” would be “a definite step
toward total disarmament… Our paralyzed political process needs that
catalyst of nonviolent action based on faith. We have to refuse to give
incense — in our day tax dollars — to our nuclear idol.”
Brief summaries of the activities of various meetings included such notices
as these:
“Conscience and Military Tax Campaign [and] Consequences of Tax Refusal”
were among topics on the agenda of University Meeting’s “study
hour.”
“Eugene friends held a threshing session on tax resistance: ‘No consensus
was sought, and the Meeting was clearly divided on this difficult
issue.’ ”
“Conscription of Taxes” was discussed by the Phoenix Meeting in the
context of “discussions growing out of the New Call to Peacemaking
statement.”
The Friends Committee on War Tax Concerns is well on the way to working itself
out of a job. The committee was established early in
to accomplish three tasks: (1) to publish a
guidebook on war tax concerns; (2) to encourage consultation on war tax issues
throughout the Society of Friends; and (3) to develop queries and advices for
Quaker employers.
The proposed guidebook has become a series of pamphlets and a bibliography.
Three of the pamphlets, the ones on Quaker history and recent statements of
Friends, on the Biblical basis for conscientious objection to war taxes, and
on the spiritual and rational bases for war tax concerns, should be in print
by , along with the bibliography.
In mid-continent and mid- there will be
a conference for employers. Invitations will be sent to schools and religious
organizations operated by all the groups participating in the New Call to
Peacemaking. About 100 people are expected to gather and explore the positions
that can be adopted vis à vis the Internal Revenue Service
and the range of possible solutions to problems which may arise.
Two regional conferences, “Money and Conscience” and “Paying for War/Paying
for Peace,” were held in . Both were very
successful. Several more are planned for .
FCWTC
will provide resource material and assistance with program planning for
conferences wherever there are Friends who recognize the importance of war tax
issues and are willing to do the basic planning and arrangements. I hope this
means some of us.
Each of us on the committee represents a different Friends organization. Most
of us refuse to pay some or all of the taxes that pay for war. However, the
committee is concerned with “concerns,” not just resistance. We believe that
all Friends should go as far as they can, but not all are called to go in the
same direction. What aspect of this explosive issue do you most want to learn
more about, discuss with other Friends, make the subject of a conference? If
you can’t give time, can you give money? The basic program of the committee is
to prepare resource materials, distribute them where they are needed, help
people with similar problems and concerns to get in touch with each other and
then to lay the committee down, probably about .
I will try to get to any meeting in Southern California (maybe further) and
hope to get to Intermountain Yearly Meeting in
(Anne Friend, 836
N. Beaudry, № 5, Los
Angeles, CA 90012).
Lon Fendall at the Center for Peace Learning, Newberg,
OR 97132, is willing to
visit some meetings in North Pacific Yearly Meeting, as way opens, and/or to
help plan a conference. Linda Coffin is the staff at FCWTC,
P.O. Box 6441,
Washington,
D.C. 20009.
Any of us would like to hear from you.
If April 15 is getting to you more every year, think about what you can do
about it. And while you’re thinking about it, do something to get others
thinking about it, too.
