Miscellaneous tax resisters → individual local or state tax resisters → Robert Purvis

War tax resistance in the Friends Journal in

In mentions of war tax resistance in the Friends Journal were few and far between.

In the issue, Cliff Marrs (a British Quaker) gave his interpretation of the “Render Unto Caesar…” koan from the Bible, and in particular what guidance it offers to those war tax resisters who take advice from scripture. His point-of-view:

  • The idea that Jesus was circumscribing a political realm that was Caesar’s domain, and a sacred realm that belonged to God, is anachronistic. Jesus, and his Jewish listeners, “regarded God as the Creator, and the whole universe as God’s domain — including politics — and would not have distinguished between the political and the religious.”
  • The tax in question “functioned as a kind of rent that assumed that all land belonged ultimately to the Roman Empire,” while core Jewish scripture makes it clear that Israel belongs to God.
  • The fact that Jesus had to ask someone else for a coin to use to illustrate his point may be significant — perhaps he did not carry such a coin because its use of a graven image that represented a member of the Roman ruling class as a divinity was idolatrous, or perhaps he had rejected Roman money and so (by the logic of his epigram) its taxes as well. Maybe he was suggesting that it’s not sufficient to refuse to pay Roman taxes, but you ought to reject Roman money as well: give it back to Caesar and be done with it.
  • Would Jesus, who cared for the poor, really promote a regressive poll tax?
  • Paul’s unmistakable pay-your-taxes command in Romans 13 isn’t necessarily an interpretation of Jesus’s instructions, or even good advice in general, but was just a pragmatic, common-sense instruction to Christians living in Rome.
  • Since Jesus was ultimately charged with promoting resistance to Roman taxes prior to his execution, this seems to indicate that at least some of his listeners interpreted his message that way.
  • In short, biblically-oriented tax resisters should not be frightened off by the “Render Unto Caesar…” episode, as its interpretation is not so simple as its vulgar usage may suggest.

An obituary notice for Edith Carlton Browne in the same issue noted that “[s]he and [her husband] Gordon became military tax resisters in , and she continued that witness throughout her life.” Another obituary, for Lorraine Ketchum Cleveland, said that “[i]n she became a war-tax refuser in a case that eventually went to the Supreme Court (Cleveland, Cadwallader, and the AFSC vs. U.S.A.). Lorraine continued throughout her life to deduct from her federal taxes that portion that would be used for war, and sent it to a worthy cause.”

The issue mentioned the tax resistance of Robert Purvis, who refused to pay his Pennsylvania state taxes in protest against the state’s denial of equal voting rights to black citizens around , and then refused to pay “that portion of his property tax that went to support the schools” in when his children were refused admission to the whites-only classrooms. Purvis wrote:

I have borne this outrage ever since the innovation upon the usual practice of admitting all the children of the township into the public schools, and at considerable expense, have been obliged to obtain the services of private teachers to instruct my children, while my school tax is greater, with a single exception, than that of any other citizen of the township. It is true, (and the outrage is made but the more glaring and insulting): I was informed by a pious Quaker director, with sanctifying grace, imparting, doubtless, an unctuous glow to his saintly prejudices, that a school in the village of Mechanicsville was appropriated for “thine.” The miserable shanty, with all its appurtenances, on the very line of the township, to which this benighted follower of George Fox alluded, is, as you know, the most flimsy and ridiculous sham which any tool of a skin-hating aristocracy have resorted to, to cover or protect his servility.

An article in the issue mentioned in passing that “Quakers withdrew almost as a single body from the Pennsylvania legislature in rather than vote taxes for war.”

An obituary notice for Wally Nelson (not, I believe, a Quaker, but the obituary says he “demonstrated the values and commitment of a Friend; by his loving manner and unwavering integrity, he shaped an ideal for Friends to aspire to”) mentions his war tax resistance activities:

In , he cofounded Peacemakers, a national organization dedicated to active nonviolence as a way of life. In , he and his wife, Juanita Nelson, began their lifelong practice of refusing to pay taxes used for armaments and killing.… During , the couple was among the founders of the Valley Community Land Trust, Pioneer Valley War Tax Resisters, and the Greenfield Farmers Market. He was well known as a regular market vendor in downtown Greenfield and as a participant in the annual war tax protest in front of the Greenfield Post Office on tax day.

The issue noted that the Northern Yearly Meeting had “approved a minute expressing support for the Religious Freedom Peace Tax Fund Bill and for those who are conscientiously opposed to war taxes.”

At this point, those Quakers who cannot pay for military and weapons are subject to great sacrifice. Some have refused employment that would result in a taxable level of income. Others have exposed themselves to confiscation of their homes and other possessions. We seek a legal mechanism whereby we may pay taxes and be responsible citizens without funding human death and suffering. We view adoption of [the Bill] as providing religious freedom to many of our Society currently suffering for their faithfulness to their Quaker beliefs.

Add that all up and we get:

  • one abstract discussion of whether war tax resistance conflicts with Jesus’s teachings
  • three mentions of American war tax resisters recently deceased
  • one mention of a tax resister from
  • one mention of American Quaker war tax resistance from
  • one contemporary American Quaker Meeting advocating the latest Peace Tax Fund scheme and alluding to the acts of contemporary Quaker war tax resisters

Which is to say: next to nothing about actual real-life American Quakers doing actual, honest-to-goodness war tax resistance in .

On , Robert Purvis wrote to the tax collector in Philadelphia to explain why he would not be paying his taxes to fund a school system that was for white children only:

You called yesterday for the tax upon my property in this Township, which I shall pay, excepting the “School Tax.” I object to the payment of this tax, on the ground that my rights as a citizen, and my feelings as a man and a parent have been grossly outraged in depriving me, in violation of law and justice, of the benefits of the school system which this tax was designed to sustain.

I am perfectly aware that all that makes up the character and worth of the citizens of this township look upon the proscription and expulsion of my children from the Public School as illegal, and an unjustifiable usurpation of my right. I have borne this outrage ever since the innovation upon the usual practice of admitting all the children of the Township into the Public Schools, and at considerable expense, have been obliged to obtain the services of private teachers to instruct my children, while my school tax is greater, with a single exception, than that of any other citizen of the township.

It is true (and the outrage is made but the more glaring and insulting) I was informed by a pious Quaker director, with a sanctifying grace, imparting, doubtless, an unctuous glow to his saintly prejudices, that a school in the village of Mechanicsville was appropriated for “thine.” The miserable shanty, with all its appurtenances, on the very line of the township, to which this benighted follower of George Fox alluded, is, as you know, the most flimsy and ridiculous sham which any tool of a skin-hating aristocracy could have resorted to, to cover or protect his servility.

To submit by voluntary payment of the demand is too great an outrage upon nature, and, with a spirit, thank God, unshackled by this, or any other wanton and cowardly act, I shall resist this tax, which, before the unjust exclusion, had always afforded me the highest gratification in paying. With no other than the best feeling towards yourself, I am forced to this unpleasant position, in vindication of my rights and personal dignity against an encroachment upon them as contemptibly mean as it is infamously despotic.

Purvis’s protest was apparently effective, as the school board rescinded its racial exclusion policy.

This was not the first time Purvis had contemplated tax resistance. In an letter to the editor to the Philadelphia Public Ledger, he wrote:

How infamously tyrannical to extort payment for that which we are not allowed to possess! Can we feel any interest in the honor of a state which has disgracefully and unjustly dishonored us? Would not resistance by us to this unjust tax, based upon and demanded from the patriotism of the people, be in obedience to the principles of justice and right? Let the depredatory arm of the Commonwealth, through its officers, seize our goods or even our persons — the sacrifice will be made upon the altar of humanity. Let that suffice.

According to Margaret Hope Bacon’s But One Race: The Life of Robert Purvis: “The antiblack elements in the Philadelphia public reacted swiftly to his letter; the night of its publication his house was surrounded by an angry mob. Robert Purvis was afraid for the safety of his family. Fortunately for the Purvis household, but unfortunately for others, the rumor was spread that there were a large number of armed and dangerous men in the Purvis house, and the mob turned aside, and vented its anger by burning a black church in the vicinity.”

This interesting excerpt from Black Freedom: The Nonviolent Abolitionists from 1830 through the Civil War (Carleton Mabee, ) introduces some tax refusal advocates from that period that I had not come across before:

Like the Garrisonians, Thoreau defied the fugitive slave law; he hid a fugitive in his house. Like the Garrisonians, Thoreau advocated the secession of the North from the South. Also like the Garrisonians, Thoreau did not vote. In his early years he did not vote largely from indifference to politics, but even when he became concerned about the folly of the Mexican War and the corruption of slavery, he remained a nonvoter; in fact he remained a nonvoter all his life. At an abolitionist meeting Thoreau explained tersely: “The fate of the country does not depend… on what kind of paper you drop into the ballot-box once a year, but on what kind of man you drop from your chamber into the street every morning.” All the Concord individualists, including Emerson, were likely to be nonvoters — they were likely to be willing to take but little responsibility for government, the economic order, education, or the church; they were anti-institutional and anti-establishment.

But Thoreau went beyond the Garrisonians by practicing one form of noncooperation with government that the Garrisonians seldom practiced. “Some are petitioning the state to dissolve the Union,” Thoreau wrote. “Why do they not dissolve it themselves — the union between themselves and the state — and refuse to pay their quote into its treasury?” For six years Thoreau did refuse to pay poll taxes, and accordingly in , during the Mexican War, he was imprisoned in Concord for one night until a friend paid his fine. Prison, said, Thoreau provocatively, “is the only house in a slave state in which a free man can abide with honor.”

The idea of tax refusals as a means of social protest was not new. There was considerable tradition among Quakers both in England and America to refuse to pay war taxes, and when they did refuse, the government sometimes confiscated their property. Just before the American Revolution, Americans resisting British encroachments often refused to pay stamp taxes. During the Revolution the young Quaker-raised sailor, Paul Cuffee, the son of a Negro father and an Indian mother, refused to pay his Massachusetts taxes because as a nonwhite he was not allowed to vote. He was jailed, but he continued to agitate the question, using the popular slogan, no taxation without representation, and by Massachusetts Negroes had won the right to vote.

In the early years of the Nonresistance Society, it considered the question of refusing to pay taxes. For example, the society’s treasurer, Charles K. Whipple, argued in that the American Revolution could have been won more speedily and under more favorable circumstances for the later development of America if the Revolutionists’ tax refusals had been entirely nonviolent and on a larger scale. [See ♇ 27 October 2007.] The result would have been widespread suffering for Americans, Whipple admitted; their property would have been confiscated to pay the taxes. But if they had patiently submitted to this and continued their noncooperation, the prisons would have been “filled to overflowing” with nonviolent rebels, the British could have accomplished nothing, and their power would have come to a stop without blood.

In Negro leaders became well aware of circumstances in which they felt it was unjust for them to be required to pay taxes. Charles Lenox Remond, writing from England — where he was lecturing with one of the Nonresistance Society’s tax-refusal advocates, John A. Collins — urged Negroes to be more radical in their demands, and added: “Let every colored man, called upon to pay taxes to any institution in which he is deprived or denied its privileges and advantages, withhold his taxes, although it costs imprisonment or confiscation. Let our motto be — no privileges, no pay.” … The black national convention, meeting in Cleveland, adopted a resolution that came close to being an endorsement for Negroes refusing to pay taxes wherever they could not vote: “Whereas we firmly believe with the fathers of , that taxation and representation ought to go together; therefore, resolved, that we are very much in doubt as to the propriety of our paying any tax… until we are permitted to be represented.”

Garrisonians usually recommended paying taxes even if the taxes seemed unjust. When the tax question came up during the Mexican War, the Negro antislavery lecturer W.W. Brown gave the stock Garrisonian answer: we are coerced to pay taxes; we are not to blame for what the government does with the money it seizes from us. As usual with the Garrisonians, when they discussed whether they should pay taxes, they discussed it more in moralistic than in pragmatic terms. They were more likely to ask whether paying taxes was consistent with nonvoting and disunion than to ask whether it would be an effective form of protest, and, if so, under what circumstances and at what cost.

Despite the usual Garrisonian opposition, there were a few abolitionists, in addition to Thoreau, who helped to strengthen the slender thread of tax-refusal tradition by deliberately refusing to pay taxes.

Before Thoreau refused to pay taxes, his Concord friend, nonresistant Bronson Alcott, had already refused. Alcott had acted as a general protest against government interference with individual liberty, including government support of slavery. Three years before Thoreau was sentenced to jail for tax refusal, Alcott had already been sentenced to jail for the same reason, but Alcott was released before being actually jailed because someone quickly paid his tax.

A Negro storekeeper in Bath, in upstate New York stopped paying taxes for a new school building in when he discovered that his children as Negroes were to be excluded from it. The tax collector insisted on his paying, and when the storekeeper still refused, the collector auctioned off some of his goods in his store. The storekeeper was noble, said Douglass’s North Star.

In , Garrisonian leader [Robert] Purvis protested the new policy that segregated his children in the public schools of Byberry, Pennsylvania, by refusing to pay school taxes; the Liberator called it a “manly protest.” Purvis also protested at the same time by boycotting the segregated schools, having his children privately tutored.

Purvis’s influence was weighty. He was the highest-ranking Negro in the antislavery societies; he had served as one of the vice-presidents of the American Antislavery Society and for at least five years as president of one of its strongest auxiliaries, the Pennsylvania Antislavery Society. In addition, gentlemen farmer Purvis was the second largest taxpayer in his township. Purvis’s weight made itself felt. He succeeded in having the Byberry schools reopened equally to white and black children. [See ♇ 4 November 2013.]

In the struggle for the control of Kansas in the mid-1850s, free-soil settlers sometimes refused to pay taxes to the pro-Southern Kansas government because they did not recognize it as legitimate. John Brown was a guerrilla abolitionist who supported such refusal, and his brother-in-law, American Missionary Association agent Samuel Adair, was a Tappanite nonviolent abolitionist who also supported it. Adair joined his Kansas community in an open decision to refuse to pay taxes, for which pro-Southerners punished the community with violence.

The quote from Lenox Remond comes from a letter that appeared in the Liberator on .