Some historical and global examples of tax resistance →
United States →
North Carolina colonial rebellions, 1735–66
In North Carolina, for nearly three-quarters of the first century of its settlement the Government was the veriest farce imaginable.
During that time not merely all political authority but all private property in the soil as well, was vested in the Lords Proprietors, as they were called; yet it was said that one of them if here “would be regarded no more than a ballad singer would be.” Under their rule “the people of North Carolina were confessedly the freest of the free.” Generally speaking, they were sarcastically said to recognize no authority not derived from themselves and to have deposed their Governors until they actually thought they had a right so to do.
Rebellions, too, so-called, were the order of the day.
That passage comes from an address by William L. Saunders, then the Secretary of State of North Carolina, in .
Saunders had been a commander in Robert E. Lee’s rebel army, and was a North Carolina patriot.
His address sought to trace the ornery and independence-minded Carolina character back to the early history of the colony.
In the course of this, he includes these descriptions:
The first outbreak under royal rule was brought about by the attempt of Governor [Gabriel] Johnston to force the people to bring their rents to the collectors at places designated by the Government.
In this connection it must be remembered that in those days the people did not own their lands in fee-simple as we do now, but were tenants and held them upon payment of an annual rent of so much per hundred acres.
Owing to the lack of a sufficient currency, at a very early day laws were passed making these rents payable in produce and collectible on the premises.
The trouble began in and several years elapsed before it was ended.
In the year the people thought forbearance had ceased to be a virtue, and having exhausted all peaceable means, began to resort to force.
In that year, at the General Court at Edenton, a man was imprisoned for contempt of Court, but the people of Bertie and Edgecombe, which then covered substantially all the settled territory to the westward, hearing that he was imprisoned for refusing to deliver his rents at the appointed places, rose in arms to the number of 500 and marched on the town, intending to rescue the man by force from the Court, in the meantime cursing the King and uttering a great many rebellious speeches.
When within five miles of Edenton they learned the truth, and that the man having made his peace with the Court, had been discharged from custody.
The “mob” thereupon dispersed, threatening, however, “the most cruel usage to such persons as durst come to demand any rents of them for the future.” This was the account of the affair the Governor himself gave, to which he added a declaration of his inability to punish them if they carried out their threats.
The trouble did not end here nor for several years.
In this same Governor Johnston attempted to
deprive the old counties of the province of their immemorial right to send
five delegates each to the Assembly, and issued writs of election for only
two members to the county. The result was that the old counties refused to
regard his writs of election, and when they voted each voter put on his
ballot the names of five men already agreed upon and the sheriffs so
returned. The Legislature thereupon declared the elections void. But the
people would vote in no other way, and in consequence the old counties for
eight years were not represented in the Assembly, and not being represented,
refused to pay taxes or to do any other act that recognized the authority of
the Assembly. The new counties that sent only two members, seeing what the
old ones were doing, said it was not fair to make them bear the whole burden
of the Government, and they, too, refused to pay taxes. And this was the
condition of the Province for eight years, at the end of which time full
representation was restored. And the Governor was powerless to change it.
The next serious trouble grew out of the opposition to the notorious Stamp Act.
This was an act of the British Parliament requiring everything to be stamped just as has been the case here under the Internal Revenue System.
The stamp masters were seized and forced to swear they would have nothing to do with the stamps, and it being known when the vessel bringing the stamps would come up to Wilmington, Colonels Ashe and Waddell, having called out the militia from Brunswick and the adjoining counties to the number of some 700 men, seized the vessel and held her until her commander promised not to permit the stamps to be taken from her.
Tryon, the new Governor, was a prisoner in his own house and utterly powerless.
Nor was this all.
The royal sloop Viper, then on duty in the river, having seized several vessels for want of stamped papers, the inhabitants of Wilmington entered into an agreement not to supply his Majesty’s ships with provisions until such seizures were stopped; and the boatmen sent for supplies were put in jail.
This agreement was carried out until the Viper, after being entirely without rations for a day or two, was driven to terms and stopped her seizures.
This was in the winter of –.
There was neither disguise nor concealment about all this. Everything was
done in the broad open day, by men perfectly well known, and in the very
presence of the Governor, as it were.
Immediately after this period, the Regulator movement began its tax resistance campaign in North Carolina.
Saunders notes that among the items on the agenda of the North Carolina rebels during the American Revolution was the legal rehabilitation of the Regulators, who had been defeated and forced to sign loyalty oaths.
There are many ways to support tax resisters when they are targeted by the police or courts, including:
Another way to help is to disrupt the trials or to break resisters out of prison.
Today I’ll give some examples of these tactics.
Alexander Hamilton complained of the American Whiskey Rebels:
“The audacity of the perpetrators of those excesses was so great, that an armed banditti ventured to seize and carry off two persons who were witnesses against the rioters… in order to prevent their giving testimony of the riot to a court then sitting, or about to sit.”
The American tax rebels in the Fries rebellion did what they could to break their comrades out of prison:
As soon as it became known the arrests were made, the leaders of the opposition to the law determined to rescue them, if possible.
For the purpose of consulting on the subject, a meeting was called at the public house…
Notices were carried around the evening before land left at the houses of those known to be friendly to the movement.
By ten o’clock a number of people had assembled, and considerable excitement was manifested.
The general sentiment was in favor of immediate organization and marching to Bethlehem to take the prisoners from the hands of the Marshal.
The crowd was formed in a company, and John Fries elected captain.
They were variously armed; some with guns, others with swords and pistols, while those with less belligerent feelings, carried clubs.
The people of Northampton, meanwhile, had also taken action in reference to a rescue of the prisoners.
A meeting to consult on the subject was called…
Notice was also given for two or three companies of light horse to meet there at the same time…
Fries led a group of about 140 armed rebels to the building where the prisoners were held, and then after a tense standoff with the Marshal and about twenty of his posse, managed to win the surrender of the prisoners.
Victory was sweet, but brief, as this provoked President John Adams to send in the militia.
Fries and some of his companions were captured, convicted of treason, and sentenced to be hanged (Adams pardoned them).
Those forefathers to the Rebecca Rioters known as “Jack a Lents” rescued two of their number who had been arrested for their roles in toll booth destruction.
A news account said:
[T]he whole gang appeared soon after, who demanded the said prisoners, threatening, in case of refusal, to pull his house down, and burn his barns and stables, and immediately discharged several loaded pieces into the house, which happily did no damage.
The justice finding himself and family beset in such a manner, discharged several blunderbusses and fowling-pieces at them, whereby one was shot dead on the spot, and several so wounded, that ’tis not believed they will recover.
At this the rioters fled with precipitation, leaving their two companions behind them.
But the Jack a Lents weren’t giving up.
A later dispatch reads:
[A]bove twenty of those turnpike cutters or levellers, as they call themselves, though that is a character by much too good for them, met with the said keeper [of the county jail] at the King’s Head Inn at Ross fair, and demanding his reasons for detaining those two men in custody, without giving him time to return an answer, dragged him out of the inn into the street, knocked him down several times, and almost murdered him, notwithstanding all that the innkeeper and his servants could do to prevent it, who were used in a very cruel manner for assisting him.
The villains immediately carried the keeper to Wilton’s Bridge, where at first they concluded to throw him into the river Wye; but at length they agreed to carry him to a place where they would secure him till they themselves had fetched the prisoners out of custody.
The better to complete that design, they dragged him four miles in his boots and spurs, to a place called Horewithey, a public-house, where he was kept prisoner, beat in a shameful manner by those merciless wretches, and obliged to write a discharge to the turnkey, being threatened, in case of refusal, to be hanged upon the spot.
When pensioner Sylvia Hardy was taken to court for her refusal to pay her council tax in , her supporters in the Devon Pensioners’ Action Forum tried to blockade the court and prevent the officials from entering.
More recently, hundreds of British “constitutionalist” tax protesters “stormed a courtroom and attempted to make a citizens’ arrest on a judge in support of a man challenging his council tax bill.”
One of them shouted “seal the court” and another sat in the judge’s seat and officiously ordered the accused to be released.
A number of protesters staged a sit-down blockade of the police vehicles that were summoned to the courthouse.
The court hearing was postponed.
During the tax revolts in Turkey in , the government tried to quietly round up the leaders of the rebellion in the dead of night.
That didn’t work out too well, as the rebels turned the tables:
Haci Akif Agha, one of the important local notables and a leader of the revolt, however, offered a successful resistance to the gendarmes who came to arrest him.
His resistance publicised the arrests, and the citizens immediately organised themselves for the release of the prisoners.
The morning after the arrests, a large crowd of furious Muslims surrounded the Governor’s residence, demanding the return of the exiles.
The Governor escaped to a private house, but was captured and kept prisoner in the İbrahim Pasha Mosque.
The crowd also took revenge against the local police, and went to retrieve the exiled mufti and his companions, “the Governor having been compelled under the threat of death to give orders for their return.”
In 1737, in North Carolina, rumor spread that a man had been imprisoned for refusing to pay a property tax (he had in fact been imprisoned for contempt of court).
500 armed people marched on Edenton, where the prisoner was held, meaning to free him, but by the time they got there he had already been released.
The “mob” thereupon dispersed, threatening, however, “the most cruel usage to such persons as durst come to demand any quitrents of them for the future.”
This was the account of the affair the Governor himself gave, to which he added a declaration of his inability to punish them if they carried out their threats.
Today I’ll continue our look at the violent side of tax resistance campaigns by giving some examples of assaults and intimidation directed at collaborators with the tax system:
In Paris during the French Revolution, legal proceedings against people who destroyed the tax offices were abandoned when neither the officers in charge of the investigation or the National Assembly itself had the courage to stand up to popular indignation and threats.
Witnesses who were called to testify against the Fries Rebels “were generally very reluctant to give information, being afraid the insurgents would do them some injury.”
In the Whiskey Rebellion, “William Richmond, who had given information against some of the rioters… had his barn burnt, with all the grain and hay which it contained…”
During the Rebecca Riots, two or three hundred Rebeccaites met at an inn in Pontyberem and, during the course of the meeting, forced the innkeeper to swear not to admit the toll collector at the inn.
In another example: “the dead body of Thomas Thomas… was found in a river near Brechfa!
This man had been very much opposed to the Rebecca movement, and… had been to Carmarthen to make a complaint to the authorities against some Rebeccaites; on his return home that night he found his house, etc., on fire.
Bearing this in mind, together with other circumstantial evidence, it is plain that he had some bitter enemies in the neighbourhood, and it was generally believed that he had been waylaid and murdered.”
Thomas had on another occasion testified against his servant and had him jailed, and for this the Rebeccaites ransacked his house, destroying what they could.
During the Tithe War in Ireland, resisters did what they could to prevent people from cooperating with attempt to seize and auction off resisters’ goods:
[I]t almost invariably happened that either the assembled spectators were afraid to bid, lest they should incur the vengeance of the peasantry, or else they stammered out such a low offer, that, when knocked down, the expenses of the sale would be found to exceed it.
The same observation applies to the crops.
Not one man in a hundred had the hardihood to declare himself the purchaser.
Sometimes the parson, disgusted at the backwardness of bidders, and trying to remove it, would order the cattle twelve or twenty miles away in order to their being a second time put up for auction.
But the locomotive progress of the beasts was always closely tracked, and means were taken to prevent either driver or beast receiving shelter or sustenance throughout the march.
One clergyman had to import some sixty workers to help him take his tithes “in kind” from the farmers in his parish, “from distant counties, and at high wages, who yet were incapable of obtaining more than a small portion of tithes, being interrupted by a rabble — chiefly women — though men were lurking in the background to support them.”
In colonial North Carolina during the Stamp Act agitation, “The stamp masters were seized and forced to swear they would have nothing to do with the stamps, and it being known when the vessel bringing the stamps would come up to Wilmington, Colonels Ashe and Waddell, having called out the militia from Brunswick and the adjoining counties to the number of some 700 men, seized the vessel and held her until her commander promised not to permit the stamps to be taken from her.”
During the Reform Bill uprising in the , “Threats had been employed to prevent auctioneers from selling distrained goods; and an auctioneer in Bath had been obliged, in consequence of intimidation, to issue a handbill, in which he gave public notice, that he would not receive for sale any goods distrained for the non-payment of King’s Taxes.”
Irish Household Tax resisters recently mobbed Ireland’s Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform, surrounding his car and chanting “fucking scumbag” Another politician who witnessed the event said: “In my view, there was an element of thuggery to it.
Some of the protestors prevented him from getting out of the car park.”
When Ondárroa tried to hire an outside debt collection company to go after resisters; “Upon learning of the assignment of this work to the Bilbaoan firm Gesmunpal, the nationalist left spread slogans via Internet in favor of ‘civil disobedience,’ as well as calls and letters against the company.
Gesmunpal resigned.”
During the Annuity Tax resistance movement in Edinburgh, a newspaper was sued for publicizing the names of the people who rented carts to the government for hauling away distrained goods — the grounds of the suit being that such publicity would be damaging to the business of the carters.
The Poll Tax resistance movement in Thatcher’s Britain included attacks and threats directed at collaborators with the tax, for example:
“Attacks and threats have been made against Bristol newsagents and shops where people can pay the Poll Tax.
Windows have been smashed and graffiti daubed over businesses which have become agents for the Bristol-based company ‘Penalty Points.’
The firm installs special tills with its agents to collect the community charge on behalf of local authorities for a fee.
Mr. Ross Hendry, a spokesman for the company… said ‘because of the attacks, one newsagent in Patchway has now declined taking an agency after a brick was thrown through his window.
He said another newsagent in Bishoport Avenue, Hartclife had the words ‘Poll Tax scab’ and ‘you’re the first’ scrawled in white paint across his window.
A Circle K store in Cardiff where the revolutionary scheme was launched on with 48 agents, had its door locks jammed with superglue.”
some of the posters with threatening messages aimed at bailiffs and other poll tax collaborators
Intimidation of bailiffs (people authorized to seize and sell property for tax arrears) was widespread: “Housing schemes and estates were plastered with posters.
One showing a vicious dog, read ‘Bailiffs?
Make my day!’
Another showing a picture of Malcolm X holding a machine gun looking out from behind the curtains, read: ‘Bailiffs we’re ready.’
A third showed a picture of a bailiff swinging in a noose.
It read ‘Dead bailiffs don’t knock on doors.’
In some areas bailiffs and registration officers were photographed and their portraits were reproduced on posters which read ‘wanted’ and listed their ‘crimes.’
These images were extremely popular… People were used to seeing images of themselves in the role of victim.
Now wherever they looked there were images of their adversaries in this role.”
“Wherever the council registration officers went they were harassed.
In Glasgow violent threats drove canvasser Robert Stevenson to quit his job.
He was physically threatened twice in four weeks and continually harassed:
I’d just put the form through the door when this guy across in the garden opposite started shouting.
He was sitting in the garden with about four others and they were all giving me dirty looks.
He said that if I came back to collect the form I would need a tank for protection.
I was in no doubt that they were serious.
I didn’t finish my last street.
I just chucked it.
“…another canvasser… was ‘harassed by a gang.’
In this case, it was reported that:
Four or five youths cornered him in a close in Gairbraid Avenue and subjected him to abuse.
A Strathclyde police spokesman revealed: “They said it was a ‘No Poll Tax Area’ and told the worker to get out, which he did.”
“Following these reports, the Poll Tax registration officer admitted that ‘there had been at least four other incidents involving canvassers’ and… canvassers had been threatened (leaflets were grabbed from their hands).
Already over two members of his staff had resigned because of fears about their personal safety.”
Mayors and municipal councils resigned en masse to support the French wine-growers’ tax strike of , and, according to one account, “there have been threats to burn the property of those mayors failing to resign.”
“Mr. Trueman, a Poll Tax snooper whose job was to call on people and badger them into filling the registration forms, [was] unable to cope with the abuse…
Mrs. Trueman found the corpse of her husband as she came back from shopping.
Fred Trueman, 52, an employee of Bristol City, had hanged himself.
“No-one can imagine what terrible pressure he had to work under,” she claimed.
“He was sworn at and threatened; he couldn’t stand it any more.”
