Some historical and global examples of tax resistance →
Germany →
in 1848 →
Karl Marx
The more I uncover about historical examples of tax resistance campaigns and campaigners, the more there seems to be to uncover.
By accident, while reading a book unrelated to my tax resistance research a few days ago, I found a reference to Karl Marx promoting a tax resistance campaign in Germany.
Germany was a chaos of uprisings in , and its rulers and taxers had only the most dubious legitimacy, as the first popularly elected parliament had been shut down by the royal and military aristocracy before they could enact something resembling a Constitution.
That parliament responded by ruling, unanimously, that the government was officially out of business:
So long as the National Assembly is not at liberty to continue its sessions in Berlin, the Brandenburg cabinet has no right to dispose of government revenues and to collect taxes.
, the paper issued a further appeal (signed by Marx and two others):
The Rhenish District Committee of Democrats calls upon all democratic associations in the Rhine Province to have the following measures decided upon and carried through:
Since the Prussian National Assembly itself has ruled that taxes are not to be paid, their forcible collection must be resisted everywhere and in every way.
In order to repulse the enemy the local militia must be organized everywhere.
The cost of weapons and ammunition for impecunious citizens is to be defrayed by the community or by voluntary contributions.
The authorities are to be asked everywhere to state publicly whether they recognize the decisions of the National Assembly and intend to carry them out.
In case of refusal committees of public safety are to be set up, and where possible this should be done with the consent of the local councils.
Local councils opposed to the Legislative Assembly should be re-elected by a universal vote.
This was pretty straightforwardly a declaration of revolutionary (or counterrevolutionary, depending on your perspective) war via an outpouring of passive verbs.
The aristocrats & generals, who got the jump on Marx and his militias and seized political power, took Marx to court, but were unable to convince a jury to convict.
(Edmund Wilson, in whose book To The Finland Station I first learned about this case, writes that “the effect [of Marx’s defense] on the jury was so great that Marx was thanked on their behalf by the foreman for his ‘extremely informative speech.’ ”)
Quite apart from the question whether the decision on the refusal to pay taxes is legally valid or not the document [the appeal] obviously presented an example of incitement to revolt and to civil war.
The accused also did not conceal that the word “enemy” (see Paragraph 2) should be understood as the internal enemy, the armed might of the Government.
Nevertheless the state authorities, despairing of a conviction under this article of the Code, have selected a milder indictment: the call for rebellion and resistance to the agents of state power…
Hence the case turned only on the political question: whether the accused were authorised by the decision of the National Assembly on the refusal to pay taxes to call in this way for resistance to the state power, to organise an armed force against that of the state, and to have government authorities removed and appointed at their discretion.
After a very brief consultation, the jury answered this question in the affirmative.
You may wonder why Karl Marx was so concerned with the legitimacy of governments and democratically-elected parliaments and Constitutional reforms and such.
It’s not what one typically thinks of as Marxist concerns.
From the looks of things, this was just a sort of strategic camouflage: Marx had picked up the bullhorn of a bourgeois democratic reform movement because he saw it as the necessary next step toward his real goal, which had nothing to do with bourgeois democracy.
A while back, I started looking for examples of ways tax resisters have organized mutual aid pacts to help diffuse the effects of government retaliation.
In the course of doing the research, though, I started collecting examples instead of a larger variety of collective projects resisters and their sympathizers have used in support of tax resistance.
Here are some of the examples I found:
Tax resister “insurance”
For instance, the Breton Association in
France, which organized to “form a common stock or fund… to indemnify the
subscribers for any expense they may be put to by their refusal to pay any
illegal contributions imposed upon the public.”
Another example was the Association
of Real Estate Taxpayers in
Chicago, which formed a cooperative legal fund to fight an offensive legal
battle against the tax.
American war tax resisters today can use the War Tax Resisters Penalty
Fund to defray penalties and interest seized by the
IRS.
The fund is raised as-needed by asking subscribers to contribute an equal
amount.
The oath of the Regulator tax resistance movement in the North Carolina
colony bound its signers to “bear an equal share in paying and making up
[the] loss” if “any of our company be put to expense or under any
confinement.”
Communes, collectives, and co-housing projects.
Some tax resisters have formed mutual support communities.
Whiteway Colony
was founded to try to live up to Tolstoyan ideals. The members of the
Bijou and
Agape communities live below a taxable
income so as to avoid paying taxes.
Supporting resisters as an employer
Some members of the Restored Israel of
Yahweh ran a construction business and agreed not to withhold federal
taxes from the wages of those employees who were fellow-members and who were
resisting taxes.
Vivien Kellems refused to withhold
taxes from her employees’ wages, saying: “They are all free American
citizens, thoroughly capable of performing all of the duties and
responsibilities of citizenship for themselves. And so, from this day, I am
not collecting nor paying their income taxes for them.”
Charles Kanjama recently urged Kenyans
to begin a tax resistance campaign, and said that to foil pay-as-you-earn
withholding, “participating employers and employees can enter into a
voluntary contract to convert monthly employment into quarterly or
half-yearly employment, thus effectively delaying tax liability for several
months.”
British nonconformists and women’s suffrage activists a century ago also
used this tactic. Auctions became rallies, with speeches and banners and
crowds that could number in the thousands. Supporters would pack the auction
house and refuse to leave their seats. On some occasions, violence broke
out. In some cases, auctioneers refused to handle goods that had been seized
for tax refusal.
Simply boycotting the auctions and refusing to buy seized goods is one way
communities offer support. It was part of the Quaker “Discipline” to refuse
to buy seized goods. When Valentine Byler’s horse was seized for non-payment
of the social security tax, “no Amish came to bid on the horses and, due to
a lack of bidders, they went for a good price, with the harnesses ‘thrown
in’ by the auctioneer.”
Pay cash so as not to leave a paper trail
Jessica Ramer and a
Claire
Files contributor brought this idea up. If you pay in cash
whenever you can, you give the recipient the opportunity to decide whether
or not to declare the income.
Cash tips are easy to under-report. I asked about that recently and was
told that most people pay with credit card/debit card and that the
government now uses a percentage method for tips. They look at the charged
meals, look at the number of total meals served, and then look at the
charged tips to figure out how much cash tips you received.
(100 meals served. 50 paid with card, tipping 15%. the government
calculates 15% from 100 meals even if cash tips are only 10%)
You can help out by tipping more when paying with cash or better yet, when
you pay with card, put 1% tip on it and put the rest out as cash. I even
leave a note for the server saying “this is your money, don’t
tell your boss, or the government. share it with the buss boy if that is
the policy.” This will help lower the average tip figures, but
still give the nice server what they have earned.
Use barter to avoid taxable/seizable transactions
Karl Hess found people willing to barter with him as he was dodging
IRS
seizures:
The other day I welded up a fish-smoking rack for a family in Washington,
D.C. It will earn me a year’s supply
of smoked fish. At about the same time, I helped a friend dig a foundation.
He’ll help me lay the concrete blocks for a workshop. Part of my pay for a
lecture at a New England college was the use of the school’s welding shop,
to make some metal sculptures. Three such sculptures have paid my
attorney’s fees in maintaining the tax resistance which is the reason
barter has become such an integral part of my life.
Manufacture and sell goods as alternatives to taxed products
Before the American Revolution, colonists who opposed Britain’s economic
control boycotted British products and began to produce homespun cloth,
alternatives to tea, and so forth. Gandhi’s independence campaign in India
made the wearing and production of homespun cloth central to the opposition,
and the Salt March was focused on the illegal production of untaxed,
non-foreign-monopoly salt.
An example today is home-brewed beer (which beats the excise tax on
alcoholic beverages).
Buycotts and boycotts that favor resisting businesses
One report from World War Ⅰ-era America noted that this was a technique used
by those who opposed the “Liberty Bonds”:
Efforts to prevent banks from handling the bonds have centered chiefly in
Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Missouri and
Oklahoma. The President of a Wisconsin bank has advised the Treasury that
his depositors, mostly Germans, or of German parentage, have withdrawn
many thousands of dollars from his bank because he aided the First Liberty
Loan.
These depositors, he added, had taken their accounts to two rival banks on
the understanding that those banks would not aid the second Liberty Loan.
The two banks, he reported, were not aiding the loan in any way.
Many banks have felt the pressure of German influence in this propaganda,
reports indicate. So pronounced was the movement that the States of
Minnesota, North and South Dakota, and Montana recently decided that they
would withdraw State funds from any bank which did not support the loan.
Social boycotts / shunning / noncooperation with tax collectors
Adolf Hausrath writes of Roman-occupied Judaea,
The people knew how to torment these officials of the Roman customs with
the petty cruelty which ordinary people develop with irreconcilable
persistency, whenever they believe this persistency to be due to their
moral indignation. In consequence of the theocratic scruples about the
duty of paying taxes, the tax-gatherers were declared to be unclean and
half Gentile.… among the Jews the words
“tax-gatherersand sinners,”“tax-gatherers and Gentiles,”“tax-gatherers and harlots,”
“tax-gatherers, murderers and robbers,” and similar insulting
combinations, were not only ready on the tongue and familiar, but were
accepted as theocratically identical in meaning. Thrust out from all
social intercourse, the tax-gatherers became more and more the pariahs of
the Jewish world. With holy horror did the Pharisee sweep past the lost
son of Israel who had sold himself to the Gentile for the vilest purpose,
and avoid the places which his sinful breath contaminated. Their
testimony was not accepted by Jewish tribunals. It was forbidden to sit
at table with them or eat of their bread. But their money-chests
especially were the summary of all uncleanness and the chief object of
pious horror, since their contents consisted of none but unlawful
receipts, and every single coin betokened a breach of some theocratic
regulation. To exchange their money or receive alms from them might
easily put a whole house in the condition of being unclean, and
necessitate many purifications. From these relations of the tax-officials
to the rest of the population, it can be readily understood that only the
refuse of Judaism undertook the office.
A social boycott of tax collectors was practiced in the years before
the American revolution. John Adams wrote:
At Philadelphia, the Heart-and-Hand Fire Company has expelled Mr. Hughes,
the stamp man for that colony. The freemen of Talbot county, in Maryland,
have erected a gibbet before the door of the court-house, twenty feet
high, and have hanged on it the effigies of a stamp informer in chains,
in terrorem till the Stamp Act shall be repealed; and
have resolved, unanimously, to hold in utter contempt and abhorrence
every stamp officer, and every favorer of the Stamp Act, and to
“have no communication with any such person, not even to speak to
him, unless to upbraid him with his baseness.” So triumphant is the
spirit of liberty everywhere.
Harassment of tax collectors was a signature action of the Whiskey
Rebellion. An early published resolution of the rebels read in part:
[W]hereas some men may be found amongst us, so far lost to every sense of
virtue and feeling for the distresses of this country, as to accept
offices for the collection of the duty:
Resolved, therefore, That in future we will consider such persons as
unworthy of our friendship; have no intercourse or dealings with them;
withdraw from them every assistance, and withhold all the comforts of life
which depend upon those duties that as men and fellow citizens we owe to
each other; and upon all occasions treat them with that contempt they
deserve; and that it be, and it is hereby most earnestly recommended to
the people at large to follow the same line of conduct towards them.
Tax collectors were tarred-and-feathered in America, both before and after
the revolution — the violent expulsion of tax collectors was a frequent
technique of the Whiskey rebels. Tax collectors have been the targets of
violent reprisal at many times and in many places. Because of this,
governments have often had to pay high salaries — or, frequently,
percentages of the take — to convince collectors to take on the job, which
only increases the resentment of those being collected from.
During the French Revolution and its aftermath, customs houses were burned
by mobs, tax rolls were destroyed, excise collectors were made to renounce
their jobs and then were run out of town — or in some cases killed.
The first Boer War was triggered when an armed group of Boers seized a
wagon that was being auctioned after it was distrained for resisted taxes.
The Whiskey rebels threatened to destroy the stills of those distillers
who complied in paying the excise tax.
Boycotts / social boycotts of non-resisters
If a tax resisting movement is large enough, it may be able to dissuade
people from paying taxes through boycotts or social boycotts of people
who are tax compliant. In Massachusetts, a group enforced a boycott of
taxed British imports by declaring that
…we further promise and engage, that we will not purchase any goods
of any persons who, preferring their own interest to that of the public,
shall import merchandise from Great Britain, until a general importation
takes place; or of any trader who purchases his goods of such importer:
and that we will hold no intercourse, or connection, or correspondence,
with any person who shall purchase goods of such importer, or retailer;
and we will hold him dishonored, an enemy to the liberties of his country,
and infamous, who shall break this agreement.
Maintain solidarity in the face of divide-and-conquer tactics
In
Germany, the government attempted to break a tax resistance movement by
offering to moderate its enforcement efforts against people who could show
that they had limited means. Karl Marx, who was promoting the resistance at
the time, saw this as a divide-and-conquer tactic:
The intention of the Ministry is only too clear. It wants to divide the
democrats; it wants to make the peasants and workers count themselves as
non-payers owing to lack of means to pay, in order to split them from
those not paying out of regard for legality, and thereby deprive the latter
of the support of the former. But this plan will fail; the people realizes
that it is responsible for solidarity in the refusal to pay taxes, just as
previously it was responsible for solidarity in payment of them.
Keep a record of the “sufferings” of resisters
The Quakers responded to persecution by keeping careful records of
individuals who had suffered thereby. In the archives of Quaker meetings,
you can find lists of people who had resisted militia taxes or tithes for
establishment church ministers, and what property was distrained by which
tax collector.
Sign petitions and public advertisements, engage in public protests
When the American Amish were trying to resist compulsory enrollment in the
social security system, 14,000 of them signed a petition to Congress.
During the Vietnam War, public advertisements were taken out by tax
resisters. In , for instance,
448 writers and editors put a full-page ad in the New
York Post declaring their intention to refuse to pay taxes for the
Vietnam War. The signatories included James Baldwin, Noam Chomsky, Philip K.
Dick, Betty Friedan, Allen Ginsberg, Paul Goodman, Paul Krassner, Norman
Mailer, Henry Miller, Tillie Olsen, Grace Paley, Thomas Pynchon, Susan
Sontag, Benjamin Spock, Gloria Steinem, Norman Thomas, Hunter S. Thompson,
Kurt Vonnegut, and Howard Zinn.
Protests, rallies, pickets, and the like have been a part of many
large-scale tax resistance campaigns.
Hold resisters’ property as an informal trustee
Some resisters who are vulnerable to property seizure find sympathetic
friends who are willing to hold the resisters’ property in their
names as a way of foiling seizure. Some war tax resister
alternative funds function
partially as “warehouse banks” that hold deposits of war tax resisters.
When a frustrated tax collector seized Ammon Hennacy’s protest signs
as he was picketing the
IRS
office — claiming that he planned to auction them off to pay Hennacy’s tax
debt — a friend of Hennacy helped him make new signs, each one marked “this
sign is the personal property of Joseph Craigmyle.”
Keep in contact with resisters and express support
After the press reported that Valentine Byler’s horse had been seized by the
IRS
as he was plowing his field, he got letters of support from all across
the country.
Form groups for mutual support & coordinated decision-making
Here there are too many examples to list.
Give financial aid to evicted rent strikers
When the Irish Land League launched its rent strike, it claimed that
“The funds will be poured out unstintedly to all who may endure
eviction in the course of the struggle. Our exiled brothers in America may
be relied on to contribute, if necessary, as many millions in money as they
have thousands, to starve out the landlords and bring the English tenantry
to its knees.”
Comfort and aid imprisoned resisters
The trick to supporting imprisoned tax resisters is to respect their real
needs and desires. When “someone interfered,” as Thoreau put
it, and paid his taxes in order to spring him from his night in jail, they
thought wrongly that they were doing Thoreau a favor, “for they
thought that my chief desire was to stand the other side of that stone wall.”
Juanita Nelson tells of the support she received in jail, where she had
been taken in her bathrobe from her home. Her supporters took the time to
learn how to support her in a way that was appropriate to her resistance:
Two fellow pacifists, one of them also a tax refuser, had been permitted
to come to me, since I would not go to them. I asked them what was
uppermost in my mind, what they’d do about getting properly dressed?
They said that this was something I would have to settle for myself. I
sensed that they thought it the better part of wisdom and modesty for me
to be dressed for my appearance in court. They were more concerned about
the public relations aspect of getting across the witness than I was. They
were also genuinely concerned, I knew, about making their actions truly
nonviolent, cognizant of the other person’s feelings, attitudes and
readiness. I was shaken enough to concede that I would like to have my
clothes at hand, in case I decided I would feel more at ease in them. The
older visitor, a dignified man with white hair, agreed to go for the
clothes in a taxicab.
They left, and on their heels came another visitor. She had been told that
in permitting her to come up, the officials were treating me with more
courtesy than I was according them. It was her assessment that the chief
deputy was hopeful that someone would be able to hammer some sense into me
and was willing to make concessions in that hope. But he had misjudged
the reliance he might place in her — she was not as critical as the
men. She did not know what she would do, but she thought she might wish to
have the strength and the audacity to carry through in the vein in which I
had started.
And she said. “You know, you look like a female Gandhi in that robe.
You look, well, dignified.”
That was my first encouragement. Everyone else had tended to make me feel
like a fool of the first water, had confirmed fears I already had on that
score. My respect and admiration for Gandhi, though not uncritical, was
deep. And if I in any way resembled him in appearance I was prepared to
try to emulate a more becoming state of mind. I reminded myself, too, that
I had on considerably more than the loincloth in which Gandhi was able to
greet kings and statesmen with ease. I need not be unduly perturbed about
wearing a robe into the presence of his honor.
Support the families of imprisoned resisters
When Gandhi was preparing the groundwork for a tax refusal campaign in
India, he noted that the Indian National Congress “should undertake
to feed the wives and families of those who may be imprisoned.”
Study the law, give legal support
When Elizabeth Cady Stanton was contemplating a tax resistance campaign for
women’s suffrage in the United States, she noted, “One thing is
certain, this course will necessarily involve a good deal of litigation,
and we shall need lawyers of our own sex whose intellects, sharpened by
their interests, shall be quick to discover the loopholes of retreat.”
Combine redirected taxes for dramatic charity giveaways
Larry Rosenwald wrote, of this technique, “To sit on the Grants and
Loans Committee of New England War Tax Resistance, and to dispense the
interest on refused taxes to a youth group in Chelsea, a video for cable
television on United States involvement in Central America, and a
people’s garden in Roxbury is to be reminded of the ideal community,
however blurred and fragmented, that war tax resistance is done on behalf
of, in the hope of helping to make it clear and whole.”
Can you think of any I’ve missed?
John Hampden was adopted as a sort of patron saint of the Women’s Tax Resistance League and other suffragist groups who used or defended the tactic of tax resistance.
To explain why the Hampden legend had the sort of resonance it did, I’ll turn to Stephen Dowell, who tells the story in his A History of Taxation and Taxes in England ():
The famous ship writs of king Charles Ⅰ. formed an extra-parliamentary method of obtaining the result of a tax on property.
They embodied the ultimate expression of the ingenuity of the king’s advisers in the invention of means to enable him to rule without a parliament.
It will be remembered that the position of the king as regards the levy of taxes on property was clear and acknowledged.
Except in the case of the Jews, who had been liable to indefinite extortion at the hands of the king because they were permitted to be here solely at his will, and in the case of the tenants of royal demesne, who by reason of their relation to the king as their landlord, were liable to tallage when he was in debt — with these two exceptions, the king never had any right to take an aid or subsidy from the subject without the consent of parliament, unless it were for knighting his son, for the marriage of his eldest daughter, or to ransom his person, and then only to a reasonable amount.
On any other occasion the grant was in the hands of parliament.
An acknowledgment of this right of parliament was implied in the terms used for the contributions in aid of the king, which were demanded as for “gifts” and “benevolences,” or under the specious pretext of “loans;” and these attempts at exaction and any tax of the kind had been suppressed by the Petition of Eight, to which the king had given his assent in .
There was nothing new in the use of ship writs.
They formed a well-known means of getting together a navy in times of war.
Before the invention of cannon there was little difference between any ship worthy to be called a merchant vessel and a ship of war; and in the times of the Plantagenets, when we had no permanent navy, when ships were wanted for war, the sea-port towns had been required to furnish their ships with men and equipment for the defence of the kingdom.
A permanent navy, commenced by Henry Ⅷ., with the Regent and the Harry Grâce à Dieu, or “the Great Harry,” had been carefully increased by him and Elizabeth, who, to the “one and twenty great ships and three notable galleys, with the sight whereof and the rest of the royal navy it was incredible how much her grace was delighted,” added, after the breach with Spain, one large ship at least every year.
But even after this formation of a permanent royal navy, it was from the merchant navy that two-thirds of the ships that formed the fleet against the Armada were derived; and they were the result of ship writs, issued according to precedent, to London and the other port towns, requiring them to furnish ships and their equipment for the defence of the kingdom.
Thus also, in , the greater number (12 out of 18) of the vessels employed in the attack on Algiers — the only warlike operation by sea undertaken by James Ⅰ. — were ships hired from private merchants; and on this occasion the port towns had been required to provide ships, and ship money was levied for the purpose.
And lastly, as late as in , when we were at war with Spain, the seaports had been required, after the dissolution of parliament, to provide and maintain a fleet of ships for three months.
But all these were war precedents, and applied only to the port towns; and Noy’s ingenuity in building upon them his famous superstructure consisted in drafting the preamble of the “new writs of an old edition,” so as to bring the case, as far as possible, within the precedents, and to prepare the way for a more extensive issue of writs throughout the kingdom, on the plan of the ship-geld of Anglo-Saxon times.
At this time, though England was at peace with other nations, a rising jealousy of the importance of the Dutch threatened at no distant date to lead to war with them upon the question of the close or open sea.
War was going on between the Spaniards and French and the Dutch.
While the Barbary pirates had extended their ravages upon our merchant ships even to within sight of our coasts.
Such was the state of affairs.
Noy made the most of them.
He began by infusing a spirit of crusade into the business by stigmatizing the corsairs as “Turks, enemies of the Christian name;” grouped these “thieves, robbers, and pirates of the sea” together in bands; recited their capture of ships and men in the channel and their further preparations of ships “to molest our merchants and grieve the kingdom;” and, referring to the wars abroad and the possibility that we might be involved in them — “the dangers which in these times of war do hang over our heads;” thus presented a strong case for providing for “the defence of the kingdom, safeguard of the sea, security of the subjects, and safe conduct of ships and merchandise coming to the kingdom and passing outwards to foreign parts.”
Then he went on to say — in allusion to the principle of the old ship-geld of Anglo-Saxon times, that the whole kingdom ought, it was true, to bear the burden of defence, but the maritime counties and towns were “more chiefly bound to set a helping hand, not only because they got more plentiful gain by the sea than others, but also because it was their duty of allegiance to defend the sea coast and keep up the honour of the king there,” for which reason writs were sent to them on this occasion.1
The writs were issued on .
There was no opposition to this levy, which, after all, was not an unprecedented charge, though some towns petitioned against what they regarded as an overestimate of the proportion of the whole amount to be paid by the town, and the citizens of London, who were charged with the payment of a fifth of the whole sum, remonstrated on the ground they had advanced in former times against tallage, of their peculiar privileges of exemption from such levies, by reason of their charter, their ancient liberties and acts of parliament.
But a summons of the lord mayor before the council and a stormy meeting ended in the submission of the Londoners to obey the king’s orders in the matter.
The amount raised was £104,252, a sum obviously insufficient for any extensive increase of the navy, while the course of events on the continent increased the anxiety of Charles to strengthen his force at sea.
He was now advised to advance in the business and carry the intention of taxing the whole kingdom into effect by means of a second set of ship writs, to extend to inland as well as maritime counties and towns; and in June, the lord keeper, Coventry, in the usual address to the judges of assize in the Star Chamber, previous to their going on circuit, informed them to that effect, and that the grounds on which the council had advised the step were that “since all the kingdom was interested both in the honour, safety and profit, it was just and reasonable that they should all put to their helping hands.”
Accordingly on , a second issue of ship writs was ordered, to extend to inland as well as maritime counties and towns.
In these writs the recital of the reasons for the issue was altered so as to suit the circumstances.
They proceeded upon the old principle of the ship-geld of Anglo-Saxon times, that inasmuch as the burden of defence relates to all, it should be borne by all, according to the law and custom of England.
A writ was sent to the sheriff of every county, and separate writs to a number of the principal cities and towns.
The writs stated the tunnage of the ship or ships required and the place of rendezvous at a given date, and contained elaborate provisions for the apportionment of the expense between the different parts and towns in the county, the assessment of the contributories, and the collection of the rate.
In substance the levy was an extra-parliamentary levy of a subsidy of a fixed amount for the purpose of increasing the navy; for it was not necessary to provide the ship itself or the men.
A special commission was issued for the loan of ships and pinnaces of the king’s own to counties and towns unable to find them as required by the writs, and the arming and furnishing them in warlike manner with ordnance and munition of all sorts; and the treasurer of the navy was empowered to receive from the officers of the counties and towns, all moneys paid in for the said ships and service.
Although the whole sum to be raised was but £208,900, a sum less than the produce of three subsidies, this more extended application of the ship writs encountered opposition not only in inland counties, but also in maritime places where the previous levy had not been opposed.
No doubt the new assessment involved in the levy tended to render the ship money unpopular throughout the country; for the contributories would have to expect that their assessments would be raised in the king’s subsidy books, and for all the different local levies of the period — for building houses of correction, for contributions for places stricken by the plague, rates for the poor, &c. And no doubt the people also resented the interference of the sheriff in the business.
But it was not for these reasons only that ship money met with opposition.
It was now opposed on principle.
In Oxfordshire, in the hundred of Bloxham, where stands lord Saye and Sele’s castle of Broughton, the constables, evidently upon careful advice, refused to proceed to the assessment, on the ground that they “had no authority to assess or tax any man” and conceived the warrants sent to them did not give them any power to do so, and eventually sir Peter Wentworth, the sheriff, was ordered himself to make the necessary assessment.
While troubles of the same kind occurred in Devonshire and other places.
In these circumstances the king caused a case to be submitted to the judges, in , for their opinion as to the legality of the levy and his power to enforce payment of the ship money, and the twelve judges, viz., the justices of the courts of king’s bench and common pleas and the barons of the exchequer, or ten of them according to some accounts, expressed and signed their opinion, in answer to the questions put to them, as follows:—
We are of opinion that when the good and safety of the kingdom in general is concerned and the whole kingdom is in danger, your Majesty may by writ under your great seal of England, command all the subjects of this your kingdom at their charge to provide and furnish such a number of ships, with men, victuals, and munition, and for such time as your majesty may think fit, for the defence and safeguard of the kingdom from such danger and peril; and that by law your majesty may compel the doing thereof in case of refusal or refractoriness.
We are also of opinion that in such case your majesty is the sole judge, both of the danger and when and how the same is to be prevented and avoided.
This opinion was, by command of the king, enrolled in the courts of chancery, king’s bench, common pleas and exchequer, and also entered among the remembrances of the court of star chamber; and thus fortified, he continued the levy of ship money.
A third issue of ship writs, similar to those issued on , was ordered in , and they produced £202,240 And in there was a fourth issue of writs.
Although under the new assessments, the ship money was, certainly, more fairly assessed than any fifteenth and tenth or subsidy hitherto collected — for indeed, it was of extreme importance to the king that no fault to be found with the assessment or any detail of the tax should endanger the rapidity and ease of the collection — and although the amount levied was no more than about the annual average of the produce of the subsidies granted to the king by parliament in the earlier part of the reign, the opposition of the people to ship money increased on every occasion of a levy.
Already Robert Chambers, a merchant of London, an old opponent of the imposts who had suffered imprisonment for his opposition, had endeavoured to test the legality of ship money in a court of law, but without success; for the court had refused to hear his counsel on the ground, as stated by sir Richard Berkeley, that “the question raised was one of government and not of law.”
And now lord Saye and Sele, and John Hampden, a Buckinghamshire squire, determined to obtain a legal decision upon the point.
The king, confident in the opinion expressed by the judges, had no reason to offer any opposition to the course proposed, and Hampden’s, made a test case, came on for hearing in the court of exchequer in .
In cases of great importance and difficulty arising in one of the three superior courts of law, it was usual to adjourn the case into the exchequer chamber, a court which, for this purpose, consisted of all the judges of the three courts.
This course was taken by the barons of the exchequer in Hampden’s case.
The case was argued solemnly for several days; and in the result, it was decided by a majority of the judges that Hampden should be charged with the sum assessed on him, the main grounds and reasons for the decision being those of the extrajudicial opinion of the judges in .
At last, the king was compelled to summon a parliament, , in order to provide for the expenses of the preparations for the campaign in Scotland.
But this parliament, subsequently known as the short parliament, was dissolved as soon as it appeared probable that they would refuse to proceed at once to the question of supply.
In the king summoned a great council of peers and laid before them the difficulties of his case, and on their advice, summoned in , subsequently known as the Long Parliament.
This parliament, after passing the Triennial Act and the Bill of Attainder against Strafford, settled the question of tunnage and poundage by granting the subsidy for a short term, and then proceeded to pass Acts against the ship money, distraint for knighthood and illegal impositions, and for ascertaining the bounds of the royal forests.
The Act against ship money, 16 Car.
I. c. 14, entitled, “An Act for declaring illegal and void the late proceedings touching ship money and for vacating all records and process concerning the same” recites:—
“The issue of the ship-writs.
The necessity of enforcing payment against sundry persons by process of law.
The proceedings against Hampden.
The hearing of the case and the decision of the judges that Hampden should be charged with the sum assessed on him.
The grounds for that decision.
The extrajudicial opinion given by all the judges on the case submitted to them in , and, That other cases were then depending in the court of exchequer and in some other courts against other persons, for the like kind of charge, grounded upon the said writs commonly called ship writs, all which writs and proceedings as aforesaid were utterly against the law of the land;” and enacts:—
That the said charge imposed upon the subject for the providing and furnishing of ships, commonly called ship-money; and the said extrajudicial opinion of the said justices and barons and the said writs, and every of them and the said agreement or opinion of the greater part of the said justices and barons, and the said judgment given against the said John Hampden, were, and are, contrary to and against the laws and statutes of this realm, the right of property, the liberty of the subjects, former resolutions in Parliament, and the Petition of Eight made in the third year of the reign.
And further, that all and every the particulars prayed or desired in the said Petition of Eight, shall from henceforth be put in execution accordingly, and shall be firmly and strictly holden and observed, as in the same Petition they are prayed and expressed.
And that all and every the records and remembrances of all and every the judgment enrolments, entry and proceedings as aforesaid, and all and every the proceedings whatsoever, upon, or by pretext or colour of any of the said writs commonly called ship writs, and all and every the dependents on any of them, shall be deemed and adjudged to all intents, constructions and purposes to be utterly void and disannulled, and that all and every the said judgment, enrolments, entries, proceedings, and dependents of what kind soever, shall be vacated and canceled in such manner and form as records use to be that are vacated.
The attorney-general, “with his own hand” — according to Edward Hyde Clarendon — “draughted and prepared the ship writs” for the maritime towns and counties.
“Noy,” writes Selden, in his Table Talk, “brought in the ship money for maritime towns, which was like putting in a little auger that afterwards you may put in a greater.
He that pulls down the first brick does the main work; afterwards, it is easy to pull down the wall.”
Karl Marx, when he was on trial for his own tax resistance, referred back to Hampden, saying:
Far be it from me to deny that the English revolution, which brought Charles Ⅰ to the scaffold, began with a refusal to pay taxes or that the North American revolution, which ended with the Declaration of Independence from Britain, started with a refusal to pay taxes.
The refusal to pay taxes can be the harbinger of unpleasant events in Prussia too.
It was not John Hampden, however, who brought Charles Ⅰ to the scaffold, but only the latter’s own obstinacy, his dependence on the feudal estates, and his presumptuous attempt to use force to suppress the urgent demands of the emerging society.
The refusal to pay taxes is merely a sign of the dissidence that exists between the Crown and the people, merely evidence that the conflict between the government and the people has reached a menacing degree of tensity.
It is not the cause of the discord or the conflict, it is merely an expression of this fact.
At the worst, it leads to the overthrow of the existing government, the existing political system.
The foundations of society are not affected by this.
In the present case, moreover, the refusal to pay taxes was a means of society’s self-defense against a government which threatened its foundations.
Benjamin Ricketson Tucker faced off in the pages of Liberty with a letter writer who contrasted Tucker’s hesitant tax resistance with that of Hampden’s. Some of Gandhi’s first writings on tax resistance also concerned Hampden:
At that time, King Charles was the ruler of England and he wanted to wage wars in foreign lands.
As his treasury had become empty, he imposed Ship Money.
Hampden, a rich gentleman of great prestige, saw that, if Ship Money were paid, the King’s demands would go on increasing and the people would suffer.
He therefore refused to pay the tax, and many joined him in this.
Though some of them agreed to pay the tax, Hampden remained firm and was prosecuted.
The judges sentenced him, declaring that he had committed a crime in not paying the tax.
Despite the sentence, Hampden did not pay the tax.
Hampden and his companions went to jail and the people congratulated them.
Like them, the people too remained firm.
Many did not pay the tax and there was a great revolt.
The King became nervous and the whole matter was reconsidered.
It was realized that thousands of people could not be sent to jail.
He therefore got the earlier judgment reversed by other judges and Hampden was set free.
The seed of the struggle for freedom that he sowed grew into a mighty tree.
As a result of the struggle he put up, Cromwell emerged and England acquired real power and the people were given a large share in the governance of the country.
Hampden died fighting for his country; he remains immortal.
…General Wrangel, soon after his return from Schleswig-Holstein, marched his troops into the market place, in front of the building in which the Parliament was sitting, and on , Von Unruh and the other Members, coming to hold their meetings, found the doors locked, and the soldiers guarding the place.
They then adjourned to the Hotel de Russie, where they declared [General] Brandenburg guilty of High Treason, and called on the people to refuse to pay taxes.
Deputations came in from Magdeburg, Breslau and Frankfort, declaring their sympathy with the Assembly; and the Civic Guard refused to give up their arms to Wrangel.
Wrangel now declared all public meetings prohibited, announced that the Civic Guard was dissolved; and declared Berlin in a state of siege.
But the addresses of sympathy came in more freely than ever; and it was rumoured that Silesia was actually in a state of insurrection.
Even several citizens of Brandenburg itself sent an address to the Assembly, declaring that they would resist the transfer of the Parliament to their town.
The opposition between the bourgeoisie and the workmen, which had been caused by the riots of , and , had now entirely disappeared in a common zeal for Constitutional freedom; and the Town Council permitted the Assembly to meet in their Hall.
But even there Wrangel would not leave them in peace, and soon after they were driven from this refuge also.
Even the ex-Minister Hansemann became an object of denunciation to the Court party; and on the Assembly put into a formal vote the proposal which they had already hinted at, that no further taxes should be paid.
This vote was carried just after they had been driven from the Town Council House to another meeting place.
soldiers were called out, who threatened the Civic Guard with violence, but finally marched off without firing; and some soldiers and officers were dismissed for not consenting to act against the people.
Taxes were beginning to be refused in various parts of Prussia; several arrests were made in Cologne; and Düsseldorf was declared in a state of siege.
The soldiers were forbidden to read the National Zeitung; while on the other hand printers and publishers offered to print the decrees of the Assembly without any compensation for loss of time.
Attempts to enforce the payment of taxes led to riots in Bonn and Breslau; and in Coblenz the people attacked officers for speaking evil of the National Assembly.
The Government tried, in some cases, to cut off the payment of deputies; but the people insisted on making the payment, in spite of this prohibition; and even a Government official in Düsseldorf declared his belief that if the Brandenburg Ministry lasted three or four days more, none of the official boards would consent to act.
One of the Roman Catholic bishops of Silesia appealed to his flock not to refuse taxes, as otherwise they would be damned for “refusing to give to Cæsar the things that were Cæsar’s.” To this appeal several Roman Catholics of Silesia retorted by an address in which they expressed their fear for the spiritual condition of the clergy, since they had never paid taxes at all.
This, from The Revolutionary Movement of in Italy, Austria-Hungary, and Germany by C. Edmund Maurice ( edition).
Refusal by juries to convict tax resisters or those associated with tax resistance movements can be a powerful check on government power.
Today I will mention a small handful of such cases from tax resistance campaigns of the past.
Many successful applications of jury nullification never make the papers or the histories — this is because the government, seeing how the cards of public opinion are dealt, decides against bringing cases to trial because they fear the effect an innocent verdict would have.
The government might try transporting the defendants to a more sympathetic jurisdiction, or might hand-pick a “hanging jury” to insure conviction, but either of these tactics risks further alienating the people and bolstering the resisters’ arguments about the faithlessness and illegitimacy of the government and its taxes.
Governor Andros of Connecticut
For example, Governor Andros of colonial Connecticut put members of the Ipswich town meeting on trial after they refused to assess taxes the governor had tried to impose without the consent of the colonial Assembly.
The trial was a sham — the jury was hand-picked by the prosecution and the judge referred to the defendants as “criminals” throughout the course of the trial, telling them they “must not think the privileges of English men would follow [them] to the end of the world.”
But they did think that, and threw that quote back in the faces of Andros and the judge in the case, when they revolted, overthrew the colonial government, and imprisoned the two of them.
The Whiskey Rebellion
During the Whiskey Rebellion, juries had no interest in indicting or convicting people for their refusal to pay the federal excise tax.
Mary K. Bonsteel Tachau, in her paper “The Whiskey Rebellion in Kentucky: A Forgotten Episode of Civil Disobedience,” showed how effective this strategy was:
When they did meet, grand jurors seemed uninterested in charging anyone with anything.
In fact, the only action taken by grand juries during the first four years was to approve the first census.
Their inactivity implied that Kentucky was a notably law-abiding place.
Of course the judge, the marshal, the grand jurors, and everybody else in Kentucky knew that the internal revenue laws were being ignored.
The Kentucky Gazette regularly published notices about the statutes, often accompanied by complaints and threats from Colonel [Thomas] Marshall.
It is possible that the grand jurors felt justified in overlooking their obligation by attending strictly to the instructions that Judge [Harry] Innes gave them.
He regularly delivered eloquent addresses describing the matters that came within their cognizance.
Among those were such traditional offenses as treason, misprison of treason, forgery, interference with the processes of the courts, bribery, perjury, and so on.
These were sometimes lengthy lists, but they had one obvious omission because violation of federal statutes was also within the grand jurors’ purview.
As long as the judge overlooked such widespread evasion, the jurors evidently felt no obligation to take the initiative and bring charges against their neighbors.
Federal prosecutors could themselves bring charges for violation of the excise law to these grand juries, but none did.
Indeed the federal government had difficulty even finding anyone to take the job of prosecutor.
When, five and a half years after the excise tax went into effect, they finally found someone to take the job, it was a recent arrival from out of state, and they had “to furnish [him] with copies of the revenue statutes, because none were available in the commonwealth.”
Then the government finally was able to begin bringing charges against Whiskey Rebels.
It thought it had won.
Not so much:
During the remaining terms of court in , the federal marshal failed to convene grand juries, and [federal prosecutor] Clarke failed to file any informations [charges].
Clarke had run head-on against the power structure, and it was not about to submit tamely to an outsider.
The agents that he had instructed to seize [Thomas] Jones’s stills were charged with trespass; the witnesses whom he had summoned to testify to the grand juries were denied compensation for their travel.
Clarke complained to the treasury department, which initially sympathized with him, but it acknowledged that the judge was master in his own court.
Then, seven plus years after the widely-resisted excise tax came into effect, the government changed the rules: deciding that anyone who was a whiskey distiller would be banned from serving on the grand jury!
One of the bottlenecks to prosecution had been broken through.
Yet as these cases came to trial, it became clear that the distillers did not have much to worry about.
In an early grand jury address, Judge Innes had stated that “trials by jury… are the great bulwark which intervenes between the magistrate and the citizen,” and these petit jurors obviously saw themselves as that great bulwark.
Whether the charges were initiated by Clarke or by revenue collectors or by grand juries made no difference: trial jurors regularly acquitted their neighbors of criminal charges.
In Kentucky, violation of the revenue acts was simply not perceived as a crime.
Not one of the fifty criminal charges brought during the four years of Clarke’s tenure resulted in conviction [emphasis mine –♇].
Default judgments were set aside, while other charges were abated by death, or quashed, dismissed, or discontinued.
Seven cases went to trial, but the jurors found for the defendants every time, and the judge then ordered their accusers to pay the costs of the suits.
It was proving impossible to win convictions — and it is easy to see why.
The law was held in utter contempt by the people the juries were being drawn from.
Bonsteel Tachau notes, for instance, that “[i]n one term of court alone, five members of the jury panels were themselves defendants in cases brought by Clarke.”
The successful resistance by people in Kentucky against attempts to prosecute their neighbors for resistance to the federal excise tax continued until the the anti-tax movement could claim victory with the election of Thomas Jefferson as president, who promised to rescind the tax.
Karl Marx’s jury
When the royal and military aristocracy of Germany tried to shut down the country’s first popularly-elected legislature before they could enact a Constitution, the parliament responded by declaring the government out of business: “So long as the National Assembly is not at liberty to continue its sessions in Berlin, the Brandenburg cabinet has no right to dispose of government revenues and to collect taxes.”
Karl Marx, who was at the time editing a newspaper called the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, trumpeted the news, saying: “From today, therefore, taxes are abolished!
It is high treason to pay taxes.
Refusal to pay taxes is the primary duty of the citizen!”
The government took Marx to court for such incitements to rebellion, but this didn’t discourage him.
Instead, Marx managed to persuade the jury that he’d been right all along.
(Edmund Wilson, in whose book To The Finland Station I first learned about this case, writes that “the effect [of Marx’s defense] on the jury was so great that Marx was thanked on their behalf by the foreman for his ‘extremely informative speech.’”)
Marx wrote of the acquittal:
[T]he case turned only on the political question: whether the accused were authorised by the decision of the National Assembly on the refusal to pay taxes to call in this way for resistance to the state power, to organise an armed force against that of the state, and to have government authorities removed and appointed at their discretion.
After a very brief consultation, the jury answered this question in the affirmative.
The Rebecca Riots
During one of the tollgate demolishings that marked the Rebecca Riots in Wales, Sarah Williams, who was in charge of the toll house being destroyed, rushed back to try to save it from the flames.
She was shot and killed, presumably by one of the Rebeccaites.
Colonel George Rice Trevor explains what happened next:
[A]n inquest was held… Two surgeons… gave evidence that on the body were marks of shot, some penetrating the nipple of left breast, on in the armpit of the same side, and several shot marks on both arms. Two shots were found in the left lung.
In spite of all this evidence the jury found “that the deceased died from effution of blood into the chest [which] occasioned suffocation, but from what cause is to this jury unknown.”
[emphasis mine –♇]
The inquest refusing to find the cause of death to be murder made it difficult to launch an investigation, make arrests, or begin a prosecution.
A challenge that many successful tax resistance campaigns have confronted has to do with divisions in the movement.
Sometimes these are deliberate divide-and-conquer tactics by those who oppose the campaign.
Other times, these are just the result of fractures in an unstable coalition, where most of the dividing pressure comes from within the campaign.
It can be important to the success of such a campaign that it maintain and demonstrate solidarity in the face of such challenges.
Here are some examples of how a variety of tax resistance campaigns have tried to cope.
German constitutionalists
In Germany, the government attempted to break a tax resistance movement by offering to moderate its enforcement efforts against people who could show that they had limited means.
Karl Marx, who was promoting the resistance at the time, saw this as a divide-and-conquer tactic and counseled people to disregard it:
The intention of the Ministry is only too clear.
It wants to divide the democrats; it wants to make the peasants and workers count themselves as non-payers owing to lack of means to pay, in order to split them from those not paying out of regard for legality, and thereby deprive the latter of the support of the former.
But this plan will fail; the people realizes that it is responsible for solidarity in the refusal to pay taxes, just as previously it was responsible for solidarity in payment of them.
Rebeccaites
The Rebeccaite movement in Wales was very successful in its bold campaign of destroying toll booths.
But its diffuse, non-hierarchical, anonymous structure made it easy for people to hijack it for their own ends, and it wasn’t long before people and groups calling themselves “Rebecca” began issuing threats and enacting vigilante justice in a variety of causes, or sometimes in what seemed like merely personal grievances.
For example, having come to the help of the farmers by reducing the tolls they were charged when bringing their goods to market, a meeting of Rebeccaites decided they were justified in now demanding that these newly-liberated farmers and merchants lower the prices of their goods.
Butter and beer would now be cheaper in Wales, and the Rebeccaites would make it so by force if necessary.
Things like this made the message of the movement confused, made it less sympathetic to potential supporters, and helped the authorities to recruit spies and people willing to testify against the rioters among those who otherwise might have been their allies.
Irish Land League
The Irish, suffering from famine and under the thumb of government-backed English absentee landlords, began a rent strike under the leadership of the Irish Land League.
The English encouraged the Irish to respond to their sad lot by emigrating to America and elsewhere.
They would have been happy to depopulate the island and make it England’s livestock grazing pasture, and they were eager to diminish by attrition the political power of the native population.
But, as Charles Stewart Parnell put it:
The Land League saw through this design, and defeated it by their advice to the people to resist being compelled to emigrate.
It told them to refuse to pay extortionate rents — that is, rents they could not pay and at the same time feed their families; it told them to refuse to leave their homes unless forcibly ejected, so that winter might not find them without a shelter to their heads; and it told them to refuse to rent farms from which other tenants had been evicted.
British women’s suffrage movement
At the time the Women’s Tax Resistance League and allied organizations were trying to win the vote for women, most men couldn’t vote in Britain either.
The vote at the time was largely restricted to propertied men, though there were ongoing campaigns for universal male suffrage.
By trying to get women to be treated equally as voters under the law, the women’s movement of the time was, thereby, fighting merely for the voting rights of propertied women, not for women in general.
Dora Montefiore reflected on this, and the divisions it threatened to provoke, when she reviewed her time in the movement in her autobiography, From a Victorian to a Modern:
The members of the I.L.P., of which there was a good branch in Hammersmith, were very helpful, both as speakers and organisers during these meetings, but the Members of the Social Democratic Federation, of which I was a member, were very scornful because they said we should have been asking at that moment for Adult Suffrage and not Votes for Women; but although I have always been a staunch adult suffragist, I felt that at that moment the question of the enfranchisement of women was paramount, as we had to educate the public in our demands and in the reasons for our demands, and as we found that with many people the words “Adult Suffrage” connoted only manhood suffrage, our urgent duty was at that moment to gain Press publicity up and down the country and to popularise the idea of the political enfranchisement of women.
I explained in all my speeches and writings that though it looked as if I were only asking for Suffrage for Women on a property qualification, I was doing this because the mass of non-qualified women could not demonstrate in the same way, and I was to that extent their spokeswoman.
… The working women from the East End came, time and again, to demonstrate in front of my barricaded house and understood this point and never swerved in their allegiance to our organisation
Poll Tax rebellion in the U.K.
In Danny Burns’s reminiscences of the Poll Tax Rebellion, he reflects that there were constant tensions in the campaign between the locally-organized grassroots groups that were the real engine of the revolt, and the professional left/labor radical groups and politicians who kept trying to put themselves at the front of the parade.
When a number of people were arrested in a police riot during an anti Poll Tax demonstration at Trafalgar Square, some of the movement leadership distanced themselves from those who had been arrested in the riot — wanting to distinguish nonviolent tax resisters from those charged with resisting arrest or other such charges, and talking about holding “an internal inquiry” to “root out the troublemakers.”
But when the defendants organized their own collective defense committee, the leaders of the All-Britain Federation tried to usurp them by launching their own defense fund and soliciting donations (the attempt failed).
Anti-war, anti-tax coalition building in U.S.
There have been some attempts at coalition building between the left and right in the United States, where the folks at the top keep the folks at the bottom facing off against each other that way so their pockets face outwards and are easier to pick.
One example of such coalition building in the tax resistance movement was a “tea party” held in by the right-leaning group called the National Taxpayers Union, at which left-libertarians like Murray Rothbard and Karl Hess, and leftish war tax resisters like Bradford Lyttle spoke.
The following year, leftist scholar and war tax resister Noam Chomsky, and conservative publisher Robert Kephart spoke at a National Taxpayers Union event.
I had seen the name of Lothar Bucher connected with tax resistance in several places before, but the references were very vague.
I’ve finally found something a little meatier.
Bucher was arrested and tried for fomenting tax resistance around the same time and in the same cause as Karl Marx, during the constitutionalist rebellion against an autocratic Prussian government in .
The New York Sun did a recap of Bucher’s career later on, when, in an unlikely across-the-aisles alliance, he had become the right-hand man of right-wing Chancellor Bismarck.
Here’s an excerpt about his tax resistance from that article:
Bucher is a “Forty-eighter.”
That is, he was one of the men who, like Franz Sigel, rebelled against the Government in , and demanded a strictly constitutional administration.
But 29 years old, he became known as “Bucher the Red” in the Prussian Parliament, where he sat on the extreme left, while his later master, Otto von Bismarck, thundered against constitutional government from the extreme right.
Despite his youth, he was soon the leader of the fighters for the new Constitution, and to him was due the credit for originating the policy of starving the monarchy under the Ministry of Brandenburg into desisting from its violations of the new Constitutions in the early fifties.
“Let every taxpayer and taxpaying community,” he said, “refuse to pay taxes, and thus in the way of the bloodless revolution the will of the people’s representatives may be accomplished.”
“I have never heard a man speak with more eloquence or moderation,” wrote Gen. von Brandt of him at this time.
“His light hair, his passionate gestures, reminded me always of the pictures of Saint Just.”
But the Prussian Government was not fond of eloquence or learning on the extreme left, and so Bucher and forty-two other Radicals found themselves presently under arrest for treason and refusal to pay taxes.
This most celebrated State case in recent German history, except, perhaps, the Harry Arnim case, was eighteen months in preparation, and was tried in an uninterrupted court sitting of fifteen hours.
Bucher defended himself with passionate eloquence, but to no purpose.
He was condemned to eighteen months’ imprisonment and loss of his offices.
When the Government officers went to take him off to a fortress, however, he was gone.
A powerful friend, such as the Pearl of Bismarck has never lacked, warned him after he had made his great speech of defence that his fate was sure and that he must flee.
Bucher read the warning note, then tucked a roll of legal papers, as if for immediate perusal, under his arm, and apparently much exhausted by his address he sauntered bareheaded into the garden adjoining the Court House.
At the gate he jumped into a cab, and that was the last seen of Bucher the Red in Berlin for some time.
Karl Marx, you may remember, had better luck in court.
His legal defense convinced the jury that he had been justified in calling for tax resistance from the pages of his newspaper, and they acquitted him.
