Some historical and global examples of tax resistance →
United States →
Louisiana during reconstruction, 1872–79
Google is starting to do for newspaper archives what it has been doing for books: putting scanned images on-line and making them text-searchable.
Hooray for Google, says I.
Here are a few articles I found while browsing around today:
A couple of pieces regarding a reconstruction-era dispute over the legitimacy of the Louisiana state government (in which tax resistance played a role):
The Nixon Administration asked the Supreme Court today to rule out draft exemptions for men who are conscientiously opposed to the Vietnam war but not to all wars.
…
Besides, the Administration argued, if selective exemptions are approved people could refuse to pay their taxes on religious grounds or could defy other laws.
Washington [D.C.] Official Urges Tax Refusal to Push Statehood The New York Times (“Walter E. Fauntroy, the District of Columbia’s Delegate to Congress, has urged residents here not to pay their Federal taxes until Congress makes Washington the 51st state.”
[C]ollection will be a formidable challenge after years in which taxes
were identified by Palestinians with foreign occupation.
Tax resistance is strong in the territories. It spread during a seven-year
uprising against Israeli rule, when Palestinians working in the tax
department resigned. According to Israeli estimates, only 20 percent of
Palestinians taxed in the West Bank met their payments in 1993, when tax
revenues totalled some $90 million.
The Palestinian Authority has already run into difficulties collecting
taxes in Gaza and Jericho, and it has published appeals in recent weeks
urging tax payment as a national duty. Outside of Jericho, it has no
police powers in the West Bank, and the legal system there remains under
Israeli control.
“Taxes are the dowry of independence and the key to democracy,” said Atef
Alawneh, director general of the Palestinian finance department, at the
ceremony today in Ramallah.
“Nonpayment of taxes under occupation was a national struggle worthy of
praise,” he added. “Now it is 180 degrees different. Now delay in paying
means a delay in building the Palestinian state.”
Zuhdi Nashashibi, the finance minister in the Palestinian Authority, said
he was confident Palestinians would now “hurry to pay” their taxes.
Mr. Alawneh argued that collection by Palestinians would be more effective
because it would lack the coercion of military occupation, would extend to
places the Israelis were unable to reach because of security concerns, and
would create new revenue sources. The tax authorities will not use force,
he said, but will rely instead on friendly persuasion and public goodwill.
Remember what this sort of thing used to be like? You’d get yourself down to
the library, and then you’d look through each volume of the
Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature or whatever,
one at a time, hoping that what you were looking for was among the things the
editors of that guide felt was worth indexing. Then with luck, some of what
you were looking for was available in bound volumes, microfilm, or microfiche
on-site (elsewise you could always try for inter-library loan, but that might
take a couple of weeks). In the case of the first, you could find it on the
shelves or ask the reference librarian, and then thumb through the pages, but
in the case of the latter two, you’d have to haul your film over to a reader
(one that wasn’t broken or occupied) and then spend five minutes or so just
trying to locate the pages you were interested in. Then, if it turned out to
be good, you’d have to scribble things down or drop in some coin for a
barely-legible photocopy.
I like the future.
, I posted links to two short articles about a tax resistance campaign in Reconstruction-era Louisiana.
I remember doing a little research on this campaign when I was assembling We Won’t Pay!: A Tax Resistance Reader, but I also remember that the trail gave out after a while and I didn’t find anything particularly promising.
Today I tried to pick up the trail again.
Here’s what I found.
To set the scene: Louisiana in is a little something like Iraq in .
It’s been sacked by the enemy, which dissolved the local government and military (which then started to assemble into ethnic militia terrorist groups), and installed its own idea of a democratically-elected government — one that seems largely to be composed of outsiders and members of the formerly-marginalized ethnic group.
There’s rampant corruption, and the invading army has to swoop back in from time to time to provide muscle to back up the weak central government’s dictates.
There’s an election.
The governor, a former Union Army colonel and Republican carpetbagger named Henry C. Warmoth, allies himself with the Democratic challenger, a former Confederate Army colonel named John McEnery.
He says the election’s in the bag because, after all, he’s the governor and he can fix it.
(Why did this strange alliance take place?
Two possible explanations.
One, that Warmoth said he’d support McEnery if McEnery would then appoint him to be U.S. Senator.
Two, that Warmoth was an ally of the more conservative Horace Greeley “Liberal Republican” faction of the Republican Party and the Republican candidate for governor was an ally of the Ulysses S. Grant “Radical Republican” wing.)
Anyway, so there’s an orgy of ballot stuffing, voter intimidation, and so forth, and at the end of it, whaddya know: McEnery’s “fusion ticket” loses.
The “Returning Board” that is set up to certify the election results declares the Republican candidate, William P. Kellogg (another carpetbagger, originally from Vermont) the winner.
Warmoth dismisses the Returning Board and appoints another one.
They come up with the answer he likes.
For good measure, he appoints a third Returning Board and they too say McEnery is the real winner.
The legislature, meanwhile, successfully impeaches Warmoth for all of this chicanery.
(Thereupon the lieutenant governor took over for the remaining 34 days before Kellogg’s inauguration, becoming the first black governor in U.S. history.)
The State Supreme Court eventually takes up the case and rules that the first Returning Board had every right to make its decision and the decision of the other two boards can be disregarded.
Things don’t stop there, though.
Eventually the U.S. Congress has to debate the whole thing, but they never quite get the gumption up to take a stand either way, which leaves everything up to President U.S. Grant, who, naturally, sees little reason to interfere with the governorship of his Republican ally.
But the McEnery crew aren’t quite ready to quit.
They set up a parallel government — holding their own inauguration, raising their own militia, seating their own legislature, and insisting that the Kellogg crew are “usurpers” and not the legitimate government at all.
As part of this, they insist that no demands for taxes coming from Kellogg’s government are legitimate.
On , McEnery issued this proclamation:
Whereas, Information has reached me that certain persons, pretending to be tax-collectors in the City of New-Orleans and in parishes of the State, but having no legal authority therefor, are issuing circulars and notices to taxpayers to come forward within a certain time to pay their taxes and licenses, threatening certain penalties prescribed by law against all parties failing to comply with such notice,
Now, I, John McEnery, Governor of the State of Louisiana, do issue this my proclamation, warning all tax and license payers not to obey or regard such notice or demand, but to refuse and resist the same, and recognize as the only lawful persons charged with the collection and enforcement of taxes those who hold over as tax-collectors under the Government of the State as existing on , and those who have been appointed and commissioned by the undersigned.
Full protection will be guaranteed by the Government to all citizens of the State against any penalties or violences which may be attempted by persons who may seek to enforce their illegal demands and acts and to exercise their usurped power and authority in the premises.
Black voters were essential to the Republican victory.
The Republican/Democrat split in Louisiana politics was a black/white split, if you subtract out the white carpetbagger Republicans.
And the McEnery faction resented the power of black voters.
Its war on the Kellogg government and on Republican office-holders was in part a race war, and there was at least one ethnic-cleansing episode: The Colfax Massacre.
(The McEnery and Kellogg governments each appointed their own set of local officials in Grant Parish.
When a white militia organized to try to take over the government buildings in Colfax, and started terrorizing black people in the parish, the blacks gathered in Colfax, hoping for safety in numbers.
Dozens were butchered, some executed after having been taken prisoner.)
Former Confederate military officers formed a militia designed to defend towns under McEnery-faction control, and even successfully raided New Orleans itself at one point — putting Kellogg’s own forces on the run.
But McEnery’s militia folded when the federal government sent its own forces in to prop Kellogg up.
By May, McEnery gave up his pretense of being governor.
The Kellogg administration lasted until .
McEnery’s militia became the White League, and continued to rely on terrorist tactics to intimidate black voters and assassinate Republican office-holders.
Over time, the federal government wearied of having to keep interfering.
President Grant’s Attorney General noted that “The whole public are tired out with autumnal outbreaks in the South, and the great majority are now ready to condemn any interference on the part of the government.”
The Supreme Court ruled that the federal government was powerless to prosecute members of terrorist mobs like the one that perpetrated the Colfax Massacre, and Louisiana itself never managed to bring anyone to justice for it.
The White League eventually was successful in its terrorist campaign to bring an end to Republican rule.
In the presidential election of , Louisiana sent two sets of electors — one Republican set that Kellogg said represented the parishes in Louisiana where the White League hadn’t intimidated black voters, and one Democratic set that Louisiana whites insisted represented the real Louisiana electorate.
The election was close enough that it made a big difference.
Bush/Gore’s got nothing on this one.
Samuel Tilden had more popular votes and more electoral votes — unless all the disputed electoral votes went Rutherford Hayes’s way.
As part of a compromise, Hayes took the crown but said in return that he’d stop propping up Republican governments in the Confederate states and would end the occupation.
In , the Democrats took over in Louisiana, Kellogg (as part of the compromise) took a seat in the U.S. Senate, the White League was absorbed into the state militia, and the political power (and civil rights) of black people was pretty much wiped out — in there were a total of 730 black people registered to vote in the whole state.
The tax resistance aspect to this story appears to be little more than a footnote.
If you believe the brags of the Kellogg government, it had reduced corruption and increased efficiency in tax collection to the extent that even during the tax resistance campaign and the various armed struggles it was bringing in more revenue than the previous administration had the year before.
But in any case, the tax resistance was not so much a tactic as a logical outgrowth of the argument that the Kellogg government was not legitimate.
Around , white residents of Louisiana, angered by the continuing rule of the black/carpetbagger state government that had been suppressing white supremacist rule since the end of the American Civil War, met to organize a tax strike.
These documents, though they seem to have been collected from multiple sources, come from Louisiana Affairs, the report of a House of Representatives select committee on “the condition of The South.”
The Mass-Meeting for Resistance to Tax-Collections, 1872.
The meeting, called by a large number of citizens, to resist the collection of local taxes, filled Odd-Fellow’s Hall last night to its utmost capacity, and the reporter is assured by those who were near the entrance that thousands were unable to obtain admission.
The meeting contained representatives from every respectable class — industrial, commercial, and professional — but was composed chiefly of those who, being the owners of property, are the immediate tax-payers.
It was nearly eight o’clock when the meeting proceeded to business, and it was full eleven when it adjourned.
The assemblage was called to order by Mr. Benjamin F. Florence, who briefly stated the object of the demonstration, and the following officers were chosen:
The officers listed included Dr. Daniel Warren Brickell, president, Edward Booth, secretary, and dozens of “vice-presidents.”
Dr. Brickell, upon taking the chair, after some prefatory remarks, in the course of which he observed that he had been twenty-four years in New Orleans, working for a livelihood, as he presumed most of his hearers had, and paying his dues to the government, as no doubt all his audience had done, and now he was selected for the chairmanship of the association, because he was opposed to the payment of any taxes whatever.
[Applause.]
In taking this responsible position, he wished it to be clearly known that he did it with the understanding that those he was addressing would stand by him in refusing to pay taxes, and would refuse to the bitter end.
[Applause.]
They were told by the veteran office-holder who fills the post of administrator of finance for the city, that the man who refused to pay taxes was not a good citizen.
The Times said they were dogs if they paid taxes, and they were fools if they didn’t. While they saw public officers growing rich in a very short time, and the people becoming poor as the officers grew rich, was it not time to put a stop to such a system of government?
They had a newspaper that was everything to-day, another thing to-morrow — another thing to-day and everything to-morrow — a newspaper, the man who owns which, whatever his hired writers may be, “is not one of us, has no sympathies with us, is against us, for the burdens that afflict us do not bear upon him.”
This newspaper told the people that it was a costly experiment to resist tax-paying — that an effort of the kind which failed had cost $67,000. Dr. Brickell, for his part, would pay his share of a million of dollars to get rid of the carpet-baggers and villains who were consuming the substance of the people, and he would consider it very cheap if the thing would be thoroughly done at that price.
The Times said wait until the fall, honest men would be elected to the legislature, and then all would be right.
Dr. Brickell commenting upon this, said he would prefer to keep his money until honest men were elected rather than put it in that fiscal agency on Camp street.
[Great applause.]
Mr. Booth, chairman of the committee on resolutions, consisting of, besides himself, Messrs.
Benj. Florence, E. Conery, L. Schneider, Hugh McCloskey, Archibald Mitchell, John G. Fleming, W.C. Black, A. Carriere, and W. Freret, submitted the following resolutions, which were unanimously adopted and enthusiastically applauded from time to time as they were being read.
The meeting was addressed successively by Messrs.
Booth and Wm. M. Randolph, Judge J.B. Cotton, and Julien Michel, and J.Q.A. Fellows.
The meeting adjourned at so late an hour that the abstracts of the speeches of these gentlemen, which we had prepared, cannot be printed before the paper goes to press, and are, therefore, laid over.
Besides the resolutions appended one was adopted requesting the people of the rural parishes to join in the movement against tax-paying.
Preamble and Resolutions.
Whereas, as citizens of a free country, assembled in our primary capacity, irrespective of party, and exercising our inalienable right of remonstrance against the oppression of excessive taxation, and the imposition upon us of grievous and unnecessary burdens, destroying our peace of mind, sapping the foundations of our prosperity, and depriving us of the advantages necessary to sustain the active competition of our sister cities and States; and further, staunchly disavowing for ourselves, and those who think with us, all those charges or suggestions which would attribute to us a desire to avoid, hinder, or delay the just, reasonable, or necessary operations of a representative government, by refusing or resisting the prompt payment of lawful taxes; and further, claiming to be acting the part of good citizens by resisting to the last the payment of such taxes as are equally unnecessary and unlawful, imposed without authority from us by persons whom we refuse to recognize as having the right to levy taxes, in that said parties were never elected by the people as representatives, and therefore by their affecting to levy taxes they violate the first principles of American liberty, baptized in blood in , and hallowed by the memories of ages, which teach us that taxation, to be legal, must be accompanied by representation, without which it is robbery, and should be resisted by good citizens under the motto of “millions for defense, but not a cent for tribute;” and further, noticing with no longer concealed indignation that the taxes paid in are not disbursed in the general interests, with economy, or a view to their diminution, but seem to be considered as a species of plunder to be managed in the interests of the distributors, as against the contributors; this being especially the case in the instances of the large sum annually wasted upon the military body known as the metropolitan police force, as well as the immense amounts thrown away upon persons, pretending to hold offices as park commissioners, police commissioners, levee commissioners, drainage commissioners, assessors, tax-collectors, inspectors, registrars, or permanent committee men, with numerous sinecurists, pluralists, and “handy men” generally — expensive, useless and dangerous vampires, corrupted and corrupting;
And whereas, further, we feel that we can no longer sustain the taxation which has taken the form of a speedy confiscation of our property, for the support of officials, contractors, and partisans; who under the alleged forms of law turn the results of public industry to their private emolument, and grow rich, insolent, and threatening, while the hard-working citizen grows poor and is admonished to be humble and good;
And further, that not only a pretended legislature, very many of whose members were the creatures of the most corrupt practices of ballot-box stuffing, quadrupled registration and voting by “repeaters,” and false counting of votes, have imposed upon us their conception of taxes, but they have passed the tax-levies and appropriation-bills through their body by notorious bribery, thus vitiating, as we believe, all powers they might have ever had to pass the tax-bills or make money-requisitions upon, or bargains binding the people, and earning for themselves the infamous notoriety of being, according to the language of the governor, who ought to know them, the most disgraceful legislature ever assembled in Louisiana;
And further, seeing that such a pretended legislature, on its own motion, and affecting to empower an appointed non-representative body calling itself the city administration, have together, through assessors who have an unlawful private interest in exaggerating and multiplying assessments, and who have done so beyond all reasonable or former bounds, sought to extort from an impoverished people an annual taxation upon these stimulated assessments of nearly five per cent., the exact figures being 2⅔ per cent., for the city and 21-⅟20 per cent.
[sic] for the State;
And further, existing impositions, large as they are, do not form our only anxiety.
They have for the past few years increased with such unexampled rapidity as to startle the most stolid and apathetic mind, and to rouse to positive resistance the most worthy and law abiding citizens, for it is well known that still greater burdens are being prepared for us.
“Bad goes before, but worse remains behind.”
We are informed by James Graham, auditor, that the legislative appropriations for will demand an increase of eight mills on the dollar in addition to the enormous amount now wrung from the tax-payers of the State, being 2.05 per cent. net on an assessment of $250,000,000, reaching the incredible sum of nearly $6,000,000, gone for nothing, which additional percentage on a pretended assessment, which it is endeavored to raise to $300,000,000, will make next year’s confiscations amount on State account alone to over $7,000,000;
And whereas, further, our duty seems plain, whatever may be the final result of our movement, and if we decline, neglect, or refuse to do our duty, without fear or favor, as free citizens of a free country; if apathy, irresolution, a want of public spirit, or a selfish indifference to the misfortunes of others, should induce us to be laggards in this struggle for our homes and properties, then we shall have only ourselves to blame; but if, taking counsel from honor and courage, we nerve ourselves to the encounter, we unite our resistance under such forms and delays as laws yet afford us, until we can from an honest legislature and a representative municipality obtain some relief, then we shall have the proud satisfaction of knowing that “we, who would be free ourselves, have struck the blow:” Therefore, be it
Resolved, That we who are here assembled, and as many others who shall hereafter associate themselves with us, form ourselves into an association whose object shall be to resist by legal means the present exorbitant, illegal, and unconstitutional taxes now attempted to be extorted from us as citizens of the State and city.
Resolved, That the style of the association shall be “The People’s Association to Resist Unconstitutional Taxation.”
Resolved, That the president of this mass meeting is requested to act as president of this association, and at his prudent convenience to summon to his aid counsel from the general membership, a vice-president from each district of the city, and a board of directors, consisting of one from each ward of the city, who together shall constitute the first board of directors, who shall be charged with the organization of the association in its necessary details, and the board may report progress through the press, or otherwise, as they may deem best for the interest of the members of the association.
Resolved, That we pledge ourselves to give a cordial and prompt support to the association, to patronize its assemblies, and procure and encourage as many of our fellow-citizens as possible to join its membership.
Resolved, That while we recognize cheerfully the right of every citizen to resist on his own account any illegal tax, we cannot see the force of the argument which would forbid us to combine together for the accomplishment of the same end.
Resolved, That we cordially and earnestly invite the co-operation of every citizen, inasmuch as none are too high and none too low to feel the pressure of this practical confiscation.
Every mechanic, merchant, drayman, banker, storekeeper, butcher, shoemaker, produce-dealer, commission-merchant, press-owner, insurance-agent, shipping-agent, property-owner, clerk, laborer, founderyman, carpenter, or whatever else, are all deeply interested in this movement for the legal resistance to unconstitutional taxation, and therefore will be warmly welcomed to the roll of the association whether they have already paid the whole or part of their taxes or not.
Resolved, That in the mean time we will pay no more taxes to State or city, being supported in this view by the opinion of able counsel learned in law; but will, through our association, invoke the protection of the courts of the State and of the United States to test our right of resistance to exorbitant and confiscating taxation imposed by a pretended legislature, self-nominated, corruptly bought and sold by written contract, and sitting in defiance and contravention of the constitution of , which declares that a representative basis shall be established, and the representation distributed in accordance therewith, as well as our right to resist exorbitant taxation imposed by an appointed non-representative body of persons styling themselves the mayor and administrators of the city of New Orleans.
Resolved, That when this meeting adjourns, it will be so to meet again at the call of the president of the association.
Non-Payment of Taxes
Rooms Democratic Parish Executive Committee of Orleans,
.
This committee, composed of representatives of the democratic party of the city and parish of Orleans, although partisan in its character, is not insensible to the fact that parties exist but for the public good, and are only intended to promote the public welfare to which all partisanship should be subordinate.
Influenced by these considerations, a committee was appointed from this body to take into consideration the subject of taxes, now become so excessive as to be really confiscation, as they exceed the revenue of property.
This subcommittee reports to us in the following language, which we adopt as our own, and address to the public at large, so that all persona and parties may profit by our labors:
To pay taxes legally imposed by a legislature elected by the people is a duty which every good citizen owes, even though the taxes are somewhat onerous and excessive; but when the taxes are so cruelly excessive as to leave the citizen in the position of a mere tenant of the lands and buildings which may belong to him, and when the taxes are illegally imposed by so-called representatives of the people, who had been fraudulently foisted upon them for the avowed purpose of enriching an unprincipled executive and a corrupt ring of legislators and other public plunderers, the people should rise in their might and refuse to place money in the hands of the spoiler to complete their ruin and degradation.
Believing that this government is revolutionary, and as such has no legal claim upon the people for support; that the sham legislature was not elected by the people, but virtually appointed by the executive, and that no taxation can be lawful unless imposed by the legally-chosen representative of the tax-payer, we consulted eminent counsel upon this subject, the majority of whom confirmed our views, viz., that all taxes imposed by and under the revolutionary government are clearly illegal, and can be contested as such.
The members of the bar, so far as we have consulted them, were unanimous in opinion that the following city taxes were manifestly illegal: The school-tax, the park-tax, and the metropolitan-police tax.
A number of gentlemen, whose names are subjoined [but omitted here], signed the following engagement.
Such is the public spirit of the legal profession and the conviction of the illegality of the above taxes, that it is our opinion that almost every member of the bar would have attached his signature had he been approached by us for that purpose.
We spread these facts before the people, and earnestly counsel and advise them to unite and take every lawful means to resist the payment of all taxes.
I[saac] W. Patton, Chairman. W. Woelper, Secretary.
Patton would become mayor of New Orleans after the United States dropped its support for the reconstruction government.
The statement, signed by several attorneys, read that they “engage themselves, without compensation, and as a matter of public service, to defend professionally all citizens, residents, or property-holders in this city, who shall desire their assistance in resisting the collection by municipal authorities of the taxes known as the ‘school-tax,’ the ‘park-tax,’ and the ‘metropolitan-police tax,’ and other taxes the collection of which may be lawfully resisted.”
Determined Meeting of Citizens — All Further Payments of State and City Taxes to be Resisted — Armed Organizations in Progress Throughout the City — The Voice of the People — Indignation and Enthusiasm
Pursuant to the call of two hundred and fifty citizens of the Second ward, for the meeting in favor of armed organization and to resist the further collection of taxes, a large body of determined men filled the hall of the Iron House, on Tchoupitoulas street, last evening, and there gave emphatic evidence that no longer would the people submit to the remorseless and unprincipled rule of a few adventurers, who by their acts thus compelled peaceful citizens to rise in their might, to protest, refuse, and, if need be, resist by force of arms, all further encroachments upon their rights.
The meeting was called to order at half past 7 o’clock, by Col. S.J.N. Smith, who moved that Mr. Archibald Mitchell be elected chairman pro tempore.
On taking the chair, Mr. Mitchell addressed those present in the following words:
Gentlemen: Before stating the purpose of this meeting, I will premise that we are not assembled here in the interest of any political party.
Whatever may be our predilections as individuals, we are as an organized body neither democrats, reformers, nor republicans, but merely citizens endeavoring to secure our inherent and constitutional rights, and to preserve the remnant of property left to us by the tax-collector.
We are not opposed to the present State government because it is nominally republican, but because it is organized and administered for no purpose whatever.
Our intention is to inaugurate a movement, which we hope will become general, having for its object the non-payment of all taxes until we have a government which legally represents the people and is administered to promote their material welfare.
Our principal and primary object is to take measures to secure to all citizens, of all colors and conditions, the right of the elective franchise, by which all abuses may be corrected.
We justify our right to refuse to pay taxes on the following grounds:
They are greatly in excess of the legitimate expense of the government.
They are in excess of the natural increase of property, and as such should be resisted, being actual confiscation.
These taxes were not levied by the legally-elected representatives of the people, and they are not applied to promote the public interests.
Besides, the whole State government is anti-republican and revolutionary, and as such has no legal claim on the citizens for support.
In these views the ablest legal minds in this State concur.
The past history of this State leaves us in no doubt as to the course he will pursue in the coming election.
Governor Warmoth has never failed in any instance to use force and fraud to accomplish his ends.
Therefore, having a positive moral assurance we will only be permitted to have the forms of an election, unless we forcibly maintain our rights, we propose to form ourselves into a military organization for that purpose, but we do not contemplate the employment of force, even in defense of our well-recognized rights, until all other means shall have failed.
Our object in meeting to-night is to discuss the expediency of the foregoing measures and the best mode of carrying them into effect.
Col. Eugene Waggaman, having been called upon to address the meeting, depicted in eloquent terms the present and the past history of this State.
The alarming condition of political degradation under which the people are now and have been suffering for the past four years was described in all its corrupting and evil effects.
There was a necessity — a life and death necessity — of organizing a military association to meet force with force and protect what yet remained to the people of this degraded State.
“Warmoth and his minions must be put down in their schemes of robbery and plunder.
The means were in the hands of the people; stop the supplies; refuse to pay the taxes.
There were other ways of defeating an army than by a conquering in battle.
A general that cuts off the enemy’s supplies, and forces a surrender, is more to be honored than one who slaughters thousands.”
After the conclusion of Colonel Waggaman’s remarks, the following document was read and adopted, as expressing the views of those present:
To pay taxes legally imposed by a legislature elected by the people is a duty which every good citizen owes, even though the taxes are somewhat onerous and excessive: but when the taxes are so cruelly excessive as to leave the citizen in the position of a mere tenant of the lands and buildings which may belong to him, and when the taxes are illegally imposed by so-called representatives of the people, who have been fraudulently foisted upon them for the avowed purpose of enriching an unprincipled executive and a corrupt ring of legislators and other public plunderers, the people should rise in their might and refuse to place money in the hands of the spoiler, to complete their ruin and degradation.
In our present situation, with taxes so enormous, the payment of which will in a very, very few years bankrupt the citizens and force them either to revolution or exile, with an executive who openly boasts that his official patronage exceeds that of the President of the United States.
The document then inquired whether the people are willing to continue to pay taxes for the purpose of continuing the present corrupt rulers in power, “which has so long disgraced Louisiana and impoverished her people.”
It then goes on to state that the best legal talent of the State has been consulted relative to the constitutionality or the unconstitutionally of the present outrageous and obnoxious tax-laws, and “the almost unanimous opinion was that a great portion if not all of these laws are unconstitutional.”
The people were therefore advised no longer to pay the taxes to the State or city authorities until the question of the legality of the imposition is settled by the courts of the State and of the United States.
The members of the bar were then appealed to for the purpose of trying the cases where such taxes were brought in the conns free of charge.
The bar nobly responded to the appeal by from forty to fifty signatures of the leading lawyers of this city and State, and gave as their opinion (which was unanimous) that the school, metropolitan, and park taxes were unconstitutional, and could be successfully resisted before the courts.
The majority also agreed in the opinion that many other taxes other than those mentioned above were also unconstitutional.
On motion, the sentiments and expressions embodied in the above were adopted as the objects of the meeting, and the thanks of those present tendered the legal gentlemen who had so generously offered their services to the people free of charge, to represent them in the courts as the protectors of their just rights.
The following resolutions were then read and adopted:
Some boring organizational ones, and then:
Resolved, That a committee of five be appointed to draw up a plan by which the citizens may co-operate, to employ counsel and mutually assist each other in their refusal to pay taxes.
“Archibald Mitchell was then elected permanent president, and Hugh McClosky vicepresident of the association by acclamation.
¶ The latter gentleman accepted the honor conferred upon him, although he was not a resident of the ward.
Mr. McClosky said that if he had to resist the further payment of taxes singly and alone, he had determined upon doing so.
[Cheers.]”
There is also some testimony given in the same volume about terrorists from the White League, or perhaps some allied groups, intimidating tax collectors into resigning their posts, or interfering with tax auctions.
In one case:
There was a mob of fifty or sixty armed men came to prevent the deputy tax-collector effecting a sale, armed with revolvers nearly all.
Mr. Fournet came and threatened the deputy and tax-collector.
The deputy and tax-collector ran into their offices.
I came down and called upon the citizens to clear the court-house, but could not succeed.
I then called upon the military, but they had no orders at that time to give me assistance to carry out the law.
Another person said, of (I think) the same incident:
…Mr. [Valsin A.?]
Fournet came with eight or ten.
When the deputy tax-collector attempted to make a sale Mr. Fournet raised his hand and struck him.
The deputy then shoved him down.
As soon as this was done forty, fifty, or sixty men came with their revolvers in hand.
…very few people attended tax-sales [typically], because the white people were organized to prevent tax-collection, and pledged themselves not to buy any property at tax-sales, and the property was generally bought by the State.
The government reprisals against tax resisters included the following, according to one account:
Every delinquent tax-payer, however small the amount, was compelled to pay $2 auditor’s fee, $1.50 advertising fee, $1.50 recorder’s fee, and $5 surveyor’s fee, for useless paper survey, and 25 cents for notice; all of which went into the pockets of officials, and in no respect increased the revenue of the State.
In addition to this, the legislature organized under Governor Kellogg passed a law rendering any delinquent incompetent as a witness in any civil suit, and preventing him from bringing any suit.
No injunction, it is believed, could be taken against the action of the tax-collector, however much he might deviate from law.
Some of that was later ruled to be unconstitutional.
Tax resistance was only one part of a campaign that included terrorism, the establishment of parallel government structures, and a variety of other techniques.
It was eventually successful at ending Union control of the heart of formerly Confederate territory, and allowing the white supremacists to return to power, though never as the independent nation they’d aimed at.
People will be less reluctant to take risks in a tax resistance campaign if
they know other people are willing to share those risks. One way of providing
this sort of reassurance is for resisters to join together in a mutual
insurance plan, so that if the government takes legal action against a
resister, or retaliates against them in some other way, they won’t have to
bear these consequences alone.
Today I’ll review some examples of how a variety of tax resistance campaigns
have created mutual insurance plans to protect resisters.
War Tax Resisters Penalty Fund
The War Tax Resisters Penalty Fund
reimburses American war tax resisters who have penalties & interest
seized by the
IRS.
The fund is operated by a team of resisters and sympathizers, and has hundreds
of subscribers:
In a core group of 83 people across the
country decided we could easily share $463.14 in penalties and interest
incurred by a few military tax resisters who appealed to the war tax
resistance community for help. The more people we could recruit to shoulder
the penalties and interest of resisters, the lighter the burden for everyone.
With the modest help we could provide, conscientious resisters were able to
keep on keeping on.
The penalty fund had the added benefit of making us all tax resisters, not
just those who withheld all or a portion of their income taxes. The base list
of supporters has been as high as 800 people sharing the weight. In nearly
every appeal, at least 200 people respond, usually more. In all we’ve paid
out about $250,000 to help resisters stay in the struggle.
Resisters who have had money seized by the
IRS
send the fund documentation showing how much of the seizure was the result
of interest and penalties, and then the fund sends out an appeal to its
members to help reimburse the cost:
We divide the total amount for all resisters by the number of active names on
the membership list to arrive at a “share.” We then send out an appeal to
both actives and inactive members. Each contributor pays all of a share or
whatever amount she can afford. Some pay more than a share. If we collect 75
percent of the total we ask for, each resister gets 75 percent of the amount
they requested. We cannot promise that we will collect the total amount
requested; usually, however, we can reimburse between 50% and 80% of each
appeal.
I have personal experience with this mutual insurance plan. In
the
IRS
seized some bank accounts of mine to recover taxes I had refused to pay. This
included $813 in interest and penalties. I applied to the War Tax Resisters
Penalty Fund, which sent me a check for $649 from the amount the subscribers
to the fund pledged.
Irish Land League
When the
National
Land League launched a rent strike targeting English absentee landlords in
Ireland in , it made sure resisters knew
it would have their backs if the landlords tried to evict them. The leaders
of the League issued a rent strike manifesto from Kilmainham Jail that
declared:
If you only act together in the spirit to which within the last two years
you have countless times pledged your vows, they can no more evict a whole
nation than they can imprison them.
The funds of the National Land League will be poured out unstintingly for the
support of all who may endure eviction in the course of the struggle. Our
exiled brothers in America may be relied upon to contribute if necessary as
many millions of money as they have contributed thousands to starve out
landlordism and bring English tyranny to its knees.
One of the ways this played out was for evicted tenants to be temporarily
put up, along with their livestock if any, on the property of unevicted
tenants and sympathetic landowners, in what came to be called “Land League
Villages.” Each family was given a small monthly allowance from the Land
League.
Dublin Water Charge Strike
In , the resistance campaign against the
water charge in Dublin initiated a mutual insurance fund. One of the campaign
leaders recalls:
Obviously the council/government tactic was to try to individualise their
intimidation. By summonsing individuals to court maybe they could bypass the
mass participation that the protests against disconnections had seen. The
campaign immediately took a decision that when any individual was summonsed
to court, we would turn up and contest every case — and that we would turn up
in force. It was at this time that we made a decision which would prove
crucial to the success of the campaign. We decided to initiate a membership
of the campaign at £2 per household. This money would go into a warchest to
pay legal fees so that no individual would be left facing a legal bill. The
idea that the individuals being taken to court were representing all of us
was paramount. Within weeks 2,500 households had paid the £2 membership fee,
and within 12 months there were over 10,000 paid-up households making the
campaign without doubt the biggest to have existed in decades.
Breton Association
When Charles Ⅹ of France attempted to bypass the legislature and enact his own
taxes in , French liberals in the Breton
Association organized tax resistance and created a fund to defray the costs of
any tax resisters who were prosecuted. By the terms of the Association’s
manifesto:
We declare… [t]o subscribe individually for ten francs… This subscription
will form a common stock or fund for all Brittany, destined to indemnify the
subscribers for any expense they may be put to by their refusal to pay any
illegal contributions imposed upon the public…
And this is how the fund was to be administered:
[Elected procurators are to] receive the subscriptions, to afford indemnities
conformably to the [section quoted above], at the request of any subscriber
prosecuted for the payment of illegal contributions; to sue in his name…
for justice against the exactors by all possible means allowed by law…
War of the Regulation
The Regulator movement, a tax resistance rebellion in pre-American Revolution
North Carolina, had an oath that members took that committed each of them to
come to the aid of any others who might be arrested or whose property was
being seized for nonpayment:
I will, with the aid of other sufficient help, go and take, if in my power,
from said officer, and return to the party from whom taken; and in case any
one concerned should be imprisoned, or under arrest, or otherwise confined,
or if his estate, or any part thereof, by reason or means of joining this
company of Regulators, for refusing to comply with the extortionate demands
of unlawful tax gatherers, that I will immediately exert my best endeavors to
raise as many of said subscribers as will be force sufficient, and, if in my
power, I will set the said person at liberty…
The oath also created a mutual insurance pledge:
I do further promise and swear that if, in case this, our scheme, should be
broken or otherwise fail, and should any of our company be put to expense or
under any confinement, that I will bear an equal share in paying and making
up said loss to the sufferer.
Reformed Israel of Yahweh
Members of the small Christian group called the Reformed Israel of Yahweh
were, like its founder, conscientious objectors to military taxation. When
some of the members of the group were convicted on tax evasion charges, the
Reformed Israel of Yahweh organization paid their fines.
Pacific Yearly Meeting
A committee of the collection of American Quaker congregations known as the
Pacific Yearly Meeting administers something it calls “the Fund for Concerns:”
Its purpose is to assist members and attenders of Monthly Meetings to follow
individual leadings arising from peace, social order, or spiritual concerns.
… Up to $100 per fiscal year per person will be available to help with the
interest and penalty expenses of war tax resisters who are members or regular
attenders of a Monthly Meeting. The Monthly Meeting must indicate approval
and provide matching funds.
New York Yearly Meeting
During the Vietnam War, the New York Yearly Meeting advocated war tax
resistance and “promised financial help through special committees if [Quaker
resisters] changed jobs or refused to pay taxes in protest against the war.”
Papuan Courier
In 1919, Papua, which had been a territory occupied and run by the German
Empire until World War Ⅰ when Australia took over, began to agitate against
taxation without representation, and many people refused to pay.
The Papuan Courier, which was sympathetic to the
tax resisters,
…as evidence of its bona fides on the question, has decided, to form a fund
for the defence of any resident who may by victimised, persecuted, or
prosecuted for failure to pay the tax, and to that end we open the list with
a contribution of Five Guineas.
Tithe War
In , Irish Catholics rebelled
against paying government-mandated tithes to the Anglican church. In this
case, the Catholic church itself provided some insurance to the resisters.
The Anglican archbishop Richard Whately complained:
Every possible legal evasion has been resorted to to prevent the incumbent
from obtaining his due. A parish purse has been raised to meet law expenses
for this purpose, and the result has been that in most instances nothing
whatever, in others a very small proportion of the arrears, has been
recovered. … [One Anglican clergyman] instituted a tithe-suit which was
decided in his favour; but, instead of receiving the amount, he was met by an
appeal to the High Court of Delegates, and is informed that a continued
resistance to the utmost extremity of the law is to be supported by a parish
purse.
Addio-Pizzo Movement
In , a number of individuals and businesses
opposed to paying mafia protection money began to use a number of techniques
to interrupt the payments and to support those resisters whom the mafia was
threatening with reprisals. The mayor of Palermo, Diego Cammarata, pledged
€50,000 to assist merchants who had been victims of extortion.
Peacemakers
The group “Peacemakers,” which launched the modern American war tax resistance
movement , had a mutual
insurance component from the beginning:
Peacemakers at the Ohio cell… established the Peacemaker Sharing Fund, a
mutual aid plan designed to insure aid to dependents of imprisoned
Peacemakers and to help finance group projects. During the Vietnam war, the
sharing fund became the main vehicle for donations to meet the needs of war
resisters’ families.
Penalty Sharing Community
The Iowa Peace Network maintains a mailing list of persons who have made a
commitment to the Penalty Sharing Community
to share in the penalties assessed to individuals and families who have
chosen to resist war taxes or have participated in civil disobedience or
non-violent direct action. When a request for assistance is received, a
mailing is sent out which explains the resister’s situation and the amount of
money needed. For example, if the resister was assessed a $300.00 penalty,
each of the persons in the Community would pay an equal portion of the
$300.00. Thus if there were 200 people in the Community, each would pay
$1.50. The Iowa Peace Network will also add into the amount requested its
costs for printing and mailing. Such costs have proven to be minimal.
Pioneer Valley War Tax Resisters
Members of the Pioneer Valley War Tax Resisters redirected their federal taxes
into an “alternative fund” that served partially as an escrow account, and
partially as a way of redirecting some of the money to charitable
organizations. Part of the fund was reserved to help defray any legal costs
incurred by members in the course of their resistance.
“New Rush” Resisters
White miners at the “New Rush” in Kimberly, South Africa, voted in
to form “a Defence League and Protection
Association… not to assail the Government, but to protect individuals if
assailed unrighteously by the Government.” The pledge of the association said
in part:
I shall to the utmost of my power, with purse and person, protect any and
every officer and member of the League against coercion or consequences of
what nature soever arising out of the action necessitated by this pledge.
The pledge had a clause that made it binding when it would be signed by 400
men, whereupon:
The Government will be defied if they dare to touch a single claim for
non-payment of license. The diamond buyers will refuse to pay further license
and will be defended from harm.
Ruhrkampf
When the Ruhr region of Germany began resisting reparation payments to the
victorious nations of World War Ⅰ, France and Belgium occupied the region
to take the payments by force. Germans responded with a campaign of mass
nonviolent resistance, including tax resistance, and were backed up by their
own government.
One of the ways the German government supported the campaign was by paying
the strikers itself, to the tune of 715 million marks. It did this in part by
printing off more currency, which helped fuel the hyperinflation of
(itself a sort of resistance strategy that
made it difficult or impractical to account for reparations payments).
Louisiana Anti-Reconstructionists
During the “Reconstruction” period after the American Civil War, white
supremacists in Louisiana refused their allegiance to a federally-backed,
mixed-race state government, and demonstrated this through tax resistance.
Several attorneys issued a statement offering to “engage themselves, without
compensation, and as a matter of public service, to defend professionally all
[tax resisters].” A mass-meeting issued a tax resistance pledge, and resolved:
That a committee of five be appointed to draw up a plan by which the citizens
may co-operate, to employ counsel and mutually assist each other in their
refusal to pay taxes.
Satyagraha in South Africa
Gopal Krishna Gokhale, an officer in the Indian National Congress fighting
for the independence of India, pledged £2,000 a month to support Indian
satyagrahis in South Africa who were engaged in tax resistance and other
tactics under Gandhi’s direction.
Mark Wilks was arrested and sent to Brixton Prison for failing to pay his wife’s income taxes.
The case became a cause célèbre in the British women’s suffrage movement and an embarrassment to the British government and its tax authorities.
This is a good example of how careful study of the law can help tax resisters find and exploit flaws that hold the tax system or its enforcement arm up to ridicule, make them unworkable, or make them vehicles for additional resistance or propaganda opportunities.
Ethel Ayres Purdie, resident tax law expert of the Women’s Tax Resistance League, discovered the vulnerability.
The Income Tax Act, she wrote, “is a most fearsome piece of composition.
Its language is archaic and tautological, it rises wholly superior to punctuation, and proceeds breathlessly through one hundred and ninety-four clauses.”
But one of those clauses held a fatal flaw.
The “Married Woman’s Property Act” of was a reform that allowed married women to maintain control of their property rather than relinquishing it to their husbands’ control upon marriage.
But the earlier () Income Tax Act still considered the husband to be solely liable for the income taxes of both the husband and wife.
At first, when Elizabeth Wilks began resisting her income tax, the government responded by seizing and selling her property, but when this quirk in the law was discovered, tax resisters like Wilks protested that the government could not legally seize her property since as a married woman her taxes were legally owed by the him in the marriage.
So the government went after Mark Wilks instead.
Mark Wilks, for his part, insisted that he could hardly fill out an income tax return since he had no legal right to demand information from his wife about her income!
Besides, his modest income and lack of property in his own name meant that he could not afford to pay the taxes on his wife’s considerably larger income (he did pay the tax on the portion of their joint income that was attributable to his own income, though his income was low enough that by itself it would not have been taxable).
“I am informed that I am liable for taxes levied on her income,” he wrote “while at the same time the law places all her property entirely beyond my control.”
Meanwhile, the Women’s Tax Resistance League trumpeted the arrest of Mark Wilks and his indefinite imprisonment — “for non-payment of taxes not his own and due on an income over which he has no control and whose amount he can only guess at” — as proving their contention that not only should women resist the income tax, but that married women were not even legally obligated to pay it and those who were paying it were operating under a legal delusion.
The imprisonment of Mark Wilks was a propaganda coup:
For what do the arrest and imprisonment of Mark Wilks mean?
We are perfectly certain that it will not last long.
Stupid and inept as it has been, the Government, we are certain, will not risk the odium which would justly fall upon it if this outrage on liberty went on.
A Government which has much at stake and which lives by the breath of popular opinion cannot afford to ignore such strong and healthy protest as is being poured out on all sides.
To us, who are in the midst of it, that which seems most remarkable is the growth of public feeling.
In the streets where processions are nightly held, we were met at first by banter and rowdyism.
“A man in prison for the sake of Suffragettes!”
To the boy-mind of the metropolis, on the outskirts of many an earnest crowd, that seemed irresistibly funny; but thoughtfulness is spreading; into even the boy-mind, the light of truth is creeping.
If it had done nothing else, the imprisonment of Mark Wilks has certainly done this — it has educated the public mind.
Wilks was released after less than a month in prison, without official explanation, and without paying the tax.
A tax resistance campaign is almost always one that butts up against the law, and it can be helpful to have campaigners who know a thing or two about legal matters.
As Elizabeth Cady Stanton put it when she was considering a tax resistance campaign for women’s suffrage in America,
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.
Today I’ll summarize some examples of how legal study and the assistance of attorneys have made a difference in tax resistance campaigns.
Poll Tax rebels in Thatcher’s Britain
Understanding the law and the legal process was important in the poll tax rebellion — to give confidence to resisters, to support targets of government reprisals, and to make the process of tax enforcement costly and unmanageable.
Anti-poll tax volunteer Danny Burns writes:
In Bristol when the court cases started, each person with a summons, who rang into the office, was logged and sent an information pack.
The same personal attention was given to people with notices from the bailiffs.
At the peak of the campaign, the Bristol office was staffed morning and afternoon five days a week by different volunteers.
, it was receiving over 200 calls a week.
… [The volunteers included] at least five court support workers…
In every part of England and Wales local groups mobilised to provide support for non-payers in the courts.
Tens, if not hundreds of activists in each region attended legal briefing sessions.
These were run both by activists and sympathetic local lawyers.
People were given ideas about how they might disrupt or delay the court proceedings.
These included simple things, like asking for a glass of water because their throat was dry, demanding to see the identity cards of everyone present in court, to fainting in court or arranging for fire alarms to go off.
People were told to demand their rights to see and read every document which was produced as evidence against them.
They were also given briefings on the basic technical arguments.
By , when most of the court cases had started, virtually every Anti-Poll Tax Union in the UK had trained at least two or three of its members to become conversant with the Poll Tax law.
Throughout England and Wales over a thousand people were trained to do court support work and could quote the relevant legislation.
This is unique in the history of popular campaigning.
The Anti-Poll Tax Unions hoped to use the legal precedent of McKenzie versus McKenzie (), which said that a person can “attend a trial as a friend of either party (to) take notes and quietly make suggestions and give advice to that party.”
This person would be known as a “McKenzie friend.” McKenzie friends had no right to address the court, but they could advise the non-payer what to say.
In this way everyone would be able to offer technical defences and thereby delay the proceedings.
The campaign needed lawyers only in the most technical cases.
Lawyers were often seen as a liability, because they represented an individual client, and it was in their interest to get through the procedure as quickly as possible.
It was in the campaign’s interest for everything to proceed as slowly as possible.
Nevertheless, legal knowledge and guidance was essential.
This arrived with the creation of the Poll Tax Legal Group… [which] researched legislation and case law.
It set up a network of lawyers throughout England and Wales who could support the legal challenges of Anti-Poll Tax groups and produced over 30 accessible legal bulletins on the Poll Tax and a book called To Pay or Not To Pay.
These underpinned the legal needs of the movement and helped ordinary people to get to grips with the law they needed to use.
Delaying tactics were mixed with serious legal technicalities.
Councils were challenged for sending notices to the wrong addresses.
Given the rate at which people moved houses, it was difficult for the councils to keep up, and as a result many cases were dropped because people hadn’t received proper notice.
Big legal challenges were also made over “correct procedures.”
These came in the first few weeks and resulted mostly from the inexperience of councils in dealing with this sort of process.
The first day of Medina Council’s cases (on the Isle of Wight) is probably the most famous example.
The reminder notices were sent out with second class stamps, they consequently arrived late, people didn’t receive the statutory notice which they were entitled to, and the court threw out all 1,900 cases.
The council had to start again.
When police attacked an anti-poll tax demonstration in London, many of the demonstrators fought back, and hundreds were arrested.
Elements of the campaign leadership distanced themselves from the defendants, embarrassed to have the campaign associated with violence.
So other activists helped to form and coordinate an independent group — the Trafalgar Square Defendants’ Campaign — with the following mandate:
The campaign will:
Unconditionally defend all of those arrested on .
Be controlled by and be accountable to the defendants
Be totally independent of any other organisation.
Seek support from the whole Anti-Poll Tax movement and all other sympathetic organisations.
Seek to co-ordinate the legal defence of all those arrested.
Seek to build a coherent picture of events of from the point of view of those arrested.
Publicise the points of view of defendants.
Raise money for a bust fund, controlled by the defendants to cover their legal and welfare costs.
Ensure that at all future Anti-Poll Tax events there will be proper legal cover and support for anyone arrested.
This will include an office and workers to visit places of detention and look after prisoners’ welfare.
Danny Burns again:
About a dozen people volunteered to carry out the court monitoring process.
They attended every hearing, systematically took notes of everything that was said, recorded the numbers of police officers and approached the defendants asking them to attend the now weekly TSDC meetings… By the summer, over 250 of the defendants had been contacted.
The TSDC ran advice sessions on prison, produced legal briefing notes and mailed out the minutes of the weekly meetings to every defendant every week.
A solicitors’ group was established with a core of three, but at the peak of early activity they managed to get over fifteen solicitors involved.
This proved important because the solicitors’ group managed to get hold of over 50 hours of police videos and handed them over to the campaign.
The police videos were crucial in getting a lot of people off, and a number of people in the campaign worked extremely hard editing videos and rejigging them for particular trials.
The solicitors’ group also got the Crown Prosecution Service to hand over a full list of all of the defendants and the names and addresses of their lawyers.
The lawyers were all contacted and, although many were initially reluctant to co-operate with the campaign, they soon realised that TSDC had a lot of information which their clients needed.
Every possible legal angle was pursued by the campaign’s legal team — down to legal definitions of what constituted a householder, making the councils prove that the person they had summonsed actually lived at the address, that they owned the property, etc., etc. We weren’t doing this because we had any illusions in the impartiality of the court system.
We knew that even though we were successful in finding various legal loopholes these would all be closed one by one and that the judges would be doing their best to facilitate the councils.
This was demonstrated most clearly when a judge in Swords invoked the Public Order Act to close several streets around the courthouse to prevent a protest outside it.
But by contesting every detail of every summons we could make the system unworkable.
There were tens of thousands of non-payers.
After several months the councils had only managed to get a couple of dozen cases through the courts.
Someone calculated that at the rate they were managing to proceed it would take them something like 220 years to process all the cases.
And it was costing them more in legal fees than they could ever hope to take back in charges — even if they managed to bully everyone into paying.
Any time the council did manage to get a court order, it was appealed — again the objective being to clog up the system.
George Cony’s aggressive lawyers
When Oliver Cromwell knocked the English king off his throne, he did so in part in the cause of Parliamentary democracy.
Upon assuming charge of the English government, however, he grew impatient with Parliament and decided to enact some taxes on his own.
One of Cromwell’s more radical supporters, George Cony, taking Cromwell at his word (Cromwell had said that “the subject who submits to an illegal impost is more an enemy of his country than the tyrant who imposes it”) decided to refuse to pay one of these arbitrary taxes.
Cony’s lawyers argued his case so successfully that Cony’s tax evasion case threatened to call the legal underpinnings of Cromwell’s regime into question.
The judges in the case seemed sympathetic, and Cromwell was so alarmed that he had all three lawyers imprisoned in the Tower of London until they repented, upon which the chief-justice who was hearing the case resigned.
Hugh Williams and the Rebecca rioters
Radical lawyer Hugh Williams was of great help to the Rebecca movement in Wales — some say he was more than a legal advisor, but one of the instigators of the movement, or even “Rebecca” herself!
One account says: “[Williams] did all the legal work for the rioters, also drafting various petitions for them.
He was a prominent member of the Chartist movement, acting as their solicitor, and he defended the prisoners at Welshpool Assizes in July, 1839, for taking part in the Chartist Riots.
He rendered similar services to the Rebecca prisoners gratuitously; but was eventually reported to the Lord Chancellor and struck off the Rolls.
He, however, continued to do a considerable amount of legal work, and whenever it became necessary for him to appear in court, he invariably employed [another attorney] to appear for him.”
His familiarity with the law and the legal process helped him help the Rebeccaites translate their grievances into formal petitions, which in turn helped the Rebeccaite “people power” movement effect change in government policy.
White supremacists in Reconstruction-era Louisiana
When white supremacists in New Orleans decided to actively withdraw their consent from the mixed-race Reconstruction government of “scalawags” and “carpet-baggers” there in , they formed “The People’s Association to Resist Unconstitutional Taxation” and declared a tax strike.
Fifty-eight New Orleans attorneys signed the following statement of support:
The undersigned attorneys at law, citizens of New Orleans, engage themselves, without compensation, and as a matter of public service, to defend professionally all citizens, residents, or property-holders in this city, who shall desire their assistance in resisting the collection by municipal authorities of the taxes known as the “school-tax,” the “park-tax,” and the “metropolitan-police tax,” and other taxes the collection of which may be lawfully resisted.
The Smith sisters of Glastonbury
Abby & Julia Smith refused to pay taxes to a local government that denied women the vote and that took advantage of this by excessively taxing women’s property in order to ease the tax burden on male voters and to redistribute the money to male patronage recipients.
In response, the government periodically seized and auctioned off the Smith sisters’ cows (“Votey” and “Taxey”).
That failing to discourage the Smiths, the town decided to fight dirty, and the Smiths fought back legally in a way that brought further attention to their cause:
[A]n inconspicuous advertisement in the Hartford Courant announced the sale at public auction of fifteen acres of Smith pasture land on , a date contrived to fall just before the grass would be cut.
Though the sisters set out on that day with ample funds, the collector adroitly shifted the meeting place, and when the two women caught up with the auction, the gavel had just gone down transferring for $78.35 land worth nearly $2,000 to none other than a covetous neighbor who had tried for years to get possession of it.
Abby and Julia were daughters of a lawyer.
They brought suit against tax collector George C. Andrews on the grounds that he had violated a law which plainly stated that movable property must first be sold for unpaid taxes before real estate could be seized.
The case was tried in the home of Judge Hollister of Glastonbury, who gave a verdict in favor of the sisters and fined Andrews damages of $10. Threatening terrible consequences, Andrews appealed the case.
The new trial, which lasted three days in the Hartford Court of Common Pleas, had a farcical aspect.
There were misplaced records; there was distorted evidence.
The judge, in absentia, reversed the Glastonbury decision and decided in favor of collector Andrews.
At this point the Smiths’ lawyer backed out.
Abby and Julia, both now in their eighties, began the study of law with the intention of conducting their own case.
Happily a capable lawyer finally agreed to place a second appeal before the Court of Equity.
For two years a wide and sympathetic public followed this devious litigation.
Across the nation, even in England and France, editors and columnists lauded the Glastonbury cows in prose and poetry.
Reporters visited the town, drank tea in the elm-shaded farmhouse, admired the cows, polled public opinion in Glastonbury, and returned with highly flavored and often inaccurate stories.
With whatever condescension these reporters arrived, they seem, one and all, to have found the Smith sisters irresistible.
The hospitality, wit, and charm of the two elderly spinsters captivated the world beyond Glastonbury.
When the final verdict was made in their favor, in , women the country over rejoiced.
To be sure, Julia and Abby did not vote in Glastonbury, but from that time on their property was undisturbed.
The Greek “Won’t Pay” movement
The current Greek “Won’t Pay” movement, which is resisting a number of stealth taxes the government has added to things like utility bills and road tolls, has also carried its struggle into court — at one point winning an injunction that forbade the state power company from cutting the power of people who were refusing to pay the new utility bill tax.
Newly-enfranchised Pennsylvania women
When women in Pennsylvania won the vote, many discovered to their chagrin that they had also become subject to taxes to which they had previously been immune.
Thousands of them, deciding the package was not worth it, decided to refuse to pay.
And they were able to take advantage of a quirk in an law that did not permit the authorities to send women to prison (though they could imprison men) for tax refusal:
Nothing herein contained shall authorize the arrest or imprisonment for non-payment of any tax of any female or infant or person found by inquisition to be of unsound mind.
It took a few years for the state legislature to pass a law allowing for the jailing of women who refused to pay their taxes.
Maurice McCrackin’s lawyers
Not all legal help is helpful.
When American war tax resister Maurice McCrackin was convicted of refusing to cooperate with an IRS summons, he was following a strategy of complete noncooperation that he kept following right into the courtroom — where he refused to stand for the judge, refused to plead to the charges, refused to answer questions, refused to consult with his court-appointed attorney, fasted while behind bars, and had to be wheeled into and out from his court appearances because he wouldn’t walk there under his own power.
For the same reason, upon his conviction, he emphatically said that he was not interested in pursuing an appeal: “I said I wanted to file no appeal, nor did I want steps taken to keep the door open, so an appeal could be perfected later.
I do not recognize any appeal on my behalf… My position is not changed.
This is a moral, not a legal, struggle.”
One of the lawyers who had been assigned to defend him, however, convinced that the judge had betrayed bias against McCracken in his statements from the bench, said that he intended to appeal anyway.
“Constitutionalist” tax protesters
And then there are the “Constitutionalist” “show me the law!”-style tax protesters.
For years they have been bedeviling the IRS with their baroque, ever-evolving, quasi-legal arguments and pleadings based on the real Constitution, or common law, or tortured interpretations of excerpts from a variety of cherry-picked statutes and court rulings.
While they typically know just enough about the law to get into trouble, without knowing enough to get out again, there’s no question that they cause headaches a-plenty for the powers that be.
Alas, this does not seem to actually be their objective.
Instead, they seem convinced that they’re not just whistling Dixie, but they’re right, and if they can just figure out how to pick the lock of the court system with the right argument, they’ll be able to walk out free into a new world where their Constitution holds sway and the perverters of the true law are vanquished.
Alas, most of what they have discovered is an enormous and inventive catalog of things that don’t work, so in spite of all of their creativity and effort, they have given the rest of us little to work with.
But if you ever have a “that’s so crazy it just might work!” idea about going up against the IRS, you might want to research these folks first — they may have already tried it.
And every once in a while they rack up a courtroom victory — not often one that amounts to much in real terms, but it fuels the movement.
One observer of the movement reacted to a twist of this sort by saying: “This is going to encourage thousands more people who were on the fence, who were paying taxes only because they were afraid they would be criminally prosecuted.
If too many people do this, the tax system will collapse because it is based on people voluntarily complying.”
(I’m most familiar with the U.S. variety, but similar groups exist in Canada, the U.K., and probably elsewhere.
Earlier this year in England, for instance, hundreds of Constitutionalist tax protesters stormed a courtroom where one of their number was on trial, whereupon they attempted to put the judge under citizens arrest, and began making their own rulings from the bench!)
, I’m finishing off Violence Week here at The Picket Line.
Violence certainly can be an effective way to disrupt the tax collecting bureaucracy.
Most tax collectors are not particularly enthusiastic about their calling, and so a little intimidation can go a long way in discouraging them.
This in turn makes tax collection more expensive for the government, decreasing its return-on-investment and compelling it either to tighten its belt or to resort to higher taxes and thereby expand the ranks of resisters.
The IRS even now is complaining of “a surge of hostility towards the federal government” that threatens its employees.
“Attacks and threats against IRS employees and facilities have risen steadily in recent years.”
Taxation is such a political hot potato, and politicians are so venal, that the people who most profit from taxes are often the first ones to fan the flames of hostility.
Violence also has a way of backfiring.
Tax resistance campaigns often show great success right up to the point where they start relying on violent tactics, whereupon they lose popular support, become subject to an easier-to-justify draconian crack-down, or reinvigorate their opponents.
Violence also, in a less-obvious way, harms the body politic by increasing fear, divisiveness, and tension, by giving precedent to people who already have tendencies to resolve conflicts violently, by making it harder for opposing sides to come to a reconciliation, and so forth.
And of course, in many cases, it is just cruel and wrong in its own right.
I have presented examples this week largely without passing judgment as to whether they were justified or helpful to their cause.
Some examples, for instance the Rebecca Riots, are hard to imagine without violence.
Other examples, for instance the Regulator movement in colonial North Carolina, seemed to me to be cases where violent tactics were counterproductive to the point of being disastrous.
And in some cases, the violence was so cruel or misdirected that even if you were being generous about the ends justifying the means, you would be hard-pressed to defend it.
(You can read my personal views about whether violence directed at tax collectors can be justified or helpful at an earlier Picket Line post.)
A good example of violence being used successfully is also an unsavory one.
White supremacists in the defeated states of the Confederacy after the U.S. Civil War used violent white militias to back up their tax resistance campaign against the reconstruction state governments that were being propped up by the victorious Union forces.
In Louisiana, dozens of armed men from the paramilitary “White League”…
…came to prevent the deputy tax-collector effecting a sale, armed with revolvers nearly all.
Mr. Fournet came and threatened the deputy and tax-collector.
The deputy and tax-collector ran into their offices.
I came down and called upon the citizens to clear the court-house, but could not succeed.
I then called upon the military, but they had no orders at that time to give me assistance to carry out the law.
When the deputy tax-collector attempted to make a sale Mr. Fournet raised his hand and struck him.
The deputy then shoved him down.
As soon as this was done forty, fifty, or sixty men came with their revolvers in hand.
White supremacist paramilitary groups went from terrorizing tax collectors and auctioneers to intimidating voters, assassinating office-holders, and massacring blacks.
Their terror campaign was ultimately successful at wearing down the will of the North.
The U.S. withdrew federal troops, whereupon the white supremacist forces retook political control, the white paramilitaries were absorbed into the state militias, and the white supremacists held absolute political control for generations after.
So, yes, sometimes the terrorists do win, and sometimes violence is successful, for some definitions of “success.”
Here are a few examples of attacks on tax officials that I wasn’t sure how to categorize… I include them below in a sort of catch-all miscellany category:
In one of the more amusing cases in my archive, when colonial Governor John Evans tried to impose a tax on shipping on the Delaware river, in violation of the colonial charter, and to enforce this by firing cannons on vessels that tried to pass his fort without paying, Richard Hill decided to defy the tax.
First he sent men “with the ship’s papers to the fort, to show that the vessel had been regularly cleared at the custom-house, and to endeavour to persuade the officer to suffer her to pass without molestation,” but that didn’t work.
Then he just tried to sail by, “steering as near to the opposite side as he safely could,” and almost got through “without damage, except [for] the main-sail, which was shot through.”
Then:
The officer at the fort, not willing to miss his prize, immediately had his boat manned and went in pursuit.
[Hill’s] ship’s sails were now slackened, and the boat was allowed to come alongside, and having fastened a rope to the ship, the officer and his men came on board.
Whilst engaged in a warm controversy with the owner and his friends, some one on board (no doubt advisedly) quietly loosed the boat and let her drift astern.
The ship was now under full sail, and when the officer at length discovered that he was in danger of a voyage to the West Indies, and that all his hopes of retreat were cut off, his courage failed, and he suffered himself to be led as a prisoner into the cabin.
Hill landed on the Jersey side of the river, run by Evans’s rival-governor Lord Cornbury, “who claimed in his own right the exclusive jurisdiction of the river” and, being “a proud and haughty man, on hearing the case, was quite indignant at this encroachment on his prerogative, and he threatened the officer in no measured terms of rebuke, who now became seriously alarmed at his situation, and sued for pardon, making many professions of sorrow for the offence he had committed.
At length, having promised never to attempt the like again, he was suffered to depart.”
Evans then gave up on his pet tax.
When a higher court ordered county court judges in Missouri to institute taxes there to pay off the owners of fraudulently-issued railroad bonds, “a gang of armed men rode into the county seat of Osceola and held tax officials at gunpoint while its members stole all the official tax records.
The gang warned the county court judges that they would be lynched unless they resigned immediately.
Lawmen recognized individuals in the gang but took no action because they knew residents admired the gang more than they did the court.
… All three judges resigned and, at a special election, voters selected three dedicated Greenbackers, one of them a relative of train robber Cole Younger who could presumably be trusted not to ally with railroads” … “Under renewed popular threats of physical harm, county courts in Knox and Macon devised schemes in that prevented the county treasuries from ever having enough funds to pay railroad debts.”
British Constitutionalists last year stormed a courtroom where a man was challenging his council tax bill and attempted to place the judge under citizens’ arrest.
“In chaotic scenes, police rescued Judge Michael Peake from the clutches of a mob and escorted him safely from the County Court…”
Sometimes the decisive turn in a tax resistance campaign has come when the resisters have coalesced into a formal group with the authority to organize and coordinate resistance actions.
Today I’ll give some examples of this.
The Great Confederated Anti-Dray and Land Tax League of South Australia formed in the to fight taxes associated with a recently-enacted Road Act, and, once organized, the League was successful in its fight.
Organizer Jonathan Norman remarked to a meeting of the League in : “They had before them an example of what might be achieved by union.
In everything they had been victorious; the dray-tax. which from time to time was threatened to be enforced, was ultimately abandoned altogether.
The various memorials from the different hundreds, backed by the memorial of the united delegates, had caused the Government to introduce an amended Act, which promised almost everything they desired.”
When Charles Ⅹ and his ministers threatened to bypass the elected legislature and start taxing and spending on their own initiative in , French liberals declared that since such actions violated the constitution, the people were under no obligation to pay for them with their taxes.
Taxed landholders in Brittany formed the “Breton Association” to coordinate their resistance.
This Association had a two-fold object.
They proposed, in the first place, to refuse to pay any illegal tax, and in the second place to raise by contribution a common fund for indemnifying any subscriber, whose property or person might suffer by reason of his refusal.
The members subscribed each ten francs.
In the event of any tax being imposed without the consent of the Chambers, or with the consent of a Chamber of Deputies created by any illegal alteration of the existing law, payment of the tax was to be refused, and the money subscribed was to be employed in defending and indemnifying the persons who should so refuse, and to prosecute all who might be concerned in the imposing, or the levying of such illegal taxes.
The association enacted a trigger mechanism for an organized tax strike and a process for collecting and distributing a mutual insurance fund.
In this way they were able to present a credible threat to the planned royal usurpation — so much so that the newspapers that dared to print the Association’s charter were prosecuted and their editors imprisoned.
This only served to fuel the movement: “The associations spread over the greater part of the kingdom; they embraced more than half the Chamber of Deputies, and a very considerable number of peers.”
The Rebeccaites formed Farmers Unions which met in secret to discuss the same sort of grievances that, in disguise, Rebecca and her sisters would address vigilante-style, and which corresponded with each other in a regional network.
One farmer said: “This Union among us is a very excellent thing if all join.
When they elect members of Parliament they do just as they please, and we have no voice, but here we have.
There is no way of putting things to rights till we get up this Union, and then we can do as we please and think best.
If we had had this Union many years ago we should be better off than we are now!”
The Women’s Tax Resistance League formed in when about twenty women from existing suffrage groups came together in London “with the single-minded aim of starting ‘an entirely independent society quite separate from any existing suffrage society with the object of spreading the principles of tax resistance.’ ” League organizer Margaret Kineton Parkes explained that it “included Suffragists from every camp, Conservative, Liberal, Socialist, as well as non-party, and was making every effort to get a large number of influential women to refuse to pay taxes” because “[t]he isolated refusal to pay was ineffective and only caused trouble to the refuser; but a large and unexpected number would cause considerable trouble to the Government and would bring the question at issue home to them.”
Elias Rishmawi was among those who organized tax resistance in Beit Sahour during the first intifada.
He remembers how important it was to have formed a network of committees so as to distribute communication and decision-making in anticipation of Israeli military disruption by means of curfews and arrests of the resistance leadership.
Direct action-oriented pacifists in the United States came together in to form Peacemakers.
“[T]his is not an attempt to organize another pacifist membership organization, which one joins by signing a statement or paying a membership fee,” they announced.
By the group had about 2,000 members, about 150 of which were resisting taxes.
A second group, War Tax Resistance, promoted the tactic within the anti-Vietnam War activist community.
In , the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee formed to help a variety of groups that included war tax resistance as part of their work to coordinate and share resources and expertise.
During the Great Depression in the United States, taxpayers’ leagues, some of which organized property tax strikes, proliferated in the thousands.
Such groups “spring up like mushrooms,” one critic complained, “every time you go out in the morning, you find more of them.”
These leagues attacked the taxes on multiple fronts — not only organizing tax strikes but also coordinating legal suits and pressuring political figures.
A proposed sales tax boycott in Ottawa in
was boosted by the group Human Action to Limit Taxes.
“As individuals we are lost,” one resister said.
“But as a group we would have some impact.”
In the Birmingham Political Union of the Middle and Lower Classes formed.
It would play a strong role — and would advocate tax resistance — in the battle to pass the Reform Act of .
But it also began as a war tax resistance group, asking its members to sign the following oath:
That in the event of the present ministers so misconducting the affairs of the country as to make it probable we shall be involved in a Continental war [with Belgium], we will consider the propriety of checking so mischievous an event by withholding the means as far as may lay in our power, and will then consider whether or not refusing to pay direct taxes may not be advisable.
Similarly, the Catalonian “National Union” began life as a committee to direct a tax resistance action in and grew into the organizing party for an ambitious reform movement: “its demands included the entire reorganization of the vital forces of the nation: fiscal and administrative reform, the amelioration of the judicial system, the introduction of an effective system of compulsory education, the improvement of the provincial governments.”
A variety of local groups, with independent organizations, were key to the victory of the Anti-Poll Tax movement.
In Danny Burns’s book on the Poll Tax Rebellion, he stresses how important it was for the success of the campaign that people formed and ran their own small-scale, neighborhood resistance groups, rather than ceding control of the movement to the various established left-wing partisan and labor-union groups who wanted to use the movement to their own ends but were also afraid to identify themselves too closely with the law-breaking resisters.
Prior to the Anti-Poll Tax campaign, many people’s only experience of politics was a traditional Labour Party or trade union meeting — the sort of meeting where the top table takes up 90% of the discussion; where the only items discussed are those decided by the executive committee; where half the meeting time is spent discussing procedural motions or the order of words in a resolution; where political factions throw rhetoric across the room in angry and unproductive exchanges.
Essentially, boring meetings which stretch long into the night.
Hundreds of thousands of people have been to these meetings just once and never returned.
To engage people in a mass campaign, the Anti-Poll Tax Unions had to challenge this culture of organisation.
They had to make people feel wanted and included and give everyone a sense that they had a role.… This immediate form of organisation also meant that people weren’t patronised by those who had political experience.
In the local groups, people didn’t need permission to act, they just had to get on the phone to their neighbours and get something going.
People stay involved in political campaigns if they can contribute in the way that they feel is most effective.
Very often this is not by sitting in boring meetings.
…most of the successful Anti-Poll Tax Unions operated on a principle of parallel development.
Rather than trying to assert majority control or spend hours reaching consensus, people were allowed to get on with what they thought was most important.
Everything could be done in the name of the Anti-Poll Tax Union, which existed to coordinate activity against the Poll Tax, not to specify its exact nature.
However, he also notes:
…it was sometimes in the places where the Anti-Poll Tax Unions were weakest that resistance was strongest.
For example, St. Pauls was almost the only area in Bristol which couldn’t sustain an Anti-Poll Tax group.
Local people didn’t feel the need to set up new groups because, as in many inner city areas, they already had strong networks of solidarity, and there was already a high level of general hostility to officials of any sort.
… By the end of , three times as many people had turned up to court to contest their cases from St. Pauls than any other area.
White supremacists in Louisiana met in
to form “The People’s Association to Resist Unconstitutional Taxation” to coordinate their resistance to state and city taxes enacted by the reconstruction government there, and to provide legal support for resisters.
Property owners of Silver Lake Assembly met in to decide how to respond to a property tax they felt was being illegally put over on them by a government with no authority to do so.
They decided to respond as a group, “and perfected an organization for the purpose,” issuing a resolution saying that they “individually and collectively will resist the payment of the so-called taxes.”
Some tax resistance campaigns have tried to partially or completely secede from the government that is taxing them, or to set up alternative parallel governmental or quasi-governmental institutions to compete with or crowd out those of the established government.
When white supremacists in Louisiana lost the gubernatorial election to a reconstructionist candidate in 1872, they formed their own parallel government led by the losing candidate, with their own separate legislature and their own separate militia (with which they briefly occupied the statehouse).
They insisted that they were the legitimate government of Louisiana and recommended that people pay taxes to them and not to the usurpers in the statehouse.
They asserted:
Public opinion throughout the Union is against the usurpation, and our only danger, if there be any, will come from ourselves.
If the people of Louisiana will sanction, by obedience and acquiescence, this Government, they will give it the only validity it can ever acquire.
It is only by our own submission that our cause can be defeated.
We recommend the people of the several parishes, for the purpose of most effectual resistance to this usurpation, and of mutual aid and defense, to join the People’s League of Louisiana by the formation of Parish councils in correspondence with the Central Council at New-Orleans.
We must remember that there can be no de facto government as against a de jure government in a State, and that the only way by which the [governor] Kellogg usurpation can become established as a government is by acquiescence of the people… The people of New-Orleans are not to pay taxes, can not, in fact, pay them, nor are they giving any recognition to the usurpers.
The existence of this shadow government was not only a direct threat to the Kellogg government, but also indirectly made it difficult for it to raise funds because of the uncertainty.
One editorialist explained:
[Kellogg] can borrow no money, for his government is so notoriously illegal that no lender would expect payment.
If he should undertake to sell property for taxes, there would be no buyers, because an illegal Government could not give a valid title.
Hence he is reduced to the necessity of resorting to bluster and threats.
The Rebecca Rioters, confident from their success in destroying tollbooths, started to step in and adjudicate disputes in a quasi-governmental fashion.
For instance, they would visit the homes of fathers of illegitimate children and exact promises from them that they would provide support for the mothers.
During the tax strike that erupted in the French wine-growing region, local government officials resigned en masse and “local Separatist committees professed to take the Government’s place and set up a sort of provincial government.”
The decentralist Liberal Democratic Movement of Carabobo, Venezuela hinted at a tax resistance campaign in .
Upset at deteriorating public safety and infrastructure, and alleging that local taxes were being siphoned off to wasteful federal spending and a bloated local bureaucracy, Enio Daza, autonomism director of the Carabobo branch of the party, suggested that locals organize their own, independent tax office, and pay their taxes there where they could exercise local control over the spending.
The Zapatista movement in Mexico established municipios autónomos (autonomous towns) in regions where they were active:
The Tzeltal, Tzotzil, Tojolabal, and Chol Indians (among others) who lived in the autonomous townships called their political philosophy resistencia: civil resistance to government authority.
In the late 1990s there were thirty-eight Zapatista townships in Chiapas, including less than 10 percent of the 700,000 Indians in the state, but with a political impact in the indigenous communities that far outweighed their size.
The Zapatistas sought not to found a new Indian nation but to make a place for Indian self-determination within the Mexican state.
In their townships they kept their own birth and death records, discouraging followers from registering with official bureaucracies.
They stopped paying taxes to any government and refused to allow social workers from government health and welfare agencies to set foot inside what they considered their boundaries.
They opened their own health clinics staffed by volunteer Mexican and foreign doctors and local herbal healers and organized agricultural and crafts cooperatives that operated mainly through regional barter.
In some townships they held trials and set up jails.
Some people in the present-day Catalan independence movement have started paying their federal taxes directly to the Catalan regional government rather than to Spain.
An ongoing Spanish tax resistance movement is urging people to create a new, bottom-up, autonomous government of their own, and encourages them to redirect their taxes from the existing government into these new government-like projects:
[T]he construction of autonomy will require a lot of resources.
This process should be based on the ability to work and the generosity of many people, but needs to rely on these resources to make it possible.
By fiscal autonomy we mean all the pathways of redistribution that will make the tax system support initiatives that will really benefit people.
That is to say that the portion that each person is responsible of providing for the common good must be destined for new public services that really place the basic needs of people higher on the scale of priorities.
Therefore it becomes a priority, and all but essential, to generate dynamics of ever more massive civil disobedience against the pilfering of our resources on the part of the state, and to reclaim them for popular self-government.
In the Māori government in New Zealand instructed its subjects there to begin paying a dog tax directly to it, rather than to the New Zealand government-approved County Council.
When the Czar dissolved the Russian Duma in , the Duma refused to dissolve, meeting in Finland and declaring that they were the only government body with the authority to collect and spend taxes, and that therefore so long as they were abolished — so were taxes.
Something similar happened in Germany in , when the military and executive tried to break up the parliament.
The parliament then called on the people to refuse to pay any more taxes to the government.
When the government responded by trying to cut off funds for parliament, “the people insisted on making the payment, in spite of this prohibition.”
A very frequently-used tactic of tax resistance campaigns is to take public oaths or sign public pledges of resistance.
This signals to potential resisters that they will not be alone, and is a show of defiance to the authorities.
I’ve collected dozens of examples, which I’ll summarize here:
When Gandhi launched his first satyagraha-based campaign in South Africa in , a member of the meeting asked everyone present to take a solemn oath of opposition.
Gandhi remarked:
There is no one in this meeting who can be classed as an infant or as wanting in understanding.
You are all well advanced in age and have seen the world; many of you are delegates and have discharged responsibilities in a greater or lesser measure.
No one present, therefore, can ever hope to excuse himself by saying that he did not know what he was about when he took the oath.
I know that pledges and vows are, and should be, taken on rare occasions.
A man who takes a vow every now and then is sure to stumble.
But if I can imagine a crisis in the history of the Indian community of South Africa when it would be in the fitness of things to take pledges, that crisis is surely now.
… Resolutions of this nature cannot be passed by a majority vote.
Only those who take a pledge can be bound by it.
This pledge must not be taken with a view to produce an effect on outsiders.
No one should trouble to consider what impression it might have upon the local Government, the Imperial Government, or the Government of India.
Every one must only search his own heart, and if the inner voice assures him that he has the requisite strength to carry him through, then only should he pledge himself and then only would his pledge bear fruit.
His entire speech, which reflects on vows and the responsibility of vow makers, is worth reading in this context.
In , “98 per cent of the merchants at Stuttgart and… 60 out of 60 merchants at DeWitt,” Arkansas, signed pledges to refuse to collect a new sales tax from their customers or to pay it to the government.
Also in , in Verdun (then a suburb of Montreal), 164 shopkeepers, including the mayor, signed a pledge to refuse to collect or pay a Montreal city sales tax.
, merchants in Gadsen, Alabama followed suit: gathering and voting unanimously to refuse to collect or pay a sales tax.
In Ghana, in , the Akuashongs met and “swore not to… pay any tax, even if the government should fight with them, and to make war with any party breaking the agreement.”
In several French newspapers printed the text of a pledge in which French liberals vowed to resist any taxes that the monarchy instituted without going through constitutional channels.
The newspapers were themselves prosecuted for this.
However, in court, they pointed out that the King himself, before he took the throne, had signed a tax resistance pledge of his own, along with three other members of the nobility, as a protest against republican infringements on their privileges.
In Castine, Maine, in , the pledge took the form of a vote: the town voted 125 to 65 at a specially-convened town meeting, to refuse to collect a school funding tax in defiance of a superior court order to do so.
In , some 5,000 businessmen in Belfast vowed to “keep back payment of all taxes which they can control, so long as any attempt to put into operation the provisions of the Home Rule Bill is persevered in.”
In the Women’s Tax Resistance League, members signed “pledge cards” that indicated which taxes they would be resisting if the government persisted in denying women the vote.
The Reform Act agitation really hit its stride in when a huge rally, 150,000 people strong, vowed as a group to stop paying taxes until the Act’s passage.
One account of the meeting read:
He declared before God, that, if all constitutional modes of obtaining the success of the reform measure failed, he should and would, be the first man to refuse the payment of taxes, except by a levy upon his goods [tremendous cheering, which lasted some minutes].
I now call upon all who hear me, and who are prepared to join me in this step, to hold up your hands [an immense forest of hands was immediately elevated, accompanied by vehement cheering].
I now call upon you who are not prepared to adopt this course, to hold up your hands and signify your dissent [not a single hand appearing, loud shouts and cheers were repeated].
In South Africa’s “New Rush” in , a number of miners signed a pledge reading, in part, “I promise on my honour and in presence of the people that I shall not from this day forward — until released from this obligation by the officers of the League — pay any taxes or impositions whatsoever to the Government, id est, for the support and maintenance of the Government of this territory; and that I shall buy from, sell to, or deal with only such men as have also taken this pledge or obligation; and that I shall to the utmost of my power, with purse and person, protect any and every officer and member of the League against coercion or consequences of what nature soever arising out of the action necessitated by this pledge.
At least 1,000 taxpayers in Elmira, New York, signed a declaration in saying that “The undersigned taxpayers… believing the county, city, and school tax rates as levied are too high, hereby refuse to pay until the budget has been thoroughly examined by the committee of the Taxpayers’ league.
We also refuse to pay penalties until such revision has been made and a lower tax adopted.”
500 taxpayers in Cadillac, Michigan, signed a petition in in which they vowed to refuse to pay taxes for two years unless the local government cut its budget by 20%.
In , 36 New Jersey residents signed their name to a petition to the home country in which they declared that they would refuse to pay any further taxes so long as a Roman Catholic was in charge of tax assessment.
At a “monster meeting” at Castlemaine in Australia in , a group of miners unanimously adopted a resolution to refuse to take out licenses.
Taxpayers in Zeehan, Tasmania, met in an open-air meeting in and passed a resolution stating that they “hereby express our solemn determination to passively resist the payment of the unjust income tax imposed by the late Government.”
A Queensland, Australia stealth tax on rural irrigation improvements, was resisted by the farmers there in , who, organized in groups called “Local Producers’ Associations,” passed motions vowing to resist.
For example, the Association in Rockhampton “unanimously decided that all members pledge themselves to offer passive resistance to the operation of the Act by refusing to make the required applications or to furnish any returns, or to make any payments as demanded by the Act.
Further, it was decided to invite all other LPAs and kindred bodies to adopt a similar attitude.”
, about twenty households near Paddock Wood, England, “signed a declaration to withhold [tax] payments” to protest the lack of government action against vagabonds camping in their neighborhood.
When the Russian Duma-in-exile issued the Vyborg manifesto in , calling on Russians to refuse to pay taxes to the Czarist autocracy, a number of villages responded by voting whether or not to heed the call and then taking the results of the vote as a pledge they were bound to abide by.
In , 149 members of a Catholic War Veterans post vowed to refuse to pay their real estate taxes unless the government dismissed a Communist Party member from his post as an advisor to the Borough President of Manhattan.
At a meeting of the Charleston Board of Trade in South Carolina in , the white supremacist group unanimously passed a series of resolutions declaring that they considered debts incurred by the reconstruction government to be illegitimate and that they would resist the payment of taxes meant to pay them off.
At a mass meeting of white supremacists in Louisiana in , they passed a resolution vowing that “we will pay no more taxes to State or city.”
Some resisters of Thatcher’s poll tax made their resistance dramatically public by burning their “final reminder notices” at demonstrations.
This tactic has been prominent in the American war tax resistance movement.
For example:
In the American pacifist group Peacemakers released a statement, signed by 59 members, in which “the undersigned state hereby that we are not going to pay our federal taxes.”
In , some 370 people signed a public oath saying “We will refuse to pay our federal income taxes voluntarily.”
In , more than five hundred writers and editors added their names to a war tax resistance pledge that appeared as a newspaper advertisement.
The names included James Baldwin, Noam Chomsky, Philip K. Dick, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, Norman Mailer, Henry Miller, Grace Paley, Susan Sontag, Benjamin Spock, Gloria Steinem, William Styron, Hunter S. Thompson, Thomas Pynchon, Betty Friedan, and Kurt Vonnegut.
Also in , a letter was circulated largely among academics, and signed by more than a dozen professors, among others, organized as the “No Tax for War Committee” in which the signatories pledged to “withhold all or part of the taxes due” and urged the recipients to join their public pledge.
A tactic that I’ve encountered on many occasions in my research into tax resistance campaigns is that of disrupting government auctions of goods, particularly those of seized from tax resisters.
Here are several examples that show the variety of ways campaigns have accomplished this:
Religious nonconformists in the United Kingdom
Education Act-related resistance
Some disruption of auctions took place during the tax resistance in protest of the provisions of the Education Act that provided taxpayer money for sectarian education .
The Westminster Gazette reported:
There was some feeling displayed at a sale of the goods of Passive Resisters at Colchester yesterday, the Rev. T. Batty, a Baptist minister, and the Rev. Pierrepont Edwards, locally, known as “the fighting parson,” entering into discussion in the auction room, but being stopped by the auctioneer, who said he did his work during the week and he hoped they did theirs on Sundays.
At Long Eaton the goods of twenty-three Passive Resisters were sold amid demonstrations of hostility to the auctioneer.
A boy was arrested for throwing a bag of flour.
The New York Times reported that “Auctioneers frequently decline to sell goods upon which distraints have been levied.” And the San Francisco Chronicle noted:
Difficulty is experienced everywhere in getting auctioneers to sell the property confiscated.
In Leominster, a ram and some ewe lambs, the property of a resistant named Charles Grundy, were seized and put up at auction, as follows: Ram, Joe Chamberlain; ewes, Lady Balfour, Mrs. Bishop, Lady Cecil, Mrs. Canterbury and so on through the list of those who made themselves conspicuous in forcing the bill through Parliament.
The auctioneer was entitled to a fee under the law of 10 shillings and 6 pence, which he promptly turned over to Mr. Grundy, having during the sale expressed the strongest sympathy for the tax-resisters.
Most of the auction sales are converted into political meetings in which the tax and those responsible for it are roundly denounced.
Edinburgh Annuity Tax resistance
Auction disruptions were commonplace in the Annuity Tax resistance campaign in Edinburgh.
By law the distraint auctions (“roupings”) had to be held at the Mercat Cross — the town square, essentially — which made it easy to gather a crowd; or sometimes in the homes of the resisters. Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine reported of one of the Mercat Cross roupings:
If any of our readers know that scene, let them imagine, after the resistance was tolerably well organized, an unfortunate auctioneer arriving at the Cross about noon, with a cart loaded with furniture for sale.
Latterly the passive hubbub rose as if by magic.
Bells sounded, bagpipes brayed, the Fiery Cross passed down the closses, and through the High Street and Cowgate; and men, women, and children, rushed from all points towards the scene of Passive Resistance.
The tax had grinded the faces of the poor, and the poor were, no doubt, the bitterest in indignation.
Irish, Highlanders, Lowlanders, were united by the bond of a common suffering.
Respectable shopkeepers might be seen coming in haste from the Bridges; Irish traders flew from St. Mary’s Wynd; brokers from the Cowgate; all pressing round the miserable auctioneer; yelling, hooting, perhaps cursing, certainly saying anything but what was affectionate or respectful of the clergy.
And here were the black placards tossing above the heads of the angry multitude — ROUPING FOR STIPEND!
This notice was of itself enough to deter any one from purchasing; though we will say it for the good spirit of the people, that both the Scotch and Irish brokers disdained to take bargains of their suffering neighbours’ goods.
Of late months, no auctioneer would venture to the Cross to roup for stipend.
What human being has nerve enough to bear up against the scorn, hatred, and execration of his fellow-creatures, expressed in a cause he himself must feel just?
The people lodged the placards and flags in shops about the Cross, so that not a moment was lost in having their machinery in full operation, and scouts were ever ready to spread the intelligence if any symptoms of a sale were discovered.
Sheriff Clerk Kenmure Maitland appeared before a committee that was investigating the resistance campaign.
He mentioned that “Mr. Whitten, the auctioneer for sheriff’s sales, was so much inconvenienced and intimidated that he refused to take any more of those sales.”
Q: What was Mr. Whitten’s express reason for declining to act as auctioneer?
A: He was very much inconvenienced on that
occasion, and he believed that his general business connection would suffer
by undertaking these sales, and that he would lose the support of any
customer who was of that party.
Q: It was not from any fear of personal violence?
A: That might have had a good deal to do with it.
Q: Was Mr. Whitten the only auctioneer who declined?
A: No. After Mr. Whitten’s refusal I applied to
Mr. Hogg, whose services I should have been glad to have obtained, and he
said he would let me know the next day if he would undertake to act as
auctioneer; he wrote to me the next day saying, that, after consideration
with his friends, he declined to act.
Q: Any other?
A: I do not remember asking any others. The rates
of remuneration for acting as auctioneer at sheriffs’ sales are so low that
men having a better class of business will not act. I had to look about among
not first-class auctioneers, and I found that I would have some difficulty in
getting a man whom I could depend upon, for I had reason to believe that
influence would be used to induce the auctioneer to fail me at the last
moment.
It was difficult for the authorities to get any help at all, either from auctioneers, furniture dealers, or carters.
The government had to purchase (and fortify) their own cart because they were unable to rent one for such use.
Here is an example of an auction of a resister’s goods held at the resister’s
home, as described in the testimony of Thomas Menzies:
A: I saw a large number of the most respectable citizens assembled in the house, and a large number outside awaiting the arrival of the officers who came in a cab, and the indignation was very strong when they got into the house, so much so that a feeling was entertained by some that there was danger to the life of Mr. Whitten, the auctioneer, and that he might be thrown out of the window, because there were such threats, but others soothed down the feeling.
Q: There was no overt act or breach of the peace?
A: No.
The cabman who brought the officers, seeing they were engaged in such a disagreeable duty, took his cab away, and they had some difficulty in procuring another, and they went away round by a back street, rather than go by the direct way.
Q: Did Mr. Whitten, from his experience on that occasion, refuse ever to come to another sale as auctioneer?
A: He refused to act again, he gave up his
position.
He then described a second such auction:
A: The house was densely packed; it was impossible for me to get entrance; the stair was densely packed to the third and second flats; when the policemen came with the officers, they could not force their way up, except with great difficulty.
The consequence was, that nearly the whole of the rail of the upper storey gave way to the great danger both of the officers and the public, and one young man I saw thrown over the heads of the crowd to the great danger of being precipitated three storeys down.
Then the parties came out of the house, with their clothes dishevelled and severely handled; and the officer on that occasion will tell you that he was very severely dealt with indeed, and Mr. Sheriff Gordon was sent for, so much alarm being felt; but by the time the Sheriff arrived things were considerably subdued.
Sheriff Clerk Maitland also described this auction:
I found a considerable crowd outside; and on going up to the premises on the top flat, I found that I could not get entrance to the house; the house was packed with people, who on our approach kept hooting and shouting out, and jeering us; and, as far as I could see, the shutters were shut and the windows draped in black, and all the rooms crowded with people.
I said that it was necessary to carry out the sale, and they told me to come in, if I dare.
On another occasion, as he tells it, the auction seemed to go smoothly at first, but the buyers didn’t get what they hoped for:
At Mr. McLaren’s sale everything was conducted in an orderly way as far as the sale was concerned.
We got in, and only a limited number were allowed to go in; but after the officials and the police had gone, there was a certain amount of disturbance.
Certain goods were knocked down to the poinding creditors, consisting of an old sofa and an old sideboard, and Mr. McLaren said, “Let those things go to the clergy.” Those were the only things which had to be taken away.
There was no vehicle ready to carry them away.
Mr. McLaren said that he would not keep them.
After the police departed, he turned them out in the street, when they were taken possession of by the crowd of idlers, and made a bonfire of.
A summary of the effect of all of this disruption reads:
So strong was the feeling of hostility, that the town council were unable to procure the services of any auctioneer to sell the effects of those who conscientiously objected to pay the clerical portion of the police taxes, and they were consequently forced to make a special arrangement with a sheriff’s officer, by which, to induce him to undertake the disagreeable task, they provided him for two years with an auctioneer’s license from the police funds.
In , it was found necessary to enter into another arrangement with the officer, by which the council had to pay him 12½ percent, on all arrears, including the police, prison, and registration rates, as well as the clerical tax; and he receives this per-centage whether the sums are recovered by himself or paid direct to the police collector, and that over and above all the expenses he recovers from the recusants.
But this is not all; the council were unable to hire a cart or vehicle from any of the citizens, and it was found necessary to purchase a lorry, and to provide all the necessary apparatus and assistance for enforcing payment of the arrears.
All this machinery, which owes its existence entirely to the Clerico-Police Act, involves a wasteful expenditure of city funds, induces a chronic state of irritation in the minds of the citizens, and is felt to be a gross violation of the principles of civil and religious liberty.
The Tithe War
William John Fitzpatrick wrote of the auctions during the Tithe War:
[T]he parson’s first step was to put the cattle up to auction in the presence of a regiment of English soldiery; but it 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.
The Sentinel wrote of one auction:
Yesterday being the day on which the sheriff announced that, if no bidders could be obtained for the cattle, he would have the property returned to Mr. Germain, immense crowds were collected from the neighbouring counties — upwards of 20,000 men.
The County Kildare men, amounting to about 7000, entered, led by Jonas Duckett, Esq., in the most regular and orderly manner.
This body was preceded by a band of music, and had several banners on which were “Kilkea and Moone, Independence for ever,” “No Church Tax,” “No Tithe,” “Liberty,” &c. The whole body followed six carts, which were prepared in the English style — each drawn by two horses.
The rear was brought up by several respectable landholders of Kildare.
The barrack-gates were thrown open, and different detachments of infantry took their stations right and left, while the cavalry, after performing sundry evolutions, occupied the passes leading to the place of sale.
The cattle were ordered out, when the sheriff, as on the former day, put them up for sale; but no one could be found to bid for the cattle, upon which he announced his intention of returning them to Mr. Germain.
The news was instantly conveyed, like electricity, throughout the entire meeting, when the huzzas of the people surpassed anything we ever witnessed.
The cattle were instantly liberated and given up to Mr. Germain.
At this period a company of grenadiers arrived, in double-quick time, after travelling from Castlecomer, both officers and men fatigued and covered with dust.
Thus terminated this extraordinary contest between the Church and the people, the latter having obtained, by their steadiness, a complete victory.
The cattle will be given to the poor of the sundry districts.
Similar examples were reported in the foreign press:
Cork. — A most extraordinary scene has been exhibited in this city.
Some cows seized for tithes were brought to a public place for sale, escorted by a squadron of lancers, and followed by thousands of infuriated people.
All the garrison, cavalry and infantry, under the command of Sir George Bingham, were called out.
The cattle were set up at three pounds for each, no bidder; two pounds, no bidder; one pound, no bidder; in short, the auctioneer descended to three shillings for each cow, but no purchaser appeared.
This scene lasted for above an hour, when there being no chance of making sale of the cattle, it was proposed to adjourn the auction; but, as we are informed, the General in command of the military expressed an unwillingness to have the troops subjected to a repetition of the harassing duty thus imposed on them.
After a short delay, it was, at the interference and remonstrance of several gentlemen, both of town and country, agreed upon that the cattle should be given up to the people, subject to certain private arrangements.
We never witnessed such a scene; thousands of country people jumping with exulted feelings at the result, wielding their shillelaghs, and exhibiting all the other symptoms of exuberant joy characteristic of the buoyancy of Irish feeling.
At Carlow a triumphant resistance to the laws, similar to that which occurred
at Cork, has been exhibited in the presence of the authorities and the
military. Some cattle had been seized for tithe, and a public sale announced,
when a large body of men, stated at 50,000, marched to the place appointed,
and, of course, under the influence of such terror, none were found to bid
for the cattle. The sale was adjourned from day to day, for seven days, and
upon each day the same organised bands entered the town, and rendered the
attempt to sell the cattle, in pursuance of the law, abortive. At last the
cattle are given up to the mob, crowned with laurels, and driven home with an
escort of 10,000 men.
In a somewhat later case, a Catholic priest in Blarney by the name of Peyton refused to pay his income tax on the grounds that the law treated him in an inferior way to his Protestant counterparts.
His horse was seized and sold at auction, where “the multitude assembled hissed, hooted, hustled, and otherwise impeded the proceedings.”
There was precedent for this. During the Tithe War period and thereafter, the
authorities had to go to extraordinary lengths to auction off seized goods. As
one account put it:
In Ireland we pay — the whole people of the empire pay — troops who march up from the country to Dublin, fifty or sixty miles, as escorts of the parson-pounded pigs and cattle, which passive resistance prevents from being sold or bought at home; and we also maintain barracks in that country which not only lodge the parsons’ military guards, but afford, of late, convenient resting-places in their journey to the poor people’s cattle, whom the soldiers are driving to sale; and which would otherwise be rescued on the road.
The women’s suffrage movement in the United Kingdom
The tax resisters in the women’s suffrage movement in Britain were particularly adept in disrupting tax auctions and in making them opportunities for propaganda and protest.
Here are several examples, largely as reported in the movement newsletter called The Vote:
“On a sale was held… of
jewellery seized in distraint for income-tax… Members of the
W.F.L.
and Mrs. [Edith] How Martyn
(Hon.
Sec.) assembled to
protest against the proceedings, and the usual policeman kept a dreary
vigil at the open door. The day had been specially chosen by the
authorities, who wished to prevent a demonstration…”
“The sale of Mrs. Cleeves’ dog-cart took place at the Bush Hotel, Sketty,
on afternoon. The
W.F.L.
held their protest meeting outside — much to the discomfort of the
auctioneer, who declared the impossibility of ‘drowning the voice
outside.’ ”
“Notwithstanding the mud and odoriferous atmosphere of the back streets
off Drury-lane, quite a large number of members of the Tax Resisters’
League, the Women’s Freedom League, and the Women’s Social and Political
Union, met outside Bulloch’s Sale Rooms shortly after
to protest against the sale of Miss Bertha Brewster’s goods, which had
been seized because of her refusal to pay her Imperial taxes. Before the
sale took place, Mrs. Gatty, as chairman, explained to at least a hundred
people the reasons of Miss Brewster’s refusal to pay her taxes and the
importance of the constitutional principle that taxation without
representation is tyranny, which this refusal stood for. Miss Leonora
Tyson proposed the resolution protesting against the injustice of this
sale, and it was seconded by Miss F[lorence]. A. Underwood, and supported
by Miss Brackenbury. The resolution was carried with only two
dissentients, and these dissentients were women!”
“The goods seized were sold at the public auction room. Before selling
them the auctioneer allowed Mrs. How Martyn to make a short explanatory
speech, and he himself added that it was an unpleasant duty he had to
perform.”
“A scene which was probably never equalled in the whole of its history
took place at the Oxenham Auction Rooms, Oxford-street, on
. About a fortnight before
the bailiffs had entered Mrs. Despard’s residence in Nine Elms and seized
goods which they valued at £15. Our President, for some years past, as is
well known, has refused to pay her income-tax and inhabited house duty on
the grounds that taxation and representation should go together; and this
is the third time her goods have been seized for distraint. It was not
until the day before — — that Mrs. Despard was informed of the time and place where
her furniture was to be sold. In spite of this short notice — which we
learn on good authority to be illegal — a large crowd composed not only of
our own members but also of women and men from various Suffrage societies
gathered together at the place specified in the notice. ¶ When ‘Lot
325’ was called Mrs. Despard mounted a chair, and said, ‘I rise to
protest, in the strongest, in the most emphatic way of which I am capable,
against these iniquities, which are perpetually being perpetrated in the
name of the law. I should like to say I have served my country in various
capacities, but I am shut out altogether from citizenship. I think special
obloquy has been put upon me in this matter. It was well known that I
should not run away and that I should not take my goods away, but the
authorities sent a man in possession. He remained in the house — a
household of women — at night. I only heard
of this sale, and from a man
who knows that of which he is speaking, I know that this sale is illegal.
I now claim the law — the law that is supposed to be for women as well as
men.’ ”
“[A] most successful protest against taxation without representation was
made by Mrs. Muir, of Broadstairs, whose goods were sold at the Auction
Rooms, 120, High-street, Margate. The protest was conducted by Mrs.
[Emily] Juson Kerr; and Miss Ethel Fennings, of the W.F.L.,
went down to speak. The auctioneer, Mr. Holness, was most courteous, and
not only allowed Mrs. Muir to explain in a few words why she resisted
taxation, but also gave permission to hold meeting in his rooms after the
sale was over.”
“One of the most successful and effective Suffrage demonstrations ever
held in St. Leonards was that arranged jointly by the Women’s Tax
Resistance League and the Hastings and St. Leonards Women’s Suffrage
Propaganda League, on ,
on the occasion of the sale of some family silver which had been seized at
the residence of Mrs. [Isabella] Darent Harrison for non-payment of
Inhabited House Duty. Certainly the most striking feature of this protest
was the fact that members of all societies in Hastings,
St. Leonards, Bexhill and
Winchelsea united in their effort to render the protest representative of
all shades of Suffrage opinion. Flags, banners, pennons and regalia of
many societies were seen in the procession.… The hearty response from the
men to Mrs. [Margaret] Kineton Parkes’s call for ‘three cheers for Mrs.
Darent Harrison’ at the close of the proceedings in the auction room, came
as a surprise to the Suffragists themselves.”
“On , the last item on
the catalogue of Messrs. Whiteley’s weekly sale in Westbourne-grove was
household silver seized in distraint for King’s taxes from Miss Gertrude
Eaton, of Kensington. Miss Eaton is a lady very well known in the musical
world and interested in social reforms, and
hon. secretary of the
Prison Reform Committee. Miss Eaton said a few dignified words of protest
in the auction room, and Mrs. [Anne] Cobden Saunderson explained to the
large crowd of bidders the reason why tax-paying women, believing as they
do that taxation without representation is tyranny, feel that they cannot,
by remaining inactive, any longer subscribe to it. A procession then
formed up and a protest meeting was held…”
“At the offices of the collector of Government taxes, Westborough, on
a silver cream jug and sugar
basin were sold. These were the property of
Dr. Marion McKenzie, who
had refused payment of taxes to support her claim on behalf of women’s
suffrage. A party of suffragettes marched to the collector’s office, which
proved far too small to accommodate them all. Mr. Parnell said he regretted
personally having the duty to perform. He believed that ultimately the
women would get the vote. They had the municipal vote and he maintained
that women who paid rates and taxes should be allowed to vote. (Applause.)
But that was his own personal view. He would have been delighted not to
have had that process, but he had endeavoured to keep the costs down.
Dr. Marion McKenzie thanked
Mr. Parnell for the courtesy shown them. A protest meeting was afterwards
held on St. Nicholas
Cliff.”
“Mrs. [Anne] Cobden-Sanderson, representing the Women’s Tax Resistance
League, was, by courtesy of the auctioneer, allowed to explain the reason
of the protest. Judging by the applause with which her remarks were
received, most of those present were in sympathy.”
“The auctioneer was entirely in sympathy with the protest, and explained
the circumstances under which the sale took place. He courteously allowed
Mrs. [Anne] Cobden Sanderson and Mrs. [Emily] Juson Kerr to put clearly
the women’s point of view; Miss Raleigh made a warm appeal for true
freedom. A procession was formed and an open-air meeting subsequently
held.”
“The auctioneer, who is in sympathy with the suffragists, refused to take
commission.”
“[A] crowd of Suffragists of all shades of opinion assembled at Hawking’s
Sale Rooms, Lisson-grove, Marylebone, to support Dr. Frances Ede and Dr.
Amy Sheppard, whose goods were to be sold by public auction for tax
resistance. By the courtesy of the auctioneer, Mr. Hawking, speeches were
allowed, and Dr. Ede
emphasized her conscientious objection to supporting taxation without
representation; she said that women like herself and her partner felt that
they must make this logical and dignified protest, but as it caused very
considerable inconvenience and sacrifice to professional women, she
trusted that the grave injustice would speedily be remedied. Three cheers
were given for the doctors, and a procession with banners marched to
Marble Arch, where a brief meeting was held in Hyde Park, at which the
usual resolution was passed unanimously.”
“An interesting sequel to the seizure of Mrs. Tollemache’s goods last
week, and the ejection of the bailiff from her residence, Batheaston
Villa, Bath, was the sale held , at the White Hart Hotel. To cover a tax of only £15 and
costs, goods were seized to the value of about £80, and it was at once
decided by the Women’s Tax Resistance League and Mrs. Tollemache’s friends
that such conduct on the part of the authorities must be circumvented and
exposed. The goods were on view the morning of the sale, and as there was
much valuable old china, silver, and furniture, the dealers were early on
the spot, and buzzing like flies around the articles they greatly desired
to possess. The first two pieces put up were, fortunately, quite
inviting; £19 being bid for a chest of drawers worth about
50s. and £3 for an
ordinary leather-top table, the requisite amount was realised, and the
auctioneer was obliged to withdraw the remaining lots much to the disgust
of the assembled dealers. Mrs. [Margaret] Kineton Parkes, in her speech at
the protest meeting, which followed the sale, explained to these irate
gentlemen that women never took such steps unless compelled to do so, and
that if the tax collector had seized a legitimate amount of goods to
satisfy his claim, Mrs. Tollemache would willingly have allowed them to
go.”
“Under the auspices of the Tax Resistance League and the Women’s Freedom
League a protest meeting was held at Great Marlow on
, on the occasion of the sale
of plate and jewellery belonging to Mrs. [Mary] Sargent Florence, the
well-known artist, and to Miss Hayes, daughter of Admiral Hayes. Their
property had been seized for the non-payment of Imperial taxes, and
through the courtesy of the tax-collector every facility was afforded to
the protesters to explain their action.”
“At the sale of a silver salver belonging to
Dr. Winifred Patch, of
Highbury, Steen’s Auction Rooms, Drayton Park, were crowded on
by members of the Women’s Freedom
League, the Women’s Tax Resistance League, and other Suffrage societies.
The auctioneer refused to allow the usual five minutes for explanation
before the sale, but Miss Alison Neilans, of the Women’s Freedom League,
was well supported and cheered when she insisted on making clear the
reasons why Dr. Patch for
several years has refused to pay taxes while deprived of a vote. A
procession was then formed, and marched to Highbury Corner, where a large
open-air meeting was presided over by Mrs. [Marianne] Clarendon Hyde, of
the Women’s Freedom League, and addressed by Mrs. Merrivale Mayer.”
“Practically every day sees a sale and protest somewhere, and the banners
of the Women’s Tax Resistance League, frequently supported by Suffrage
Societies, are becoming familiar in town and country. At the protest
meetings which follow all sales the reason why is explained to large
numbers of people who would not attend a suffrage meeting. Auctioneers are
becoming sympathetic even so far as to speak in support of the women’s
protest against a law which demands their money, but gives them no voice
in the way in which it is spent.”
“The sale was conducted, laughably enough, under the auspices of the
Women’s Freedom League and the Women’s Tax Resistance League; for, on
obtaining entrance to the hall, Miss Anderson and Mrs. Fisher bedecked it
with all the insignia of suffrage protest. The rostrum was spread with our
flag proclaiming the inauguration of Tax Resistance by the W.F.L.;
above the auctioneer’s head hung Mrs. [Charlotte] Despard’s embroidered
silk banner, with its challenge “Dare to be Free”; on every side the
green, white and gold of the
W.F.L.
was accompanied by the brown and black of the Women’s Tax Resistance
League, with its cheery ‘No Vote, no Tax’ injunctions and its John Hampden
maxims; while in the front rows, besides Miss Anderson, the heroine of the
day, Mrs. Snow and Mrs. Fisher, were seen the inspiring figures of our
President and Mrs. [Anne] Cobden Sanderson, vice-president of the
W.T.R.L.”
“…all Women’s Freedom League members who know anything of the way in which
the sister society organises these matters should attend the sale in the
certainty of enjoying a really telling demonstration…”
“From early in the day Mrs. Huntsman and a noble band of sandwich-women
had paraded the town announcing the sale and distributing leaflets. In the
afternoon a contingent of the Tax Resistance League arrived with the John
Hampden banner and the brown and black pennons and flags. These marched
through the town and market square before entering the hall in which the
sale and meeting were to be held, and which was decorated with the flags
and colours of the Women’s Freedom League. Mr. Croome, the King’s officer,
conducted the sale in person, the goods sold being a quantity of table
silver, a silver toilette set, and one or two other articles. The prices
fetched were trifling, Mrs. Harvey desiring that no one should buy the
goods in for her.”
“Miss Andrews asked the auctioneer if she might explain the reason for the
sale of the waggon, and, having received the necessary permission was able
to give an address on tax resistance, and to show how it is one of the
weapons employed by the Freedom League to secure the enfranchisement of
women. Then came the sale — but beforehand the auctioneer said he had not
been aware he was to sell ‘distressed’ goods, and he very much objected to
doing so.… The meeting and the auctioneer together made the assembly chary
of bidding, and the waggon was not sold, which was a great triumph for the
tax-resisters.… Miss Trott and Miss Bobby helped to advertise the meeting
by carrying placards round the crowded market.”
“There was a crowded audience, and the auctioneer opened the proceedings
by declaring himself a convinced Suffragist, which attitude of mind he
attributed largely to a constant contact with women householders in his
capacity as tax collector. After the sale a public meeting was held… At
the close of the meeting many questions were asked, new members joined the
League…”
The authorities tried to auction off Kate Harvey’s goods on-site, at her
home, rather than in a public hall, so that they might avoid
demonstrations of that sort. “On
morning a band of Suffragist
men carried placards through the streets of Bromley, on which was the
device, ‘I personally protest against the sale of a woman’s goods to pay
taxes over which she has no control,’ and long before
, the time fixed for the
sale, from North, South, East and West, people came streaming into the
little town of Bromley, and made their way towards ‘Brackenhill.’
Punctually at the
tax-collector and his deputy mounted the table in the dining-room, and the
former, more in sorrow than in anger, began to explain to the crowd
assembled that this was a genuine sale! Mrs. Harvey at once protested
against the sale taking place. Simply and solely because she was a woman,
although she was a mother, a business woman, and a tax-payer, she had no
voice in saying how the taxes collected from her should be spent. The tax
collector suffered this speech in silence, but he could judge by the
cheers it received that there were many ardent sympathisers with Mrs.
Harvey in her protest. He tried to proceed, but one after another the men
present loudly urged that no one there should bid for the goods. The
tax-collector feebly said this wasn’t a political meeting, but a genuine
sale! ‘One penny for your goods then!’ was the derisive answer. ‘One
penny — one penny!’ was the continued cry from both inside and outside
‘Brackenhill.’ Then men protested that the tax-collector was not a genuine
auctioneer; he had no hammer, no list of goods to be sold was hung up in
the room. There was no catalogue, nothing to show bidders what was to be
sold and what wasn’t. The men also objected to the presence of the
tax-collector’s deputy. ‘Tell him to get down!’ they shouted. ‘The sale
shan’t proceed till he does,’ they yelled. ‘Get down! Get down:’ they
sang. But the tax-collector felt safer by the support of this deputy.
‘He’s afraid of his own clerk,’ they jeered. Again the tax-collector asked
for bids. ‘One penny! One penny!’ was the deafening response. The din
increased every moment and pandemonium reigned supreme. During a temporary
lull the tax-collector said a sideboard had been sold for nine guineas.
Angry cries from angry men greeted this announcement. ‘Illegal sale!’ ‘He
shan’t take it home!’ ‘The whole thing’s illegal!’ ‘You shan’t sell
anything else!’ and The Daily Herald Leaguers,
members of the Men’s Political Union, and of other men’s societies,
proceeded to make more noise than twenty brass bands. Darkness was quickly
settling in; the tax-collector looked helpless, and his deputy smiled
wearily. ‘Talk about a comic opera — it’s better than Gilbert and Sullivan
could manage,’ roared an enthusiast. ‘My word, you look sick, guv’nor!
Give it up, man!’ Then everyone shouted against the other until the
tax-collector said he closed the sale, remarking plaintively that he had
lost £7 over the job! Ironical cheers greeted this news, with ‘Serve you
right for stealing a woman’s goods!’ He turned his back on his tormentors,
and sat down in a chair on the table to think things over. The protesters
sat on the sideboard informing all and sundry that if anyone wanted to
take away the sideboard he should take them with it! With the exit of the
tax-collector, his deputy and the bailiff, things gradually grew quieter,
and later on Mrs. Harvey entertained her supporters to tea at the Bell
Hotel. But the curious thing is, a man paid nine guineas for the sideboard
to the tax-collector. Mrs. Harvey owed him more than £17, and Mrs. Harvey
is still in possession of the sideboard!”
“The assistant auctioneer, to whom it fell to conduct the sale, was most
unfriendly, and refused to allow any speaking during the sale; but Miss
Boyle was able to shout through a window at his back, just over his
shoulder, an announcement that the goods were seized because Miss Cummins
refused to submit to taxation without representation, after which quite a
number of people who were attending the sale came out to listen to the
speeches.”
“The auctioneer was very sympathetic, and allowed Miss [Anna] Munro to
make a short speech before the waggon was sold. He then spoke a few
friendly words for the Woman’s Movement. After the sale a meeting was
held, and Mrs. Tippett and Miss Munro were listened to with evident
interest by a large number of men. The Vote and
other Suffrage literature was sold.”
“A joint demonstration of the Tax Resisters’ League and militant
suffragettes, held here [Hastings]
as a protest against the sale of
the belongings of those who refused to pay taxes, was broken up by a mob.
The women were roughly handled and half smothered with soot. Their banners
were smashed. The police finally succeeded in getting the women into a
blacksmith’s shop, where they held the mob at bay until the arrival of
reinforcements. The women were then escorted to a railway station.”
“The auction sale of the Duchess of Bedford’s silver cup proved, perhaps,
the best advertisement the Women’s Tax Resistance League ever had. It was
made the occasion for widespread propaganda. The newspapers gave columns
of space to the event, while at the big mass meeting, held outside the
auction room…”
“When a member is to be sold up a number of her comrades accompany her to
the auction-room. The auctioneer is usually friendly and stays the
proceedings until some one of the league has mounted the table and
explained to the crowd what it all means. Here are the banners, and the
room full of women carrying them, and it does not take long to impress
upon the mind of the people who have come to attend the sale that here is
a body of women willing to sacrifice their property for the principle for
which John Hampden went to prison — that taxation without representation
is tyranny. … The women remain at these auctions until the property of the
offender is disposed of. The kindly auctioneer puts the property seized
from the suffragists early on his list, or lets them know when it will be
called.”
American war tax resisters
There have been a few celebrated auction sales in the American war tax resistance movement.
Some of them have been met with protests or used as occasions for outreach and propaganda, but others have been more actively interfered with.
When Ernest and Marion Bromley’s home was seized, for example, there were
“months of continuous picketing and leafletting” before the sale. Then:
The day began with a silent vigil initiated by the local Quaker group.
While the bids were being read inside the building, guerrilla theatre took place out on the sidewalk.
At one point the Federal building was auctioned (offers ranging from 25¢ to 2 bottle caps).
Several supporters present at the proceedings inside made brief statements about the unjust nature of the whole ordeal.
Waldo the Clown was also there, face painted sadly, opening envelopes along with the IRS person.
As the official read the bids and the names of the bidders, Waldo searched his envelopes and revealed their contents: a flower, a unicorn, some toilet paper, which he handed to different office people.
Marion Bromley also spoke as the bids were opened, reiterating that the seizure was based on fraudulent assumptions, and that therefore the property could not be rightfully sold.
The protests, odd as they were, eventually paid off, as the IRS had in the interim been caught improperly pursuing political dissidents, and as a result it decided to reverse the sale of the Bromley home and give up on that particular fight.
When Paul and Addie Snyder’s home was auctioned off for back taxes, it was
reported that “many bids of $1 or less were made.”
Making a bid of pennies for farm property being foreclosed for failure to meet mortgages was a common tactic among angry farmers during the Depression.
If their bids succeeded, the property was returned to its owner and the mortgage torn up.
In some such cases, entire farms plus their livestock, equipment and home furnishings sold for as little as $2.
When George Willoughby’s car was seized and sold by the IRS,
Friends, brandishing balloons, party horns, cookies and lemonade, invaded the IRS office in Chester and bought the car back for $900.
The Rebecca rioters
On a couple of occasions the Rebeccaites prevented auctions, though not of goods seized for tax debts but for ordinary debts.
Here are two examples from Henry Tobit Evans’s book on the Rebecca phenomenon:
A distress for rent was levied on the goods of a man named Lloyd… and a bailiff of the name of Rees kept possession of the goods.
Previous to the day of sale, Rebecca and a great number of her daughters paid him a visit, horsewhipped him well, and kept him in safe custody until the furniture was entirely cleared from the house.
When Rees was freed, he found nothing but an empty house, Rebecca and her followers having departed.
Two bailiffs were there in possession of the goods and chattels under execution… Having entered the house by bursting open the door, Rebecca ran upstairs, followed by some of her daughters.
She ordered the bailiffs, who were in bed at the time, to be up and going in five minutes, or to prepare for a good drubbing.
The bailiffs promptly obeyed, but were driven forth by a bodyguard of the rioters, who escorted them some distance, pushing and driving the poor men in front of them.
At last they were allowed to depart to their homes on a sincere promise of not returning.
Reform Act agitation
During the tax resistance that accompanied the drive to pass the Reform Act in the in the United Kingdom, hundreds of people signed pledges in which they declared that “they will not purchase the goods of their townsmen not represented in Parliament which may be seized for the non-payment of taxes, imposed by any House of Commons as at present constituted.”
The True Sun asserted that
The tax-gatherer… might seize for them, but the brokers assured the inhabitants that they would neither seize any goods for such taxes, nor would they purchase goods so seized.
Yesterday afternoon, Mr Philips, a broker, in the Broadway, Westminster, exhibited the following placard at the door of his shop:— “Take notice, that the proprietor of this shop will not distrain for the house and window duties, nor will he purchase any goods that are seized for the said taxes; neither will any of those oppressive taxes be paid for this house in future.” A similar notice was also exhibited at a broker’s shop in York Street, Westminster.
Another newspaper account said:
A sale by auction of goods taken in distress for assessed taxes was announced to take place at Ashton Tavern on , at Birmingham.
From forty to fifty persons attended, including some brokers, but no one could be found except the poor woman from whose husband the goods had been seized, and the auctioneer himself.
A man came when the sale was nearly over, who was perfectly ignorant of the circumstances under which it took place, and bid for one of the last lots; he soon received an intimation, however, from the company that he had better desist, which be accordingly did.
After the sale was over nearly the whole of the persons present surrounded this man, and lectured him severely upon his conduct, and it was only by his solemnly declaring to them that he had bid in perfect ignorance of the nature of the sale that he was suffered to escape without some more substantial proof of their displeasure.
Railroad bond shenanigans
There was an epidemic of fraud in the United States in in which citizens of local jurisdictions were convinced to vote to sell bonds to pay for the Railroad to come to town.
The railroad never arrived, but the citizens then were on the hook to tax themselves to pay off the bonds.
Many said “hell no,” but by then the bonds had been sold to people who were not necessarily involved in the original swindle but had just bought them as investments.
In the course of the tax resistance campaigns associated with these railroad
bond boondoggles, auction disruption was resorted to on some occasions. Here
are some examples:
St. Clair [Missouri]’s taxpayers joined the movement in to repudiate the debts, but the county’s new leaders wanted to repay the investors.
Afraid to try taxing the residents, they decided to raise the interest by staging a huge livestock auction in , the proceeds to pay off the railroad bond interest.
On auction day, however, “no one seemed to want to buy” any animals.
To bondholders the “great shock” of the auction’s failure proved the depth of local resistance to railroad taxes.
Another attempt was made the other day to sell farm property in the town of Greenwood, Steuben county [New York], on account of a tax levied for the town bonding in aid of railroads, and another failure has followed.
The scene was upon the farm of William Atkins, where 200 of the solid yeomanry of the town had assembled to resist the sale… A Mr. Updyke, with broader hint, made these remarks: “I want to tell you folks that Mr. Atkins has paid all of his tax except this railroad tax; and we consider any man who will buy our property to help John Davis and Sam Alley as contemptible sharks.
We shall remember him for years, and will know where he lives.” The tax collector finally rose and remarked that in view of the situation he would not attempt to proceed with the sale.
The White League in Louisiana
In Reconstruction-era Louisiana, white supremacist tax resisters disrupted a tax auction.
There was a mob of fifty or sixty armed men came to prevent the deputy tax-collector effecting a sale, armed with revolvers nearly all.
Mr. Fournet came and threatened the deputy and tax-collector.
The deputy and tax-collector ran into their offices.
I came down and called upon the citizens to clear the court-house, but could not succeed.
I then called upon the military, but they had no orders at that time to give me assistance to carry out the law.
Mr. [Valsin A.?] Fournet came with eight or ten.
When the deputy tax-collector attempted to make a sale Mr. Fournet raised his hand and struck him.
The deputy then shoved him down.
As soon as this was done forty, fifty, or sixty men came with their revolvers in hand.
…very few people attended tax-sales [typically], because the white people were organized to prevent tax-collection, and pledged themselves not to buy any property at tax-sales, and the property was generally bought by the State.
Miscellaneous
The First Boer War broke out in the aftermath of the successfully resisted
auction of a tax resister’s waggon. Paul Kruger wrote of the incident:
The first sign of the approaching storm was the incident that happened at the forced sale of Field Cornet Bezuidenhout’s waggon, on which a distress had been levied.
The British Government had begun to collect taxes and to take proceedings against those who refused to pay them.
Among these was Piet Bezuidenhout, who lived in the Potchefstroom District.
This refusal to pay taxes was one of the methods of passive resistance which were now employed towards the British Government.
Hitherto, many of the burghers had paid their taxes, declaring that they were only yielding to force.
But, when this was explained by the English politicians as though the population were contented and peacefully paying their taxes, some asked for a receipt showing that they were only paying under protest and others refused to pay at all.
The Government then levied a distress on Bezuidenhout’s waggon and sent it to public action at Potchefstroom.
Piet Cronjé, who became so well known in the last war, appeared at the auction with a number of armed Boers, who flung the bailiff from the waggon and drew the waggon itself back in triumph to Bezuidenhout’s farm.
When the U.S.
government seized Valentine Byler’s horse because of the Amish man’s
conscientious objection to paying into the social security system, no
other Amish would bid at the auction.
Between the Wars in Germany, the government had a hard time conducting
auctions of the goods of tax resisters. Ernst von Salomon writes:
Everywhere bailiff’s orders were being disobeyed.… Compulsory sales could not be held: when the young peasants of the riding club appeared at the scene of the auction on their horses and with music, nobody seemed willing to make a bid.
The carters refused, even with police protection, to carry off the distrained cattle, for they knew that if they did they would never again be able to do business with the peasants.
One day three peasants even appeared in the slaughter yards at Hamburg and announced that unless the distrained cattle disappeared at once from the yard’s stalls the gentlemen in charge of the slaughterhouse could find somewhere else to buy their beasts in the future — they wouldn’t be getting any more from Schleswig-Holstein.
Environmental activist Tim DeChristopher disrupted a Bureau of Land
Management auction by making winning bids on everything that he
had no intention of honoring.
During the Poujadist disruptions in France, “They also took to spiking
forced tax sales by refusing to bid until the auctioneer had lowered the
price of whatever was up for sale to a laughably small figure. Thus a tax
delinquent might buy back his own shop for, say 10 cents. At an auction
the other day, a brand-new car went for one franc, or less than one-third
of a cent.”
in roughly the same region
of France:
It was in the south where the wine growers refuse to pay taxes to the government.
A farmer had had half a dozen rabbits sent him by a friend; he refused to pay duty on them, whereupon they control or local customs tried to sell the six “original” rabbits and their offspring at auction.
The inhabitants have now boycotted the auction sales so that the local officials must feed the rabbits till the case is settled by the courts.
In York, Pennsylvania in , a group
“surrounded the crier and forbid any person purchasing when the property
which had been seized was offered for sale. A cow which had been in the
hands of the collector was driven away by the rioters.”
In the Dutch West Indies in “The
household effects of a physician who refused to pay the tax were offered
for sale at auction today by the Government. Although the building in
which the sale was held was crowded, there were no bids and the articles
were not sold.”
In Tasmania, in , “Large quantities of
goods were seized, and lodged in the Commissariat Store [but] Lawless mobs
paraded the streets, tore down fences, and, arming themselves with rails
and batons, smashed windows and doors.… The fence round the Commissariat
Store was torn down…”
During the Bardoli tax strike, “There were meetings in talukas contiguous
to Bardoli, not only in British territory, but also in the Baroda
territory, for expression of sympathy with the Satyagrahis and calling
upon people in their respective parts not to cooperate with the
authorities engaged in putting down the Satyagraha… by bidding for any
forfeited property that may be put to auction by the authorities.”
Here are a few more data points from the tax resistance campaign by insurgent white supremacists, led by the shadow government of John McEnery, against the carpetbagger government of William Pitt Kellogg in post-Civil War Louisiana in .
The New York World advises our people in the following words:
This is the first instance in the history of our thirty-seven State Governments in which a governor has been constrained by his fears and necessities, to issue a menacing proclamation requiring the payment of taxes.
It betokens an already empty treasury and no means to fill it.
Kellogg has been but little more than two months in his bogus governorship, and in spite of the ready advance of their taxes by his few adherents he is constrained by his distresses and apprehensions to flourish and crack his lash over the shoulders of the tax-payers.
By fulminating this unexampled proclamation he advertises his weakness and fears.
He can borrow no money, for his government is so notoriously illegal that no lender would expect payment.
If he should undertake to sell property for taxes, there would be no buyers, because an illegal Government could not give a valid title.
Hence he is reduced to the necessity of resorting to bluster and threats.
Having already got all he can collect from the few property holders among his own partisans, he tries to intimidate the weak-minded of his opponents, and scare them into furnishing the money without which his usurpation must soon collapse and perish.
His proclamation is like a signal gun at sea fired by a pirate ship that is about to be on gulfed in the waves.
The advantages of the people of Louisiana for escaping the payment of taxes to support this usurpation are great and manifest.
Its opponents comprise five sixths of the property holders of the State.
They alone possess the means of buying property offered to be sold for taxes, and their hostility to Kellogg and his crew will prevent them from ever bidding a dollar on such property.
No man will bid on that of his neighbor, and he feels assured that in return no neighbor will bid on his.
As for buyers out of the State, they would be repelled by the inability of the Kellogg Government to give a legal title, and by the indignant hostility of every neighborhood against such mercenary interloping.
If the State governments could support themselves, like the Federal Government, by indirect taxation, this form of resistance would not be easy.
When duties are laid on imported goods, or an excise on whisky and tobacco, every purchaser pays the tax, and the people can protect themselves only by refusing to consume the taxed articles, as our patriot forefathers did in the Revolution.
But happily this mode of taxation does not prevail in our State Governments.
State taxes are direct; they are laid on property, not on consumption; they are paid immediately into the hands of the collector, not mixed up with the prices of commodities.
There is no other penalty for non-payment than the distraint and sale of property, and property cannot be sold when there are no buyers.
Kellogg’s supporters are chiefly the negroes who pay no taxes themselves, and are too poor to purchase the property of their white neighbors even if they could get the fee simple and a good title by paying one year’s taxes.
It is obvious that the Kellogg Government must come to an early end if the united property-holders of Louisiana passively withhold the supplies, and keep scornfully away from all auction sales advertised by Kellogg’s collectors.
Resistance to Taxation by the Kellogg Government.
Letter of Gov. M’Enery.
State of Louisiana, Executive Office, New Orleans,
Dear Sir — I respectfully suggest that, with as little delay as possible, there be called in your parish a mass meeting of citizens to perfect a complete and thorough organization, with a view to resistance of collection of taxes by the Kellogg Government.
I will remain at my post at the Capitol and exercise, so far as practicable, the powers and functions of my office, and I appeal to the people of the State to rally to my support, and give me effective aid in my efforts to uphold their rights and liberties.
It is impossible that the Kellogg usurpation can continue beyond the meeting of Congress in , and if our liberties are worth anything at all they are worth a struggle against tyranny rand usurpation from now until Congress shall definitely act in our case.
Let there be unanimity among the tax-payers of Louistana, and the foul usurpation now headed by Wm. Pitt Kellogg will be blasted, and in due time Louisiana will be blest with the government of her choice.
John McEnery, Governor of Louisiana.
Sustaining the Kellogg Fraud.
From the Union Record we have the following manly counsel:
While there is no earthly means by which we can, at the present, get rid of the Kellogg usurpation, we can refuse to give it any support.
We can refuse to contribute anything toward it in the way of taxes.
It cannot live without bur money — indeed it lives for our money.
Withhold that from it, and it will soon come to grief.
We notice that the movements of the tax resistance association in New Orleans has already alarmed the chief conspirator.
He gives vent to his uneasiness through what is called a proclamation warning the people against refusing to pay taxes.
We are not surprised at this.
How natural it is for the wolf when he sees his prey slipping from his paw, to give vent to his disappointed feelings by a savage howl!
So it is with Kellogg, the slightest prospect of loosing his prey, brings from his ravenous lips a threatening howl.
Let our people take no notice of his threats, but, in every parish in the State, meet in counsel; form into associations, act in concert — as one man, and resolve not to pay one cent of tribute to the vile usurpers.
If we are united we can accomplish good.
We cannot individually.
Unless the people will come together, and agree to act In concert, there will be no alternative but to meet the demands of the Kellogg tax collectors, and let the government of our choice dissolve into nothingness.
Which we cannot afford to do, if, for no other reason, because all hope of having our rights secured by Congress is not entirely gone.
It is true Congress adjourned leaving us in the hands of Grant, but it did not recognize the Kellogg government.
Since the adjournment of Congress, the Senate has been in extra session and it still refuses to recognize either the Kellogg or Fusion government, by not admitting either Pinchback or McMillen to a seat in the Senate, but have expressly deferred the matter till the regular session in .
Now if we permit the Fusion government to dissolve, and give in our voluntary adhesion to the Kellogg usurpation how can we hope to be heard in Congress at its regular session?
So every consideration of self-respect, manhood, patriotism and interest demand that we give no support to the Kollogg usurpation, only as enforced at the point of the bayonet!
The U.S. Senate never did decide which of the rival Louisiana Senators (William McMillen or P.B.S. Pinchback) ought to take Governor Kellogg’s vacant seat and join them.
Kellogg’s governorship lasted until , by which time the white supremacist Democrats, who had switched from tax resistance to terrorism, succeeded in regaining political control in the state.
The next piece comes from The Morning Star and Catholic Messenger, .
Oddly, it does not mention the Kellogg/McEnery feud, but comes around to recommending tax resistance on the grounds that the present tax system is unconstitutional in the way that it uses “license” fees to enact what is essentially a poll tax on businesses, whereas the constitution says that any such taxation should be proportional to business income:
The above very brief statement of the violations of constitutional principles in the manner of levying taxes in this State, suffices we think, to show that the tax-resisters are justifiable.
We consider it to be the right and duty of all good citizens, to refuse to pay an unjust, oppressive, exhorbitant, or unconstitutional tax, or system of taxation.
This is their duty to themselves, to their country, and to republican institutions.
But, it may be said that all resistance is vain, that the resisters will be ultimately overcome, to their great loss, etc. Considering the utter disregard of right and conscience the powers that be have exhibited, the chances are in favor of those who predict that they will do evil.
Still, we insist that resistance to wrong will ultimately produce good results.
The mere fact of resistance will do good.
The obstacles opposed to wrong, the difficulties it will be compelled to contend with, will diminish its confidence in itself, and make it hesitate or restrict itself to narrower limits.
If its way is made easy it would be encouraged it and perhaps hereafter do worse.
Then, the credit of the wrong-doer will be impaired, his resources diminished, and his ability to do harm be greatly crippled.
True, we have little to hope from the Legislature and Supreme Court of the State.
True, though our State Constitution bristles with articles and clauses guaranteeing equal rights, the Supreme Court will refuse to enforce these in favor of the tax-paying portion of the people.
Nevertheless, there is a gleam of hope from another quarter.
There is a higher break in the clouds of oppression that have hung over our political skies.
In their ardent zeal to emancipate and elevate the black man, the Northern States have added brand new articles to the Federal Constitution; and it turns out that these very articles may be turned against the wrongs, our Barbarian State Government would fain inflict on the white man.
These new articles impose principles of equality upon the State Governments, and thereby insure the right of appeal from the Supreme Court of the State to the Supreme Court of the United States, in all eases in which this equality is infringed.
The famous fourteenth amendment particularly has this effect.
It says: “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States, nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty or property without due process of law, nor deny to any person within in its jurisdiction the equal protection of its laws.”
Of course this applies when the State law itself denies this equal protection or infringes the principles of justice and equality universally recognised in civilized countries.
If the State were to impose its taxes on negroes only, or at a higher rate than on white men, who can doubt that the Supreme Court of the United States would decide such inequality to be a violation of the fourteenth amendment.
If this is clear then it is also clear they must decide that laws which tax a tailor and exempt a milliner — tax butchers and exempt bakers — tax merchant-tailors more than lawyers, notaries more than retail merchants, and retail merchants more than butchers or bakers and so forth, are, on the same principle, contrary to this article of the Constitution of the United States.
Let the tax resisters therefore, never surrender, till they awake the whole people, the poor as well as the rich, in the future as well as to day, to a consciousness of the danger and injustice of such precedents and of such arbitrary modes of taxation.
Public sentiment will have its effect in shaming the judiciary, and causing them to retract their sanction of such iniquities and absurdities.
Besides, it is not unreasonable to expect that the Supreme Court of the United States will enforce the fourteenth Amendment according to its true spirit and meaning, and then we will be disenthralled.
We invite attention to the proceedings of the meeting held on .
The next meeting will be held on for the purpose of organizing the tax-resisters permanently.
Meanwhile, provisional officers have been announced who will hasten on the work of organization.
The people may rely upon it, that in Ouachita, and in every other parish in the State, there will be organizations to resist the payment of taxes to Kellogg.
Ways and means will not be wanting to block the game of that model ruler.
The Shreveport Bar.
It is a pleasure to us to point our brethren of the legal fraternity all over the State to the action taken by nearly all the prominent members of the Shreveport Bar, respecting litigation in the courts over the payment of taxes to the Kellogg government.
It will be seen by reference to the proceedings published on our first page, that a number of the leading lawyers of Shreveport are pledged to attend gratuitously to the defense in all tax suits brought by the Kellogg officials of Caddo parish.
It will also be seen that a lawyer can, if he will, make himself, as well as any other citizen van, a party in opposition to political frauds, accomplished though they be, and can array himself in an attitude of professional hostility to an usurping power.
We commend, most warmly, the decided action of the Shreveport lawyers to the lawyers of Monroe who were actively engaged in the support of the Fusion cause, and especially to those who wanted to condemn every one who would not rush frantically to the support of Horace Greeley and of a combination in this State of all the political elements opposed to Grant and Radicalism.
They led the advance then, and we now call upon them as leaders to stand like men in their chosen positions.
Tax-Payers’ Meeting
At a meeting of the tax-payers of Ouachita parish to take into consideration and to perfect an organization for the resistance of the payment of taxes to the illegal and usurping government known as the Kellogg government, it was moved and seconded that D. Faulk take the chair and D.C. Brown act as Secretary.
The meeting being called to order, it was moved, seconded, and carried that the Chair appoint a committee of five to draft resolutions to perfect said organization; whereupon the Chair appointed the following committee: Col. R. Richardson, Smith W. Bennett, Capt. G.W. McCranie, Fred Cann, and A.A. Lacy.
The committee submitted the following report, which was unanimously adopted:
Monroe,
.
Your committee, appointed to consider and report a plan for resisting on the part of the people of the Parish of Ouachita the payment of taxes to the Kellogg government, respectfully report that they have had the subject under consideration, and beg leave to report—
That your committee is not in doubt of the illegality, from the beginning, of the said Kellogg government, and that, whenever its claims to our support are legally tested, opposition thereto will be affirmed as right and just.
Our duty as citizens and individuals, therefore, demand of us the use of all legal and constitutional means to defeat the great outrage by which the people of Ouachita and the State have been defrauded of their rights; and your committee, believe that one of the rights left to them, and necessary to be exercised to show that the people are not untrue to themselves, their ancestry, or the cause of self-government, is the resistance of payment of taxes to the usurping government established by the affidavits of W.P. Kellogg and the illegal orders of Judge Durell.
For the purpose of making more effectual this recommendation, your committee have considered it wise and just to suggest the organization of a Tax-resisting Association, composed of all the tax-payers of the parish opposed to the payment of taxes to the Kellogg government, which association shall organize permanently to resist the payment of such taxes, with such officers as will carry on the object contemplated by this meeting.
It is further recommended that a public meeting for the purpose of organizing the Association, permanently, be held on , and that, meanwhile, the chairman of this meeting appoint provisional officers, consisting of a President, three Vice Presidents, a Treasurer and Secretary, who shall proceed to take charge of and prosecute diligently the duties of such offices for the purpose of organizing the people into an association to resist the payment of taxes to the Kellogg government, and to this end shall notify the people of the parish to hold primary meetings expressive of their views and to appoint delegates to the parish meeting and of the day selected for the public meeting above recommended, and shall make such collections of funds as may be deemed necessary to defray the expenses of a permanent organization.
It is further recommended that the Provisional President caused to be prepared and circulated throughout the parish, for signatures, an agreement to be signed by all such tax-payers as will join and adhere to the contemplated Tax-resisting Association and will bear their share of the burthen in the effort to restore to Louisiana a government chosen by her own people.
Very respectfully submitted, R. Richardson, Chairman.
The chairman appointed the following officers: Col. R. Richardson, Provisional President; S.D. McEnery, Eli Noble, Robert J. Wilson, Vice Presidents; G.W. McFee, Treasurer and Secretary.
On motion, the meeting adjourned.
D. Faulk, President. D.C. Brown, Secretary.
And, from The Daily Phoenix of Colombia, South Carolina, of :
In the Superior District Court, on , in the case of the State vs. Edward Booth, now pending, to compel defendant to pay his license tax, the court adjudged that Mr. Booth had violated an order of the court, for which Judge Hawkins sentenced him to be confined in the parish prison for twenty-four hours and to pay a fine of twenty dollars.
From the present attitude of many of the citizens of our city to the State Government, the case naturally excited the profoundest interest, and the decree of the court in fining Mr. Booth and sending him to prison, naturally created a widespread sympathy.
According to instructions, Mr. Booth was imprisoned on , for twenty-four hours.
On it was agreed among his immediate personal friends, the members of the tax resisting association, and their sympathizers, to make a grand demonstration, at the hour of his release, and escort him to his place of business, to show their sympathies, and in what approbation he was held for having become the object of an oppression, in the defence of his personal rights.
Before the hour of his release, a large concourse of people assembled before the doors of the prison, to hail the deliverance of the prisoner, and the anteroom was thronged with friends anxious to proffer the hand of sympathy and condolence.
Presently, at , Captain Freneaux approached Mr. Booth and told him that he was free.
Taking the arm of Mr. E.J. Ellis, Mr. Booth filed out of the room and stepped into a carriage in waiting, amid rousing cheers and a stirring air from the band.
The carriage led off, followed by the band and the large concourse of people, who gradually fell into an orderly line of twos, to the number of about 400.
On the way, the marching assembly gave repeated and loud cheers, which were vociferous on beholding an effigy at the corner of Camp and Gravier streets, hung to a telegraph pole.
All exclaimed, “That’s Kellogg!
That’s Kellogg!” and the cheers were renewed.
From thence the effigy was taken to the corner of Magazine and Gravier, and again strung up, this time to a lamp-post.
Here a large crowd gathered, when some one applied a match to the effigy, and it was in a short time entirely destroyed.
The carriage containing Mr. Booth drove to the door of his place of business, and, on alighting from the vehicle, the crowd called loudly upon him for an address, to which he gave heed by mounting a box and motioning for silence.
He thanked the assembly for the grand demonstration which they had made on the event of his release, but regarded the fervor rather to the merits of the principles which were involved, than a feeling appertaining to his case individually.
He denounced the steps taken against him as a move showing that the most sacred rights of the people were jeopardized, and that the present administration was arrayed against the liberty of the people; that they had been outraged, and that it now devolved upon them to resist, by every legitimate means, the advances of this oppression.
He cited to them the fact that their cause was now before the congress of the people — the nation itself — and not that body termed a Congress which assemble at Washington.
The people of this country would eventually cry against the wrongs now being perpetrated, and they would be adjusted.
He exhorted them to remember that “eternal vigilance is the price of liberty,” and that to lie supinely dormant was to see every vestige of a freeman’s boon swept from them.
Mr. Booth closed his remarks by saying: “This is a State where men know their own rights, and, knowing them, dare defend them.”
Colonel Smith took the stand, and, in the name of Mr. Booth, requested that the crowd now retire, at the same time urging them to be prepared and nerved to their work, and if occasion demand, let the halter be applied to him who would be the despoiler of a people’s liberty.
— New Orleans Times.
When Dickens was over here he paid Americans a deserved compliment for the promptitude with which they stepped up and paid their taxes.
“The tax collector does not come to your house,” he says, “but invites you to his.
Imagine an Englishman hunting up this collector to pay his taxes to him.”
But this promptitude, which struck Dickens so forcibly, and seemed to him an earnest proof that Americans felt a patriotic pride in their country and were willing to aid it in every way possible, is now, alas! extinct — no longer exists; and we have become instead a race of confirmed tax-resisters.
The disease is growing worse every year; at first it was only legal taxes that were resisted, now it is all; at first it was only a few litigious persons that fought the government, soon it became the whole mass of the property holders; tax-resisting associations and tax-resisting leagues were organized everywhere to fight the government in every court.
The bitterness of this feeling has been demonstrated by the late tax rebellions in several Kentucky and Missouri counties, where the tax offices were broken into, the books burned, and the collectors warned not to attempt the collection of any taxes under threat of lynch law.
The various States and municipalities have, on the other hand, made their tax laws more and more stringent each year, Georgia going to the extremity of disfranchising all tax resisters.
Thus the war between the government and taxpayers goes on, becoming more bitter every year.
If promptness in the payment of taxes be proof of patriotism, patriotic feelings are rapidly on the wane in this country.
Such is one of the fruits of bad government, heavy and fraudulent debts, and the general political disorder, peculation, and mismanagement that the Republican party has developed wherever it has held full sway.
The mention of tax resistance actions in Missouri and Kentucky refer to the railroad bonds scandals in which localities were induced to issue bonds to pay for the railroad to come to town, whereupon various well-connected folk sold off the bonds and, although the railroad never materialized, the local people were on the hook to tax themselves to pay off the bond speculators.
