You write that people absolutely fail to see that the fulfilment of any service to the state is incompatible with Christianity.
Even so, people failed for a long time to see that the indulgencies, the Inquisition, slavery, tortures were incompatible with Christianity; but the time came when this was evident, as the time will come when it will be plain, at first, that Christianity is incompatible with military service (this is beginning even now), and later, that it is incompatible with any service to the state.
As far back as fifty years ago a little-known, but very remarkable American author, Thoreau, not only clearly enunciated this incompatibility in his beautiful article on the duty of a man not to obey the government, but also in practice showed an example of this disobedience.
He refused to pay the taxes demanded of him, as he did not wish to be an abettor and accomplice of a state that legalized slavery, and was put in prison for it.
Thoreau refused to pay the taxes to the state.
Naturally a man may on the same ground refuse to serve the state, as you beautifully expressed it in your letter to the minister, when you said that you did not consider it compatible with moral dignity to give your labour to an institution which serves as the representative of legalized murder and rapine.
Thoreau, I think, was the first to say so fifty years ago.
At that time no one paid any attention to this his refusal and article, — they seemed so strange.
The refusal was explained on the ground of eccentricity.
Your refusal already provokes discussion and, as always at the enunciation of new truths, double amazement, — wonderment at hearing a man say such strange things, and, after that, wonderment at this:
“Why did not I come to think of what this man speaks, — it is so plain and unquestionable?”
Truths like these, that a Christian cannot be a military man, that is, a murderer, that he cannot be the servant of an institution which maintains itself by violence and murder, are so unquestionable, simple, and incontestable, that, for people to make them their own, there is no need of reflections, or proof, or eloquence, but only of repetition without cessation, so that the majority of men may hear and understand them.
The truths that a Christian cannot be a participant in murder, or serve and receive a salary, which is forcibly collected from the poor by the leaders in murder, are so simple and so incontestable that any one who hears them cannot help but agree with them; and if, having heard them, he continues to act contrary to these truths, he does so only because he is in the habit of acting contrary to them, because it is hard for him to break himself of the habit, and because the majority acts just like him, so that a failure to carry out the truth does not deprive him of the respect of the majority of most respected men.
There happens the same as with vegetarianism.
“A man can be well and healthy without killing animals for his food; consequently, if he eats meat, he contributes to the slaughter of animals only for the gratification of his taste.
It is immoral to act thus.”
This is so simple and so incontestable that it is impossible not to agree to it.
But because the majority still continue to eat meat, people, upon hearing that reflection, recognize it as just, and immediately add, smiling:
“A piece of good beefsteak is a good thing, all the same, and it will give me pleasure to eat it to-day at dinner.”
In precisely the same way the officers and officials bear themselves in relation to the proofs as to the incompatibility of Christianity and humanitarianism with military and civil service.
“Of course, that is true,” such an official will say, “but it is all the same a pleasure to wear a uniform and epaulets which will give us admission anywhere and will gain respect for us, and it is still more agreeable, independently of any chance, with certainty and precision to get your salary on the first of the month.
Your reflection is, indeed, correct, but I shall none the less try to get an increase in my salary — and pension.”
The reflection is admittedly incontestable; but, in the first place, a man does not himself have to kill an ox, but it is killed already, and a man does not himself have to collect the taxes and kill people, but the taxes are already collected and there is an army; and, in the second place, the majority of men have not yet heard this reflection and do not know that it is not right to act thus.
And so it is permissible as yet not to refuse a savoury beefsteak and a uniform, and decorations which afford so many pleasant things and, above all, a regular, monthly salary:
“As for the rest, we will see.”
The whole matter rests only on this, that men have not yet heard the discussion which shows them the injustice and criminality of their lives.
And so we must keep up the cry, “Carthago delenda est,” and Carthage will certainly fall.
I do not say that the state and its power will fall, — that will not happen so soon, for there are in the crowd still too many coarse elements that support it, — but what will be destroyed is the Christian support of the state, that is, the violators will cease to maintain their authority by the sacredness of Christianity.
The violators will be violators, and nothing else.
And when this shall happen, when they shall not be able to cloak themselves with the pretense of Christianity, the end of violence will be at hand.
Let us try to hasten this end.
“Carthago delenda est.”
The state is violence, Christianity is humility, non-resistance, love, and so the state cannot be Christian, and a man who wants to be a Christian cannot serve the state.
The state cannot be Christian.
A Christian cannot serve the state, and so on.
Strange to say, just as you wrote me that letter about the incompatibility of the political activity with Christianity, I wrote a long letter to a lady acquaintance on almost the same theme.
I send you this letter.
If you deem it necessary, print it.
.
I’ve mentioned before how I was inspired to embark on my experiment in tax resistance by reading Henry David Thoreau’s essay Resistance to Civil Government (more popularly known as Civil Disobedience).
Today I came across an study written a few years ago about Thoreau’s essay — The Theory, Practice, and Influence of Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience by Lawrence Rosenwald.
It is a very good look at the historical and biographical context of Thoreau’s essay, and of how Thoreau’s understanding of resistance compares to other theories that were current at that time, and with the understandings of people like Gandhi who were inspired by Thoreau later on.
Rosenwald is himself a war tax resister.
He withholds the portion of his federal income taxes that he believes goes to support war, and then the government seizes a similar amount from him after some intervening bureaucracy.
Like me, Rosenwald was eventually won over to tax resistance by Thoreau’s persuasiveness.
He tells the story this way:
Now he does teach Civil Disobedience — and if his study is any indication, it must be one hell of a class.
I’ve read Thoreau’s essay many times, but I’ve always felt like I’ve been viewing it through a keyhole because of my chronological distance from Thoreau and his time.
Now I feel like I have a much better understanding of who Thoreau was addressing his essay to and what arguments he was responding to and amplifying.
Rosenwald writes elsewhere about how things have changed since Thoreau’s time and how the tax resister today has a different set of concerns, and confronts a different sort of tax collecting apparatus.
Thoreau wrote:
But the state now confronts the tax resister more with laws and faceless bureaucracies and electronic seizures of bank accounts — this meeting of peers on equal ground is a thing of the past.
Rosenwald finds little satisfaction in confronting the dumb behemoth that has replaced Thoreau’s tax-gatherer:
[T]he IRS has instituted an Automatic Collection Service, and we have been collected on three times, once by a levy on my salary and twice by levies on our bank accounts; each time the levy took not only the original refused tax but also penalties and interest.
Even now the IRS occasionally fumbles; before levying my salary it attempted to levy a bank account I had closed out fifteen years previously, and between the first bank levy and the second it refunded the levied money with interest.
But this clumsy, capricious power frets me more than a more efficient and so more predictable bureaucracy might have done…
Rosenwald also notes that Thoreau chose tax resistance reluctantly and in an attempt to avoid getting involved with politics.
He eventually concluded that where taxes were concerned, a political choice could not be avoided (in Rosenwald’s words, “in paying taxes abstinence just isn’t a choice, because you either pay them and collaborate with the state or refuse to pay them and defy the state, but in any case you do politics”).
Today’s Thoreau-ish tax resister is confronted by many more of these entanglements than Thoreau was.
Thoreau could imagine that “I meet this American government, or its representative, the State government, directly, and face to face, once a year — no more — in the person of its tax-gatherer; this is the only mode in which a man situated as I am necessarily meets it.”
Today you meet the tax-gatherer and other coercive agents of the state on a daily basis.
Getting from the unexamined life to a place where you can plant your feet and “[l]et your life be a counter friction to stop the machine” is arguably much more difficult today.
Carl Watner has dug up some detailed information about the poll tax that Henry David Thoreau was resisting all those years ago — how it was administered, who was the collector, and how his imprisonment for tax refusal wasn’t actually justified by law (although “Staples, the tax-collector, and Thoreau were probably unaware of the provisions of the statute.”)
If this sort of historical detective work interests you, take a look at his short article: Highway Tax vs. Poll Tax: Some Thoreau Tax Trivia.
In Paris and the Social Revolution (), Alvan Francis Sanborn briefly surveyed the history of conscientious tax resistance that preceded Tolstoy’s interest in the subject, from Thoreau through William Lloyd Garrison’s non-resistants, to more recent resisters:
When that great and original child of nature, Thoreau, the Hermit of Walden, protested against the collection of taxes in Concord town, he little suspected, probably, that he was prefiguring a revolutionary movement which, before the century was over, was to alarm the sleek and the smug of the Old World and the New; and yet, whether Thoreau realised it or not, his attitude was the anarchistic attitude and his act an act of the propagande par l’example.
The attitude of the American anti-slavery champion, William Lloyd Garrison, was also essentially anarchistic.
“Garrison,” says Tolstoy, “as a man enlightened by Christianity, starting out with a practical aim, — the struggle against slavery, — understood very soon that the cause of slavery was not a casual, temporary seizure of several millions of negroes by the Southerners, but an old and universal anti-Christian recognition of the right of violence of some people over others.
The means towards the recognition of this right was always the evil, which people considered possible to outroot or to lessen by rude force; that is, again by evil.
And, realising this, Garrison pointed out against slavery, not the sufferings of the slaves, not the cruelty of the slave-owners, not the equal rights of citizens, but the eternal Christian law of non-resistance.
Garrison understood that which the most forward champions against slavery failed to understand, — that the sole irresistible means against slavery was the denial of the right of one man over the liberty of another under any circumstances whatever.
“The Abolitionists attempted to prove that slavery was illegal, unprofitable, cruel, degrading, and so forth; but the pro-slavery champions, in their turn, proved the untimeliness, the danger, and the harmful consequences which would arise from the abolition of slavery.
And neither could convince the other.
But Garrison, understanding that the slavery of the negroes was but a private case of general violence, put forth the general principle with which it was impossible to disagree, — that no one, under any pretext, has the right of ruling; that is, of using force over his equals.
Garrison did not insist so much on the right of slaves to be free as he denied the right of any man whatever, or of any company of men, to compel another man to do anything by force.
For the battle with slavery he put forth the principle of the battle with all the evil of the world.”
In an Picket Line entry I wrote about how Garrison and his New England Non-Resistance Society grappled with the tax resistance issue.
I’ve since found another Garrison quote (from his magazine The Liberator):
It is argued, that “if voting under the Constitution be a criminal participation in slavery, the paying of taxes under it is equally so.”
Without stopping to show that there is a fallacy in this argument, we reply, that, in the common use and understanding of the terms, no seceder will ever again pay taxes to the Government while it upholds slavery.
He may consent peaceably to yield up what is demanded of him, but not without remonstrance, and only as he would give up his purse to a highwayman.
He will not recognize it as a lawful tax — he will not pay it as a tax — but will denounce it as robbery and oppression.
Sanborn continues:
The refusal of the citizens of the little French commune of Counozouls to pay their taxes because they were deprived of their hereditary right to supply themselves with wood from an adjacent forest, and the “passive resistance” of the nonconformists in England to the enforcement of the new education act, and of the French Catholics to the expulsion of the monastic orders, are recent instances of probably unconscious propagande par l’example.
Tolstoy has made a clear and full statement for the purport of the propagande par l’example.
“Taxes,” he says, “were never instituted by common consent,… but are taken by those who have the power of taking them.… A man should not voluntarily pay taxes to governments either directly or indirectly; nor should he accept money collected by taxes either as salary or as pension or as a reward; nor should he make use of governmental institutions supported by taxes, since they are collected by violence from the people.”
He holds military service in similar abhorrence:—
“Every honest man ought to understand that the payment of taxes which are employed to maintain and arm soldiers, and, still more, serving in the army, are not indifferent acts, but wicked and shameful acts, since he who commits them not only permits assassination, but participates in it.”
Tolstoy returned often to the subject of tax resistance, both as a tactic and as a principle.
He was influenced by Étienne de la Boétie’s The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude and believed that the trick to ending evil and oppression was to fully stop participating in it, rather than to resist it forcefully.
Refusing to voluntarily pay taxes was one way of doing this.
At the same time, he saw taxation as itself an example of theft and violence and injustice.
He wrote a series of sketches called “The Wisdom of Children” in which he tried to demonstrate that a naïve, child-like view of social arrangements often held more truth than the more sophisticated points of view we learn as we become adults.
One of these sketches dealt with taxation:
Bailiff.(entering a poor cottage.
Nobody is in except Grushka, a little girl of seven.
He looks around him.) Nobody at home?
Grushka. Mother has gone to bring home the cow, and Fedka is at work in the master’s yard.
Bailiff. Well, tell your mother the bailiff called.
Tell her I am giving her notice for the third time, and that she must pay her taxes before Sunday without fail, or else I will take her cow.
Grushka. The cow?
Are you a thief?
We will not let you take our cow.
Bailiff.(smiling.) What a smart girl, I say!
What is your name?
Grushka. Grushka.
Bailiff. You are a good girl, Grushka.
Now listen.
Tell you mother that, although I am not a thief, I will take her cow.
Grushka. Why will you take our cow if you are not a thief?
Bailiff. Because what is due must be paid.
I shall take the cow for the taxes that are not paid.
Grushka. What’s that: taxes?
Bailiff. What a nuisance of a girl!
What are taxes?
They are money paid by the people by the order of the Tsar.
Grushka. To whom?
Bailiff. The Tsar will look after that when the money comes in.
Grushka. He’s not poor, is he?
We are the poor people.
The Tsar is rich.
Why does he want us to give him money?
Bailiff. He does not take it for himself.
He spends it on us, fools that we are.
It all goes to supply our needs — to pay the authorities, the army, the schools.
It is for our own good that we pay taxes.
Grushka. How does it benefit us if our cow is taken away?
There’s no good in that.
Bailiff. You will understand that when you are grown-up.
Now, mind you give your mother my message.
Grushka. I will not repeat all your nonsense to her.
You can do whatever you and the Tsar want.
And we shall mind our own business.
Bailiff. What a devil of a girl she will be when she grows up!
More directly, Tolstoy wrote:
I remember the utterance of a Russian peasant, who was religious and, therefore, truly liberal.
Like Thoreau, he did not consider it just to pay taxes for things which his conscience did not approve of, and when he was asked to pay his share of the taxes, he asked what the taxes which he would pay would be used for, saying, “If the taxes shall be used for a good thing, I will at once give you not only what you demand, but even more; but if they shall be used for something bad, I cannot and will not give a kopek of my own free will.”
Of course, they lost no time with him, but broke down his closed gate, carried off his cow, and sold it for the taxes.
Thus in reality there is but one true and real cause of taxes, — the power which collects them, — the possibility of robbing those who do not give the taxes willingly, and even of beating them for a refusal, of putting them in prison, and of punishing them — as is actually done.
In “The Kingdom of God is Within You” — a text that proved very influential to later Christian anarchists, pacifists, and to Gandhi — Tolstoy explicitly advocated tax resistance, and imagined the state to be essentially helpless before conscientious tax resisters:
What importance, one might think, can one attach to such an incident as some dozens of crazy fellows, as people will call them, refusing to take the oath of allegiance to the government, refusing to pay taxes, to take part in law proceedings or in military service.
These people are punished and exiled to a distance, and life goes on in its old way.
One might think there was no importance in such incidents; but yet it is just those incidents, more than anything else, that will undermine the power of the state and prepare the way for the freedom of men.
These are the individual bees, who are beginning to separate from the swarm, and are flying near it, waiting till the whole swarm can no longer be prevented from starting off after them.
And the governments know this, and fear such incidents more than all the Socialists, Communists, and Anarchists, and their plots and dynamite bombs.
The subjects of a state are all bound to pay taxes.
And every one pays taxes, till suddenly one man in Kharkov, another in Tver and a third in Samara, refuse to pay taxes — all, as though in collusion, saying the same thing.
One says he will only pay when they tell him what object the money taken from him will be spent on.
“If it is for good deeds,” he says, “he will give it of his own accord, and more even than is required of him.
If for evil deeds, then he will give nothing voluntarily, because by the law of Christ, whose follower he is, he cannot take part in evil deeds.”
The others, too, say the same in other words, and will not voluntarily pay the taxes.
Those who have anything to be taken have their property taken from them by force; as for those who have nothing, they are left alone.
“What! didn’t you pay the tax?”
“No, I didn’t pay it.”
“And what happened—nothing?”
“Nothing.”
Tolstoy defended his views, including his attitudes toward taxation, as those demanded of people who would be followers of Jesus.
So he was of course asked to explain his understanding of Jesus’s “Render unto Caesar” koan.
He responded this way:
In reply to the question as to whether [Jesus] shall give the established tax upon entering Capernaum, He says distinctly that the sons, that is, His disciples, are free from every tax and are not obliged to pay it, and only not to tempt the collectors of the taxes, not to provoke them to commit the sin of violence, He orders His disciples to give that stater, which is accidentally found in the fish, and which does not belong to any one and is not taken from any one.
But in reply to the cunning question as to whether the tribute is to be paid to Cæsar, He says, “To Cæsar the things which are Cæsar’s and to God the things which are God’s,” that is, give to Cæsar what belongs to him and is made by him, — the coin, — and to God give what is made by God and is implanted in you, — your soul, your conscience; give this to no one but God, and so do not do for Cæsar what is forbidden by God.
And this answer surprises all by its boldness — and at the same time by its unanswerableness.
[Tolstoy’s footnote: “Not only the complete misunderstanding of Christ’s teaching, but also a complete unwillingness to understand it could have admitted that striking misinterpretation, according to which the words, ‘To Cæsar the things which are Cæsar’s,’ signify the necessity of obeying Cæsar.
In the first place, there is no mention there of obedience; in the second place, if Christ recognized the obligatoriness of paying tribute, and so of obedience, He would have said directly, ‘Yes, it should be paid;’ but He says, ‘Give to Cæsar what is his, that is, the money, and give your life to God,’ and with these latter words He not only does not encourage any obedience to power, but, on the contrary, points out that in everything which belongs to God it is not right to obey Cæsar.”]
When Christ is brought before Pilate, as a mutineer who has been perverting the nation and forbidding to give tribute to Cæsar (Luke ⅹⅹⅲ.
2), He, after saying what He found necessary to say, surprises and provokes all the chiefs with this, that He pays no attention to all their questions, and makes no reply to any of their questions.
For this arrangement of the power and disobedience to it, Christ is sentenced and crucified.
A while back, I started looking for examples of ways tax resisters have organized mutual aid pacts to help diffuse the effects of government retaliation.
In the course of doing the research, though, I started collecting examples instead of a larger variety of collective projects resisters and their sympathizers have used in support of tax resistance.
Here are some of the examples I found:
Tax resister “insurance”
For instance, the Breton Association in
France, which organized to “form a common stock or fund… to indemnify the
subscribers for any expense they may be put to by their refusal to pay any
illegal contributions imposed upon the public.”
Another example was the Association
of Real Estate Taxpayers in
Chicago, which formed a cooperative legal fund to fight an offensive legal
battle against the tax.
American war tax resisters today can use the War Tax Resisters Penalty
Fund to defray penalties and interest seized by the
IRS.
The fund is raised as-needed by asking subscribers to contribute an equal
amount.
The oath of the Regulator tax resistance movement in the North Carolina
colony bound its signers to “bear an equal share in paying and making up
[the] loss” if “any of our company be put to expense or under any
confinement.”
Communes, collectives, and co-housing projects.
Some tax resisters have formed mutual support communities.
Whiteway Colony
was founded to try to live up to Tolstoyan ideals. The members of the
Bijou and
Agape communities live below a taxable
income so as to avoid paying taxes.
Supporting resisters as an employer
Some members of the Restored Israel of
Yahweh ran a construction business and agreed not to withhold federal
taxes from the wages of those employees who were fellow-members and who were
resisting taxes.
Vivien Kellems refused to withhold
taxes from her employees’ wages, saying: “They are all free American
citizens, thoroughly capable of performing all of the duties and
responsibilities of citizenship for themselves. And so, from this day, I am
not collecting nor paying their income taxes for them.”
Charles Kanjama recently urged Kenyans
to begin a tax resistance campaign, and said that to foil pay-as-you-earn
withholding, “participating employers and employees can enter into a
voluntary contract to convert monthly employment into quarterly or
half-yearly employment, thus effectively delaying tax liability for several
months.”
British nonconformists and women’s suffrage activists a century ago also
used this tactic. Auctions became rallies, with speeches and banners and
crowds that could number in the thousands. Supporters would pack the auction
house and refuse to leave their seats. On some occasions, violence broke
out. In some cases, auctioneers refused to handle goods that had been seized
for tax refusal.
Simply boycotting the auctions and refusing to buy seized goods is one way
communities offer support. It was part of the Quaker “Discipline” to refuse
to buy seized goods. When Valentine Byler’s horse was seized for non-payment
of the social security tax, “no Amish came to bid on the horses and, due to
a lack of bidders, they went for a good price, with the harnesses ‘thrown
in’ by the auctioneer.”
Pay cash so as not to leave a paper trail
Jessica Ramer and a
Claire
Files contributor brought this idea up. If you pay in cash
whenever you can, you give the recipient the opportunity to decide whether
or not to declare the income.
Cash tips are easy to under-report. I asked about that recently and was
told that most people pay with credit card/debit card and that the
government now uses a percentage method for tips. They look at the charged
meals, look at the number of total meals served, and then look at the
charged tips to figure out how much cash tips you received.
(100 meals served. 50 paid with card, tipping 15%. the government
calculates 15% from 100 meals even if cash tips are only 10%)
You can help out by tipping more when paying with cash or better yet, when
you pay with card, put 1% tip on it and put the rest out as cash. I even
leave a note for the server saying “this is your money, don’t
tell your boss, or the government. share it with the buss boy if that is
the policy.” This will help lower the average tip figures, but
still give the nice server what they have earned.
Use barter to avoid taxable/seizable transactions
Karl Hess found people willing to barter with him as he was dodging
IRS
seizures:
The other day I welded up a fish-smoking rack for a family in Washington,
D.C. It will earn me a year’s supply
of smoked fish. At about the same time, I helped a friend dig a foundation.
He’ll help me lay the concrete blocks for a workshop. Part of my pay for a
lecture at a New England college was the use of the school’s welding shop,
to make some metal sculptures. Three such sculptures have paid my
attorney’s fees in maintaining the tax resistance which is the reason
barter has become such an integral part of my life.
Manufacture and sell goods as alternatives to taxed products
Before the American Revolution, colonists who opposed Britain’s economic
control boycotted British products and began to produce homespun cloth,
alternatives to tea, and so forth. Gandhi’s independence campaign in India
made the wearing and production of homespun cloth central to the opposition,
and the Salt March was focused on the illegal production of untaxed,
non-foreign-monopoly salt.
An example today is home-brewed beer (which beats the excise tax on
alcoholic beverages).
Buycotts and boycotts that favor resisting businesses
One report from World War Ⅰ-era America noted that this was a technique used
by those who opposed the “Liberty Bonds”:
Efforts to prevent banks from handling the bonds have centered chiefly in
Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Missouri and
Oklahoma. The President of a Wisconsin bank has advised the Treasury that
his depositors, mostly Germans, or of German parentage, have withdrawn
many thousands of dollars from his bank because he aided the First Liberty
Loan.
These depositors, he added, had taken their accounts to two rival banks on
the understanding that those banks would not aid the second Liberty Loan.
The two banks, he reported, were not aiding the loan in any way.
Many banks have felt the pressure of German influence in this propaganda,
reports indicate. So pronounced was the movement that the States of
Minnesota, North and South Dakota, and Montana recently decided that they
would withdraw State funds from any bank which did not support the loan.
Social boycotts / shunning / noncooperation with tax collectors
Adolf Hausrath writes of Roman-occupied Judaea,
The people knew how to torment these officials of the Roman customs with
the petty cruelty which ordinary people develop with irreconcilable
persistency, whenever they believe this persistency to be due to their
moral indignation. In consequence of the theocratic scruples about the
duty of paying taxes, the tax-gatherers were declared to be unclean and
half Gentile.… among the Jews the words
“tax-gatherersand sinners,”“tax-gatherers and Gentiles,”“tax-gatherers and harlots,”
“tax-gatherers, murderers and robbers,” and similar insulting
combinations, were not only ready on the tongue and familiar, but were
accepted as theocratically identical in meaning. Thrust out from all
social intercourse, the tax-gatherers became more and more the pariahs of
the Jewish world. With holy horror did the Pharisee sweep past the lost
son of Israel who had sold himself to the Gentile for the vilest purpose,
and avoid the places which his sinful breath contaminated. Their
testimony was not accepted by Jewish tribunals. It was forbidden to sit
at table with them or eat of their bread. But their money-chests
especially were the summary of all uncleanness and the chief object of
pious horror, since their contents consisted of none but unlawful
receipts, and every single coin betokened a breach of some theocratic
regulation. To exchange their money or receive alms from them might
easily put a whole house in the condition of being unclean, and
necessitate many purifications. From these relations of the tax-officials
to the rest of the population, it can be readily understood that only the
refuse of Judaism undertook the office.
A social boycott of tax collectors was practiced in the years before
the American revolution. John Adams wrote:
At Philadelphia, the Heart-and-Hand Fire Company has expelled Mr. Hughes,
the stamp man for that colony. The freemen of Talbot county, in Maryland,
have erected a gibbet before the door of the court-house, twenty feet
high, and have hanged on it the effigies of a stamp informer in chains,
in terrorem till the Stamp Act shall be repealed; and
have resolved, unanimously, to hold in utter contempt and abhorrence
every stamp officer, and every favorer of the Stamp Act, and to
“have no communication with any such person, not even to speak to
him, unless to upbraid him with his baseness.” So triumphant is the
spirit of liberty everywhere.
Harassment of tax collectors was a signature action of the Whiskey
Rebellion. An early published resolution of the rebels read in part:
[W]hereas some men may be found amongst us, so far lost to every sense of
virtue and feeling for the distresses of this country, as to accept
offices for the collection of the duty:
Resolved, therefore, That in future we will consider such persons as
unworthy of our friendship; have no intercourse or dealings with them;
withdraw from them every assistance, and withhold all the comforts of life
which depend upon those duties that as men and fellow citizens we owe to
each other; and upon all occasions treat them with that contempt they
deserve; and that it be, and it is hereby most earnestly recommended to
the people at large to follow the same line of conduct towards them.
Tax collectors were tarred-and-feathered in America, both before and after
the revolution — the violent expulsion of tax collectors was a frequent
technique of the Whiskey rebels. Tax collectors have been the targets of
violent reprisal at many times and in many places. Because of this,
governments have often had to pay high salaries — or, frequently,
percentages of the take — to convince collectors to take on the job, which
only increases the resentment of those being collected from.
During the French Revolution and its aftermath, customs houses were burned
by mobs, tax rolls were destroyed, excise collectors were made to renounce
their jobs and then were run out of town — or in some cases killed.
The first Boer War was triggered when an armed group of Boers seized a
wagon that was being auctioned after it was distrained for resisted taxes.
The Whiskey rebels threatened to destroy the stills of those distillers
who complied in paying the excise tax.
Boycotts / social boycotts of non-resisters
If a tax resisting movement is large enough, it may be able to dissuade
people from paying taxes through boycotts or social boycotts of people
who are tax compliant. In Massachusetts, a group enforced a boycott of
taxed British imports by declaring that
…we further promise and engage, that we will not purchase any goods
of any persons who, preferring their own interest to that of the public,
shall import merchandise from Great Britain, until a general importation
takes place; or of any trader who purchases his goods of such importer:
and that we will hold no intercourse, or connection, or correspondence,
with any person who shall purchase goods of such importer, or retailer;
and we will hold him dishonored, an enemy to the liberties of his country,
and infamous, who shall break this agreement.
Maintain solidarity in the face of divide-and-conquer tactics
In
Germany, the government attempted to break a tax resistance movement by
offering to moderate its enforcement efforts against people who could show
that they had limited means. Karl Marx, who was promoting the resistance at
the time, saw this as a divide-and-conquer tactic:
The intention of the Ministry is only too clear. It wants to divide the
democrats; it wants to make the peasants and workers count themselves as
non-payers owing to lack of means to pay, in order to split them from
those not paying out of regard for legality, and thereby deprive the latter
of the support of the former. But this plan will fail; the people realizes
that it is responsible for solidarity in the refusal to pay taxes, just as
previously it was responsible for solidarity in payment of them.
Keep a record of the “sufferings” of resisters
The Quakers responded to persecution by keeping careful records of
individuals who had suffered thereby. In the archives of Quaker meetings,
you can find lists of people who had resisted militia taxes or tithes for
establishment church ministers, and what property was distrained by which
tax collector.
Sign petitions and public advertisements, engage in public protests
When the American Amish were trying to resist compulsory enrollment in the
social security system, 14,000 of them signed a petition to Congress.
During the Vietnam War, public advertisements were taken out by tax
resisters. In , for instance,
448 writers and editors put a full-page ad in the New
York Post declaring their intention to refuse to pay taxes for the
Vietnam War. The signatories included James Baldwin, Noam Chomsky, Philip K.
Dick, Betty Friedan, Allen Ginsberg, Paul Goodman, Paul Krassner, Norman
Mailer, Henry Miller, Tillie Olsen, Grace Paley, Thomas Pynchon, Susan
Sontag, Benjamin Spock, Gloria Steinem, Norman Thomas, Hunter S. Thompson,
Kurt Vonnegut, and Howard Zinn.
Protests, rallies, pickets, and the like have been a part of many
large-scale tax resistance campaigns.
Hold resisters’ property as an informal trustee
Some resisters who are vulnerable to property seizure find sympathetic
friends who are willing to hold the resisters’ property in their
names as a way of foiling seizure. Some war tax resister
alternative funds function
partially as “warehouse banks” that hold deposits of war tax resisters.
When a frustrated tax collector seized Ammon Hennacy’s protest signs
as he was picketing the
IRS
office — claiming that he planned to auction them off to pay Hennacy’s tax
debt — a friend of Hennacy helped him make new signs, each one marked “this
sign is the personal property of Joseph Craigmyle.”
Keep in contact with resisters and express support
After the press reported that Valentine Byler’s horse had been seized by the
IRS
as he was plowing his field, he got letters of support from all across
the country.
Form groups for mutual support & coordinated decision-making
Here there are too many examples to list.
Give financial aid to evicted rent strikers
When the Irish Land League launched its rent strike, it claimed that
“The funds will be poured out unstintedly to all who may endure
eviction in the course of the struggle. Our exiled brothers in America may
be relied on to contribute, if necessary, as many millions in money as they
have thousands, to starve out the landlords and bring the English tenantry
to its knees.”
Comfort and aid imprisoned resisters
The trick to supporting imprisoned tax resisters is to respect their real
needs and desires. When “someone interfered,” as Thoreau put
it, and paid his taxes in order to spring him from his night in jail, they
thought wrongly that they were doing Thoreau a favor, “for they
thought that my chief desire was to stand the other side of that stone wall.”
Juanita Nelson tells of the support she received in jail, where she had
been taken in her bathrobe from her home. Her supporters took the time to
learn how to support her in a way that was appropriate to her resistance:
Two fellow pacifists, one of them also a tax refuser, had been permitted
to come to me, since I would not go to them. I asked them what was
uppermost in my mind, what they’d do about getting properly dressed?
They said that this was something I would have to settle for myself. I
sensed that they thought it the better part of wisdom and modesty for me
to be dressed for my appearance in court. They were more concerned about
the public relations aspect of getting across the witness than I was. They
were also genuinely concerned, I knew, about making their actions truly
nonviolent, cognizant of the other person’s feelings, attitudes and
readiness. I was shaken enough to concede that I would like to have my
clothes at hand, in case I decided I would feel more at ease in them. The
older visitor, a dignified man with white hair, agreed to go for the
clothes in a taxicab.
They left, and on their heels came another visitor. She had been told that
in permitting her to come up, the officials were treating me with more
courtesy than I was according them. It was her assessment that the chief
deputy was hopeful that someone would be able to hammer some sense into me
and was willing to make concessions in that hope. But he had misjudged
the reliance he might place in her — she was not as critical as the
men. She did not know what she would do, but she thought she might wish to
have the strength and the audacity to carry through in the vein in which I
had started.
And she said. “You know, you look like a female Gandhi in that robe.
You look, well, dignified.”
That was my first encouragement. Everyone else had tended to make me feel
like a fool of the first water, had confirmed fears I already had on that
score. My respect and admiration for Gandhi, though not uncritical, was
deep. And if I in any way resembled him in appearance I was prepared to
try to emulate a more becoming state of mind. I reminded myself, too, that
I had on considerably more than the loincloth in which Gandhi was able to
greet kings and statesmen with ease. I need not be unduly perturbed about
wearing a robe into the presence of his honor.
Support the families of imprisoned resisters
When Gandhi was preparing the groundwork for a tax refusal campaign in
India, he noted that the Indian National Congress “should undertake
to feed the wives and families of those who may be imprisoned.”
Study the law, give legal support
When Elizabeth Cady Stanton was contemplating a tax resistance campaign for
women’s suffrage in the United States, she noted, “One thing is
certain, this course will necessarily involve a good deal of litigation,
and we shall need lawyers of our own sex whose intellects, sharpened by
their interests, shall be quick to discover the loopholes of retreat.”
Combine redirected taxes for dramatic charity giveaways
Larry Rosenwald wrote, of this technique, “To sit on the Grants and
Loans Committee of New England War Tax Resistance, and to dispense the
interest on refused taxes to a youth group in Chelsea, a video for cable
television on United States involvement in Central America, and a
people’s garden in Roxbury is to be reminded of the ideal community,
however blurred and fragmented, that war tax resistance is done on behalf
of, in the hope of helping to make it clear and whole.”
Can you think of any I’ve missed?
While scanning through some recently-internetted archives of the
San Francisco Chronicle I came across a charming
poem by Walt Mason, a Kansas newspaper witticist whose métier
was paragraph-formatted rhyming doggerel. He was extremely successful, with
his poems syndicated in hundreds of newspapers and then collected in volumes.
“Thoreau” this one’s called:
The books that Henry Thoreau wrote are little read, these later days; men
care not how a hermit poet disported in the woodland ways. The struggle
after stock and bond is so intense we little heed the nature lover by his
pond, with hair and whiskers gone to seed. Yet never should his fame grow
stale, while big assessments stick like wax; he is the man who went to jail
before he’d pay a county tax. I think of Thoreau in his cell, that hero
sheriffs could not swerve, and feel the heart within me swell with admiration
for his nerve. They tax us more each passing year, and waste the coin on
useless trash, and we are all such slaves of fear, we meekly pay our
hard-earned cash. In public prints we make a wail, for sympathy we make a
bid; but no one dares to go to jail, as Henry David Thoreau did. We may
forget that great man’s books, forget his toil with ax and rake, we may
forget the sylvan nooks in which he roamed by Walden lake; but never let us
be so lax as to forget this splendid tale: Before he’d pay a robber tax, the
hero-martyr went to jail.
Martin Luther King, Jr. called it his “first contact with the theory of nonviolent resistance,” and wrote: “The teachings of Thoreau came alive in our civil rights movement.”
Gandhi developed satyagraha under its influence, and said the essay was “written for all time.
Its incisive logic is unanswerable.”
Although the essay has strongly influenced the tradition of nonviolent direct action, Thoreau wrote it, in part, to distinguish his motives from those of firmly nonviolent resisters.
American pacifists at the time called themselves “non-resistants” because most based their pacifism on Jesus’s instruction to “resist not evil” but instead to turn the other cheek.
During Thoreau’s lifetime, Civil Disobedience was published as “Resistance to Civil Government.”
The title indicated Thoreau’s challenge to “non-resistance” theory.
A later reprint changed the title to “Civil Disobedience,” which made “civil” ambiguous — did it mean disobedience to civil authorities (as in the original title), or disobedience conducted in a civil manner?
This, and the influence the essay had on nonviolent resistance leaders like Gandhi and King, causes many to mistake Thoreau for a pacifist and his essay as a manifesto of nonviolent resistance.
Thoreau’s actual views on war and pacifism show a remarkable evolution, and present a challenge to pacifists that is as relevant today as it was in the turbulent years preceding the Civil War when Thoreau was writing.
When Thoreau was in his early twenties he began writing a journal.
Some of his earliest mentions of war show him fawning over soldiers during their annual drills, and holding romantic ideas that betray that most of what he knew of war came from the Greek classics.
War, to him, was “heartiness and activity,” while peace was “insincerity and sloth.”
“I have a deep sympathy with war,” he wrote, “it so apes the gait and bearing of the soul.”
“Every man is a warrior when he aspires.”
“The whole course of our lives should be analogous to one day of the soldier’s.”
Peace he considered to be an ideal only for “puny men, afraid of war’s alarms.”
In the 1840s, Thoreau’s attitude matured.
He stopped paying the poll tax, in what he later explained was a protest against a government that enforced slavery and that invaded Mexico in order to extend slaveholder territory.
Around the time he spent a night in jail for refusing to pay his taxes, Thoreau wrote:
There probably never were worse crimes committed since time began than in the present Mexican war… yet I have not learned the name or residence, and probably never should, of the reckless villain who should father them… [T]he villainy is in the readiness with which men, doing outrage to their proper natures, lend themselves to perform the office of inferior & brutal ones.… Any can command him who doth not command himself.
In this journal entry is the seed that would grow into Civil Disobedience.
In the years before Thoreau began resisting the poll tax, Massachusetts transcendentalists Bronson Alcott and Charles Lane were jailed for refusing to pay their taxes, in acts they justified as pacifist “non-resistance.”
Thoreau followed their practice, but with a different theory, and his essay distinguished his tax resistance from theirs.
While the non-resistants based their practice on Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount and relied on a faith in the power of nonviolence, Thoreau’s argument was secular and applied equally to violent or nonviolent techniques.
But though he was distancing himself from pacifists, Thoreau was becoming increasingly cynical about war and soldiers.
“Read the Englishman’s history of the French and Indian wars,” he wrote in his journal, “and then read the Frenchman’s, and see how each awards the meed of glory to the other’s monsters of cruelty or perfidy.”
A few days later he took up his own challenge, and found it was just as he anticipated: The histories were irreconcilable — the savage brutes of one were the chivalric heroes of the other.
One day he observed a battle between two ant hives and wrote:
I should not wonder if they had their respective musical bands stationed on some chip and playing their national airs the while to cheer the dying combatants… I was myself excited somewhat, even as if they had been men.
The more you think of it, the less the difference.
And certainly there is no other fight recorded in Concord that will bear a moment’s comparison with this.
To the extent that American patriotism is a religion, this is high blasphemy.
“The Shot Heard ’Round the World” that began the American Revolution was fired at Concord, and every Concord child, Thoreau included, was brought up to revere the heroes of that battle.
But:
I have no doubt [the ants] had as just a cause, one or even both parties, as our forefathers, and that the results will be as important and memorable.
And there was far more patriotism and heroism.… I have no doubt it was a principle they fought for as much as our ancestors, and not a threepenny tax on their tea.
Thoreau had no respect for soldiers who fought not for a principle but as a career.
When the militia of Massachusetts, a “free state,” cooperated with the Fugitive Slave Law to send Anthony Burns back into slavery in Virginia in 1854, Thoreau’s contempt for the government’s soldiers grew: “While the whole military force of the State, if need be, is at the service of a slaveholder to enable him to carry back a slave, not a soldier is offered to save a citizen of Massachusetts from being kidnapped.… The marines and the militia whose bodies were used lately were not men of sense nor of principle; in a high moral sense they were not men at all.”
“The papers are talking about the prospect of war between England & America.
Neither side sees how its country can avoid a long & fratricidal war without sacrificing its honor.
Both nations are ready to take a desperate step, to forget the interests of civilization & christianity & their commercial prosperity, & fly at each other’s throats.
When I see an individual thus beside himself, thus desperate, ready to shoot or be shot, like a blackleg who has little to lose, no serene aims to accomplish, I think he is a candidate for bedlam.
What asylum is there for nations to go to?
“Nations are thus ready to talk of wars & challenge one another (will it not be thought disreputable at length, as duelling between individuals now is?), because they are made up to such an extent of poor, low-spirited, despairing men, in whose eyes the chance of shooting somebody else without being shot themselves exceeds their actual good fortune.
Who in fact will be the first to enlist but the most desperate class — they who have lost all hope — & they may at last infect the rest.”
The mid-1850s was the closest Thoreau approached to pacifism.
He’d given up hope of finding heroes among the government’s uniformed “powder monkeys” and he felt that nations going to war were exhibiting something akin to insanity on a national scale.
Might not war come to be thought of as a shameful relic of barbaric times, he wondered, “as duelling between individuals now is?”
But the most interesting evolution in Thoreau’s views on violence and nonviolence — and his most severe challenge to pacifism — was yet to come.
In , John Brown led a raid on the Harpers Ferry armory, hoping to distribute the arms captured there in order to start a slave uprising.
The planned insurrection was crushed by government forces, and Brown was captured, tried, and executed.
Abolitionist leaders distanced themselves from Brown, many citing nonviolent principles.
Horace Greeley, writing for the New York Tribune, an organ of the newly-formed, abolitionist Republican Party, wrote that “the way to universal emancipation lies not through insurrection, civil war, and bloodshed, but through peace, discussion, and quiet diffusion of sentiments of humanity and justice.”
Thoreau was furious at this timidity, and took the lead in defending Brown, calling out these abolitionists for defending a “peace” that was no peace at all:
It galls me to listen to the remarks of craven-hearted neighbors who speak disparagingly of Brown because he resorted to violence… They preserve the so-called peace of their community by deeds of petty violence every day.
Look at the policeman’s billy & handcuffs!
Look at the jail!
Look at the gallows!…
If the government is enforcing injustice by force, then to cry “peace!” when someone tries to violently resist is not to side with peace, but to side with one variety of violence over another: to side with the victors over the vanquished.
Thoreau asked those who pleaded for calm: “What is the character of that calm which follows when the law and the slaveholder prevail?”
The slave-ship is on her way, crowded with its dying hundreds; a small crew of slaveholders is smothering 4 millions under the hatches; & yet the politician asserts that the only proper way by which deliverance is to be obtained is by “the quiet diffusion of sentiments of humanity,” without any “outbreak”!
And in the same breath they tell us that all is quiet now at Harper’s Ferry.
What is that that I hear cast overboard?
The bodies of the dead, who have found deliverance.
That is the way we are diffusing humanity, & all its sentiments with it.
To truly side with peace you must renounce allegiance to the violent status quo — only then have you earned the right to criticize violent rebellion.
This means not relying on those violent means like “the policeman’s billy & handcuffs” that maintain the government and enforce the legal privileges of its citizens.
Thoreau did renounce his government and its “protection.”
He endeavored to eliminate his complicity with the violent status quo, and so he earned the right to criticize violent rebellion.
But he would not do so: “I do not complain of any tactics that are effective of good,” he wrote, “whether one wields the quill or the sword, but I shall not think him mistaken who quickest succeeds to liberate the slave.
I will judge of the tactics by the fruits.”
Thoreau challenged the pacifists of his time to make sure their non-resistance was not a disguised collaboration with violence, and also to make their action effective so that it would most quickly succeed to end injustice.
These challenges still stand.
Here are three more additions to the Tolstoy essays hosted at
The Picket Line:
“If only every king, emperor, and president understood that his duty of
managing the army is neither honourable nor important, as he is made to
believe by his flatterers, but a bad and disgraceful work of preparing for
murder; and if every private person understood that the payment of taxes,
with which soldiers are hired and armed, and much more enlistment in the
army, are not indifferent acts, but bad, disgraceful acts, not only an
abetment of, but even a participation in murder, — then the provoking power
of the emperors, presidents, and kings, for which they are now killed, would
die of its own accord.”
“But that their participation in murder, that is, in military service or in
the taxes which are intended for the support of the army, is not only a
morally bad act, but also very pernicious for their brothers and for
themselves, — the same which forms the foundation of their slavery, — does not
enter the heads of any of them, and all either gladly pay their taxes for the
army, or themselves enter the army, considering such an act to be quite
natural. Could such people have led to the formation of a different society
from that which now exists?”
“As far back as fifty years ago a little-known, but very remarkable American
author, Thoreau, not only clearly enunciated this incompatibility in his
beautiful article on the duty of a man not to obey the government, but also in
practice showed an example of this disobedience. He refused to pay the taxes
demanded of him, as he did not wish to be an abettor and accomplice of a state
that legalized slavery, and was put in prison for it.”
The documentary film Contempt of Conscience is now on-line.
This movie focuses on the war tax resisters in Britain known as the “Peace Tax Seven,” putting their protest in the historical context of the fight for conscientious objection to military service, the growth of mechanized warfare, and the history of conscientious war tax resistance.
The seven resisters featured in this film are Joe Jenkins, Robin Brookes, Brenda Boughton, Birgit Völlm, Simon Heywood, Siân Cwper, and Roy Prockter, and there are shout-outs as well to some other resisters, like Henry David Thoreau and Arthur Windsor.
The tax resistance movement featured in this film is largely focused on winning a legal right to conscientious objection to military taxation — largely by judicial appeal based on human rights standards in Britain and Europe — that is, on gaining a legal mechanism that would allow conscientious objectors to pay their taxes to some sort of government account that is firewalled from military expenditures.
There are many ways to support tax resisters when they are targeted by the police or courts, including:
Another way to help resisters who are tangling with the legal system is to pay their legal fees or their fines.
I covered “mutual insurance” plans, with which tax resistance campaigns spread the cost of fines and other such costs over more resisters than just those explicitly targeted.
Today I’ll cover some examples of more ad hoc, after-the-fact generosity in a similar vein.
Sylvia Hardy
Sylvia Hardy, retired and living in Exeter, was upset that the cost of living increase in her pension was less than 3%, while her council tax was rising at a double-digit percentage each year.
So she decided to stop paying.
A sympathizer paid her bill one year, and in response Hardy wrote to the city council to ask them not to accept any further donations in her name.
Later, she was told that someone had called in by telephone offering to pay her whole bill, and she again refused, saying continued refusal was “the only way to get our voices heard.”
Nonetheless, when she was jailed in , an anonymous sympathizer paid her outstanding taxes, and she was released after spending two days behind bars.
Old Holborn
Nick Hogan, a Bolton pub-owner, defied a new anti-smoking ordinance and openly permitted his patrons to light up.
For this he was fined £3,000, and another £7,000+ in court costs.
He refused to pay and was thrown in jail.
Hogan was set free the following month when a blogger going by the handle of “Old Holborn” dressed up in a Guy Fawkes mask and cape in order to remain anonymous and delivered a suitcase full of cash to prison to pay Hogan’s fine.
The funds had been donated by thousands of people around the world who were sympathetic to Hogan’s fight.
“Carter”
A man named Carter (his other name has, as far as I know, been lost to history) refused to pay a $1 militia tax for conscientious reasons in .
For this, his town put him in jail and vowed to keep him there (at a cost to the town of $2.50 per week) until he paid up.
He was stubborn, and stayed there at least 21 months.
A newspaper article about his case says, “[f]riends offered to advance the money to Carter, but he stubbornly refused to accept the money and pay the tax.”
Zerah C. Whipple
When Zerah C. Whipple was imprisoned for refusing to pay a militia tax, an anonymous donor eventually paid the tax and costs to have him released.
At an unexpected moment an entire stranger called at the prison and desired to know the amount of the tax and costs, which he paid, saying he knew the worth of Z.C. Whipple, and that his family for generations back had never paid the military tax, and he wished to save the State from the disgrace of imprisoning a person guilty of no crime.
The money was paid and the door opened, and his friend took the receipt to his children and said, “Keep this as a reminiscence that in your father paid this bill to release a young man from prison, that he might enjoy the rights of conscience.”
Mary McLeod Cleeves
When women’s suffrage activist Mary McLeod Cleeves was threatened with imprisonment for refusing to pay a carriage license tax, the suffragist newspaper The Vote noted that “Mrs. Cleeves has been beseiged by friends asking to be allowed to pay her fine; but like a true Suffragette, she refused.”
Annuity Tax resisters
Quakers, also a nonconformist sect, were largely in sympathy with the Annuity Tax resisters of Edinburgh, Scotland, but an editorial in one Quaker periodical chided those resisters for being eager to pay up to get their colleagues out of jail, rather than to embrace martyrdom like a good Quaker would:
We are principally induced to advert to this matter, on account of the means by which the liberation of the prisoners was effected — that of a public subscription.
This, we consider to have been most objectionable.
… we see nothing to commend, but every thing to reprobate, in the conduct of Dissenters in this matter.
The movement may bespeak their sympathy for the sufferer, but we contend that it was both injudiciously expressed, and exceedingly ill-timed.
Had the public subscription been deferred till after the prisoners had been liberated, in what we should consider a legitimate manner, and its object of course been different — to testify at once the sympathy of the subscribers, and to compensate for the injury sustained by the prisoners — there would have been no objection to the manifestation.
Did it not occur to the Dissenters of Edinburgh, that it was not from want of pecuniary ability that either of the prisoners allowed himself to be immured in jail?
Or again, what was the difference between these individuals paying the tax themselves, and its being paid for them by public subscription?
If it was wrong in the one case, it must be equally wrong, and a violation of principle, in the other.
It has surprised us, that not one of the Dissenting Journals that we have met with has taken this view of the subject.
In their joyfulness at the liberation of the prisoners, they seem to have lost sight entirely of the sacrifice of principle at which it was obtained.
Lessons from Thoreau, Maurice McCrackin, and Juanita Nelson
You’ll note that in many of the cases I mentioned, the offered money was an unwelcome gift — the resisters were not going to jail for lack of funds, but for principle.
The trick to supporting imprisoned tax resisters is to respect their real needs and desires.
When “someone interfered,” as Thoreau put it, and paid his taxes in order to spring him from his night in jail, they thought wrongly that they were doing Thoreau a favor, “for they thought that my chief desire was to stand the other side of that stone wall.”
When the lawyers the court assigned to defend war tax resister Maurice McCrackin — who was refusing to cooperate with the court entirely, and who wanted no legal defense whatsoever — vowed to pursue an appeal of a verdict they thought was unjust, McCracken 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.”
Juanita Nelson tells a happier story: of the support she received in jail, where she had been taken in her bathrobe from her home.
Her supporters took the time to learn how to support her in a way that was appropriate to her resistance:
Two fellow pacifists, one of them also a tax refuser, had been permitted to come to me, since I would not go to them.
I asked them what was uppermost in my mind, what they’d do about getting properly dressed?
They said that this was something I would have to settle for myself.
I sensed that they thought it the better part of wisdom and modesty for me to be dressed for my appearance in court.
They were more concerned about the public relations aspect of getting across the witness than I was.
They were also genuinely concerned, I knew, about making their actions truly nonviolent, cognizant of the other person’s feelings, attitudes and readiness.
I was shaken enough to concede that I would like to have my clothes at hand, in case I decided I would feel more at ease in them.
The older visitor, a dignified man with white hair, agreed to go for the clothes in a taxicab.
They left, and on their heels came another visitor.
She had been told that in permitting her to come up, the officials were treating me with more courtesy than I was according them.
It was her assessment that the chief deputy was hopeful that someone would be able to hammer some sense into me and was willing to make concessions in that hope.
But he had misjudged the reliance he might place in her — she was not as critical as the men.
She did not know what she would do, but she thought she might wish to have the strength and the audacity to carry through in the vein in which I had started.
And she said.
“You know, you look like a female Gandhi in that robe.
You look, well, dignified.”
That was my first encouragement.
Everyone else had tended to make me feel like a fool of the first water, had confirmed fears I already had on that score.
My respect and admiration for Gandhi, though not uncritical, was deep.
And if I in any way resembled him in appearance I was prepared to try to emulate a more becoming state of mind.
I reminded myself, too, that I had on considerably more than the loincloth in which Gandhi was able to greet kings and statesmen with ease.
I need not be unduly perturbed about wearing a robe into the presence of his honor.
I stumbled on this commentary from El Libertario.
It’s a good example of someone trying somewhat awkwardly to straddle the gap between individualist conscientious objection and collective action.
Translation mine:
Chile Needs Tax Resisters
by Francisco Belmar
Tax Resistance: Populist and Libertarian Movement
Chile is a special country.
Since we formed into a republic, we have had a polarized view on all topics.
Shades of gray, as we know, are not our strong point.
Even so, there are some amusing factors that we agree on.
A good example of this is taxes, because in Chile almost everyone is fine with their existence.
Only a few protest, but not enough.
Our civil society is so weak, so manipulated, so constituted from polarization, that the existence of a few tax resisters has not helped to create a serious movement in this respect.
Today, when you speak against taxes, you are stigmatized.
Usually such people are spoken of as being fascists (which is paradoxical) or, at best, as neoliberals.
The truth is that historically, the anti-tax movement has always been populist.
Even, in the case of the United States, part of the movement for civil liberties.
This is based on a very simple fact: during the period when modern states were forming, the bulk of the tax burden fell on the workers and peasants.
Even during the Middle Ages, strong revolts caused by tax increases broke out.
At another time we will talk about them and their interpretation, also of interest, in the history of Chile.
Tax is Theft?
Critics of tax resistance, as we noted, usually come from those who defend some radical position.
We are called neoliberals because, supposedly, we want the millionaires to be even richer and the poor to die in neglect.
To others, we are utopian dreamers, hippies who dream of the impossible.
In spite of all this, I do not blame them.
In any case, in Chile there are no serious tax resisters.
In general they do not reflect on principles, and, many times they fall into the classic utilitarian analysis.
Others believe that it is enough to shout at the gates of the IRS, or, of course, to toss molotov cocktails.
With representatives like these, how can we avoid ridicule?
Usually, in libertarian circles, there is talk of the theft of taxes.
This, in reality, is quite pertinent.
To reach that conclusion one must consider their legitimacy.
Nobody has asked the question: under what conditions would taxes be legitimate?
The truth is that they could not always be considered theft.
When the citizens or members of a community can signal their willingness to pay them directly, there is no illegitimacy.
If a group of people forms an agreement to pay some quantity to purchase something in common, the legitimacy is evident.
The complication arises from extrapolating this argument to cover the current representative system.
As we see, the problem is one of understanding and consent.
In the modern state, tax originates as confiscation, but this does not imply that there exist no forms of taxation that could be adjusted to the principles of libertarianism.
Good Old Thoreau
There are people out there who say that if taxes were eliminated, everything would be fine.
The truth is that they are a very big nuisance.
Even so, as with any sudden change, the consequence of their elimination would be unpredictable.
There is a clear tendency to mythology among the propagandists of libertarianism.
Here we intend to put forward a different defense: to eliminate taxes may create changes with very harmful effects for us.
The defense of their gradual elimination (yes, gradual, not immediate) is not utilitarian.
Nobody can guarantee that prosperity will come from heaven when taxes are eradicated.
The argument in favor of their disappearance is rather from principle.
The classic example is that of Henry David Thoreau.
In he would have been imprisoned for refusing to pay the tax that financed the war of the United States against Mexico.
The truth is that the story is a little more complicated and interesting (there will be an opportunity to narrate it in detail), but the issue is that while in jail he reflected on the deed.
What is interesting is this: Thoreau refused to pay a tax to finance a war.
For him, the problem was in helping to finance a conflict against other people.
It was that the state was utilizing the citizens beyond the limits of consent.
It was using the without their consent to finance a campaign of expansion that violated the selfhood of other people.
Here we return to the theme of legitimacy: taxes can be legitimate when paying them forms part of the consent of the individual.
In this case, there was an issue that went beyond efficiency.
In a world where conscientious objection is accepted, refusing to pay a war tax should also be part of this right.
Taxes and War
Today the example seems absurd for our country, but it is not.
In , when Chile went to war with Peru and Bolivia, the National Congress approved the creation of a tax to finance the military campaigns.
If our country in the future — hopefully not — should again enter a conflict of this type, such a tax would be expected.
Would it be just if we could decide not to pick up a weapon, but not to be able to choose whether or not to finance a war?
The truth is that there are serious doubts.
The most obvious is that we are forced to pay.
This is because states can afford to indulge symbolic gestures, but when it comes to stable incomes they believe that it is better not to take risks.
The case of war is, I know, extreme.
Even so, it can happen and it’s good to think about it.
In any case, you can derive a general consideration from that case.
If we follow Thoreau, we will understand that the Lockean proviso is maintained: a government requires the consent of the citizenry to exist.
As we say when we complain about our bosses, authority comes with responsibilities and not — as is sometimes thought — privileges.
The rebellion of Thoreau tells us two things: First, that the citizens have a right to know what our taxes are spent on.
Second, even if they are not eliminated, citizens must have the right to decide what things they do not want to fund.
This does not have to imply the possibility of not paying any taxes at all.
Today in Chile, our money goes into a black box and I see no champion of transparency and modernization to argue against this.
Concerning Processes
Consent and information are the two initial principles to begin this debate.
Today we can see the defenders of impunity in the collection of taxes.
Those who defend such obscurity are shown for what they are.
Precisely the cases of irregularities in the armed forces speak to us of the importance of these principles.
In addition, we can clearly see those who mindlessly advocate for the eradication of tax burdens.
As a third group, very timid, appear those who defend voluntary taxation.
In all of these cases we must recognize the weakness: Neither an improvement in the lack of transparency, nor the eradication of taxation can be immediately achieved, and, much less can a regime of voluntary taxation come to pass.
Precisely because what is lacking is the will of those who have the resources.
On the contrary, to defend a tax system that response to principles as well as to efficiency is a good first step.
To reach this, Chile needs real tax resisters.
To advance in this respect, it is necessary to think and to reflect on useful strategies and sensible proposals.
For this reason, I think the minimum is to start with the formation of a system that allows us to know what happens to our money.
After that, it’s possible that thinking about choosing the taxes that we pay can be a little easier.
To believe that this is possible is far from the utopianism that is so vilified today.
But , another resident of Concord, Massachusetts, Amos Bronson Alcott, was arrested for the same reason.
He doesn’t get the fame, but he did set the precedent.
Alcott and [Charles] Lane… talked openly of rejecting any governmental institution, and on Alcott was arrested for refusing to pay his poll tax.
The tax was not particularly oppressive even for the impoverished Alcotts — a dollar and a half each year, assessed on every male over sixteen by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts for revenue purposes — but Alcott obviously wished to make his position a public issue.
He had refused the same tax but had not been arrested, presumably because no one enforced it.
This time the constable came to the cottage with a general warrant and escorted the nonresisting Alcott to the jailhouse.
The jailer’s absence prevented his being locked up, and he waited patiently for two hours while the constable went off to find the jailer.
By the time the jailer showed up, Judge Samuel Hoar, “the very personification of the state,” had generously paid the tax and the costs, much to Alcott’s dismay.
“Thus,” said Abby [May], “we were spared the affliction of his absence and he the triumph of suffering for his principles.”
However, Alcott and Lane did get the publicity they wanted.
Lane wrote a dramatic article for the Liberator explaining this outrage against the sovereign individual.
It was matter of individual judgment, Lane declared, whether or not a person should support the government.
Thoreau’s arrest, though it came later, was also, I believe, based on his refusal to pay the poll tax in , and he wrote to Emerson at the time about Lane’s arguments against taxpaying, so this wasn’t just coincidence.
(See Carl Watner’s Charles Lane: Voluntaryist for more details about the mutual influence of Lane, Alcott, and Thoreau on this issue.)
The following excerpt comes from Taylor Stoehr’s Nay-saying in Concord: Emerson, Alcott, and Thoreau (1979).
I thought it very helpfully put Thoreau’s “Resistance to Civil Government” in context, explaining the arguments and objections Thoreau was anticipating or responding to in his essay:
The most famous political encounter of transcendentalism was Thoreau’s refusal of his tax bill in , with its consequent night in jail, and the immortal explanation of his behavior in “Civil Disobedience.” Here were Alcott’s exemplary act, Emerson’s vow of disobedience, and Thoreau’s own ironic afterword — all in a single organic episode.
Not everyone considered the act exemplary. Emerson had not yet warmed to his abolitionist fervor of , and his initial response to his friend’s protest against slavery and the Mexican War was less than enthusiastic.
Shortly after Thoreau’s release Emerson wrote to his friend Elizabeth Hoar, who, since she was visiting in New Haven, could not yet know about their neighbor’s adventure.
(There were those who thought that her father “Squire” Hoar had paid Thoreau’s tax to get him out of jail, just as two years earlier he had kept him out of trouble when he and young Edward Hoar had carelessly set fire to the Concord woods.)
Emerson begins facetiously, treating his letter as an excuse “for counting up how many times I have been to Boston since you were in Concord, how many hayrigging parties we have made to the Whortleberry Pasture, and all other important adventures.”
He continues in the same vein: “Mr. Channing has returned, after spending 16 days in Rome; Mr. Thoreau has spent a night in Concord jail on his refusal to pay his taxes; Mr. Lane is in Concord endeavoring to sell his farm of ‘Fruitlands’ Mr. E — but I spare you the rest of the weary history.
It seems the very counting of threads in a beggar’s coat, to tell the chronicle of nothings into which nevertheless thought & meaning & hope contrive to intervene and it is out of this sad lint & rag fair that the web of lasting life is woven.”65
Frivolous as these sentences may appear, especially in the light of the more serious reflections he was entering in his journal, Emerson’s account here is nonetheless instructive, for it helps us chart the relative boiling points of transcendentalists confronted with the brute facts of war and slavery.
Only three years earlier Thoreau himself had written a similarly jocular report to Emerson of Alcott’s archetypical encounter with the friendly minion of the state, tax collector Sam Staples.
His paragraphs are worth comparing with Emerson’s:
I suppose they have told you how near Mr. Alcott went to the jail, but I can add a good anecdote to the rest.
When Staples came to collect Mrs. Ward’s taxes, my sister Helen asked him what he thought Mr. Acott meant, — what his idea was, — and he answered, “I vum, I believe it was nothing but principle, for I never heard a man talk honester.”
There was a lecture on Peace by a Mr. Spear (ought he not be beaten into a ploughshare?), the same evening, and, as the gentlemen, Lane and Alcott, dined at our house while the matter was in suspense, — that is, while the constable was waiting for his receipt from the jailer, — we there settled it that we, that is, Lane and myself, perhaps should agitate the State while Winkelried lay in durance.
But when, over the audience, I saw our hero’s head moving in the free air of the Universalist church, my fire all went out, and the State was safe as far as I was concerned.
But Lane, it seems, had cogitated and even written on the matter, in the afternoon, and so, out of courtesy, taking his point of departure from the Spear-man’s lecture, he drove gracefully in medias res, and gave the affair a very good setting out; but, to spoil all, our martyr very characteristically, but, as artists would say, in bad taste, brought up the rear with a “My Prisons,” which made us forget Silvio Pellico himself.66
Some allowance, as always, must be made for Thoreau’s habitual tone.
After all, he did intend to join Lane in his denunciations at the lecture that night — “perhaps” — and no doubt he sympathized with the position that his friends had taken.
On the other hand, he had clearly not yet reached the point when he too would march off to jail.
We find Alcott in , Thoreau in , Emerson in , each saying his “nay” to the state: “I will not obey it, by God.”
It has become the habit with commentators on these events to regard Alcott’s as the seminal act, somehow germinating and coming to flower in Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” — Emerson figuring merely as a bemused botanist.
But the chronology itself is not so orderly as I have made it seem (Thoreau in fact stopped paying his taxes the same year as Alcott and Lane did), and even if it were, it need not imply influence.
Indeed, such a view does all three — and especially Thoreau and Emerson — considerable injustice, since it tends to put their acts of conscience in the light of mere faddish postures, taken with an eye to opinions of the moment.
Whatever feelings of mutual support may have circulated among them, transcendentalists were self-reliant if nothing else.
Some neighbor — it could have been either Thoreau or Alcott but it sounds more like Alcott — told Emerson in “that he had made up his mind to pay no more taxes for he had found that he owed nothing to the Government.”67 There is something rather blithe about this announcement.
The play on words is Thoreauvian, but the sentiment has the studied nonchalance of Alcott’s individualism.
Let it stand, for the moment, as one extreme of the attitude toward taxes.
At the opposite end of the spectrum we may place Squire Hoar, “the very personification of the State” as Charles Lane once characterized him.68 Not only did the Squire pay, unasked, the taxes of Alcott and (conceivably) Thoreau — while his son Rockwood Hard paid Lane’s — but he once told Emerson, apropos of “some inequality of taxes in the town,” that “it was his practice to pay whatever was demanded; for, though he might think the taxation large and very unequally proportioned, yet he thought the money might as well go in this way as in any other.”69 This generous cynicism, a principled disregard for principle, is a good match for the cavalier anarchism of Emerson’s unidentified neighbor.
The choice between them seems pretty obviously a matter of simple economic prudence, wealth insuring its goods, poverty tightening its belt.
But there was more political and social philosophy lurking in these positions than might first appear in their casual guise as Emersonian hearsay.
In Thoreau’s tickled synopsis of Alcott’s taxation, he mentions that Charles Lane “had cogitated and even written on the matter,” before the issue was known.
Lane himself had also decided to pay no taxes, and one assumes their decisions must have been concerted, an emblem perhaps of their proposed withdrawal from society and venture into a new community of the regenerate at Fruitlands.
In any case, Lane had thought about the question long enough to provide material for more than a mere impromptu harangue after a pacifist lecture.
He wrote it up in installments, as letters to Garrison’s abolitionist and nonresistant newspaper, The Liberator.
The first letter contained the announcement and interpretation of the event itself.
According to Lane, Alcott’s act was “founded on the moral instinct which forbids every moral being to be a party, either actively or permissively, to the destructive principles of power and might over peace and love.”
Vaporous as this explanation may seem, it was probably understood by readers of The Liberator, who would have agreed that it was “tyrannous” for “the human will… to be subject to the brute force which the majority may set up.”70
Alcott’s refusal of his tax was an “act of non-resistance.”
“Non-resistance” was the name of the movement that had split the American pacifists in , between the radicals led by Garrison and Henry Clarke Wright, and the conservatives in the tradition of William Ladd.
While the latter had emphasized the need for nations to join together in some world federation, the nonresistants believed in more immediate and direct action.
Since no existing government seemed likely to reform itself as completely as the radicals required — that is, the abandonment of all use of force, including that of police and tax officers — the New England Non-resistance Society advised noncooperation with the state in all its functions.
Many became no-government men as well as nonresistants and abolitionists, and they saw their positions on these issues as mutually entailed.
When Lane called Alcott’s an “act of non-resistance,” he meant, in modern terms, that it was pacifist, nonviolent, and anarchist — as we would say, “libertarian.” Chief of these motives in the actual event was the anarchist, and the ensuing series of letter-articles that Lane wrote for The Liberator was called “Voluntary Political Government,” an argument against most of the means and many of the functions of the state, which were to be transformed by making everything optional.
Roads would be paved by those who wanted to use them, education would be the primary responsibility of the family (as Lane’s hero Pestalozzi had said it ought to be anyway), each township would handle its own criminals and insane.
Essentially, the locus of social responsibility would be shifted away from governmental bodies entirely to more natural and organic units like the neighborhood and the family.
Lane and Alcott called their principle of organization at Fruitlands “the consociate family,” and it was to figure as a model for a world without the state and all its evils.
Although Alcott himself did not say why he refused his taxes in , he did write quite a bit in his journal about taxes and the state in , around the time of Thoreau’s brush with Sam Staples.
It is interesting to see how much of Lane’s programmatic vision remained with Alcott after the failure of their community.
Here for example, in , he sounds very much like Emerson’s neighbor of , who “owed nothing to the Government”:
“The State is man’s pantry, at best, and filled at an immense cost — a spoliation of the human commonwealth. Let it go. Heroes will live on nuts, and freemen sun themselves under the clefts of the rocks, sooner than sell their liberty for the pottage of slavery.
We few honest neighbors can help each other; and if the State desires any favours of us we will take the matter into consideration and, at a proper time, give them a respectful answer.”71
One might have expected Alcott to have taken a somewhat harder line, in reaction to the Mexican War and its resultant extension of slavery into Texas.
These, of course, were among the reasons Thoreau gave for refusing his taxes the preceding year.
Alcott too had considered withholding his in , but his motives were unchanged from those reported by Lane in :
Staples, the town collector, called to assure me that he should next week advertize my land to pay for the tax, unless it was paid before that time.
Land for land, man for man.
I would, were it possible, know nothing of this economy called “the State,” but it will force itself upon the freedom of the free-born and the wisest bearing is to over-bear it, let it have its own way, the private person never going out of his way to meet it.
It shall put its hand into a person’s pocket if it will, but I shall not put mine there on its behalf.72
Much as this sounds like a decision to refuse to pay, in fact Alcott’s land was not in his name at all, but in trust for his wife, and he knew that his taxes would be paid for him, if not by Squire Hoar again, then by those relatives of Mrs. Alcott who also supported him in other ways.
What is significant is not the refusal but the manner of it.
This may be regarded as merely a further extension of nonresistance — ignoring the state if one cannot quite defy it. “Resist not evil” is taken to include the state as well as ordinary thieves and murderers.
When Alcott and Emerson discussed Thoreau’s tax refusal not long after, Alcott viewed his friend’s act as he would his own.
“E[merson] thought it mean and skulking, and in bad taste.
I defended it on the grounds of a dignified non-compliance with the injunction of civil powers.”73
For Alcott, the injustice lay chiefly in the state’s treatment of the individual taxpayer, less in the evils of slavery and war perpetrated on others.
Here again we may survey the range of civic obligations felt by the transcendentalists.
In Alcott told a convention of the Non-resistance Society that citizens could “rightfully refuse” to pay for the Mexican War, but his aim was not the end of that war so much as “a laying of the foundations of a new commonwealth, based on a catholicism commensurate with the needs of mankind.”74 Thoreau seemed to have his eye on the invasion of Mexico and the plight of the oppressed. “Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.… It is there that the fugitive slave, and the Mexican prisoner on parole, and the Indian come to plead the wrongs of his race, should find them.…”75 This was not a non-resistant position.
Thoreau had never been a pacifist, and in that debate at the Concord Lyceum it had been Henry and his brother upholding the affirmative of “Is it ever proper to offer forcible resistance?” He took special pains in “Civil Disobedience” to distinguish his position from Alcott’s anarchism as well as his pacifism; “Unlike those who call themselves no-government men, I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government.”76 Indeed, the first title of the essay, when it was published in Elizabeth Peabody’s short-lived journal Æsthetic Papers, was “Resistance to Civil Government” — verbally, at least, almost the opposite of the stance that Alcott had taken in when he resigned himself to letting the state rob him of his taxes.
In spite of these distinctions, Alcott very much approved of Thoreau’s act, and he apparently went twice in to hear the resulting lecture, then called “The Rights & Duties of the Individual in relation to Government.”
The issue of resistance and nonresistance was not yet forced in the title, and Alcott seemed happy enough to see the Mexican War and slavery received a good deal of attention, so long as his own protest in was also mentioned:
“His allusions to the Mexican War, to Mr. Hoar’s expulsion from Carolina, his own imprisonment in Concord Jail for refusal to pay his tax, Mr. Hoar’s payment of mine when taken to prison for a similar refusal, were all pertinent, well considered, and reasoned.
I took great pleasure in this deed of Thoreau’s.”77
When Thoreau finally came to publish the lecture under the new title, he excised his allusions to Alcott’s precedence over him and, while retaining the reference to Samuel Hoar’s expulsion from South Carolina as a Northern agitator, he failed to mention the Squire’s payment of the taxes of Alcott, merely noting that in his own case “some one interfered.”78 It would have been awkward for Thoreau to ignore Alcott’s “similar refusal” in a speech delivered before a Concord audience.
Presumably many of their neighbors would know what Thoreau states in his essay without comment, that he himself had not paid taxes for “six years,” that is, not since the time Alcott and Lane were arrested for not paying theirs.
Whether Thoreau acted in concert with the Fruitlanders, or in response to their gesture, cannot be finally settled.
The tone of his remarks on Alcott’s exploit suggests a later commitment, perhaps the following year.
According to Lane, Alcott had not paid his for several years before his arrest — another bit of evidence that he was the “neighbor” who in told Emerson he would pay no more taxes.
In any case it must have seemed more in keeping with Thoreau’s focus on the individual in “Civil Disobedience” to diminish those aspects of his position that might make it appear part of a movement.
Again, this is important because it helps distinguish the stands taken by the transcendentalists.
Lane would figure as the extreme case here, with his emphasis on every feature of Alcott’s tax refusal that suggested concert and community.
Even his manner of broadcasting his views, in letters to the organ of nonresistance, Garrison’s Liberator, shows a regard for tactics and propaganda that would not have occurred to Thoreau.
Alcott falls somewhere between Thoreau and Lane, eager for the golden age of “voluntary government” that Lane celebrated and that Fruitlands symbolized, yet still chiefly intent on his own single combat with the state.
As Emerson said, “The fault of Alcott’s community is that it has only room for one.”79
At bottom not one of them — Alcott, Lane, or Thoreau — could be called convivial, but surely the Timon of the three was Thoreau, whose interest in Mexico and slavery was, as he said, an anxiety to get off the “shoulders” of his fellowmen, so that he might go about his own business — to “wash his hands” of humanity’s dirt.80
From a few hints so far, something of Emerson’s stance on these questions may also be gathered.
As usual there is a good bit of ambiguity to deal with.
His attitude toward Alcott’s “community” is ironic but not especially hostile, whereas his response to Thoreau’s defiance of the state is full of annoyance — if we can take the words “mean and skulking” as literally his.
Emerson’s journal tends to substantiate Alcott’s report.
At first Emerson appears to approve of Thoreau’s act, as a protest against the Mexican War:
Mr. Webster told them how much the war cost, that was his protest, but voted the war, & sends his son to it.
They calculated rightly on Mr. Webster.
My friend Mr. Thoreau has gone to jail rather than pay his tax.
On him they could not calculate.
The abolitionists denounce the war & give much time to it, but they pay the tax.81
Yet a few pages later Emerson’s second thoughts seem to find Thoreau almost as much in the wrong as Webster himself:
Don’t run amuck against the world.
Have a good case to try the question on.
It is the part of a fanatic to fight out a revolution on the shape of a hat or surplice, on paedo-baptism or altar-rails or fish on Friday.
As long as the state means you well, do not refuse your pistareen.
You have a tottering cause: ninety parts of the pistareen it will spend for what you think also good: ten parts for mischief.
You can not fight heartily for a fraction.
But wait until you have a good difference to join issue upon.
Thus Socrates was told he should not teach. “Please God, but I will.” And he could die well for that.
And Jesus had a cause.
You will get one by & by.
But now I have no sympathy.82
Emerson characteristically peers round every corner of motive and consequence.
He must have known that Thoreau had stopped paying his tax about the time that Alcott had been arrested by Staples, several years earlier.
Accordingly, the announced motives of the refusal, the Mexican War and the annexation of Texas, must have counted as rather after-the-fact in his eyes.
Thoreau was spoiling for a fight, playing “the part of a fanatic to fight out a revolution on the shape of a hat or surplice.” He had a grudge against the state, and was looking for some cause to use as a cudgel against it.
In this he seemed to differ from Alcott, who simply waited for the state to request his taxes, and then refused on the ingenuous grounds that he did not want its services.
Thoreau lay in ambush for the state, expecting it to overstep its bounds.
One implication seems to be that Thoreau recognized legitimate as well as illegitimate functions of government.
Another is that he was not quite candid in suggesting that he only wanted to mind his own business and had no philosophic axe to grind.
Even granting the Mexican War as Thoreau’s occasion for refusing his taxes, Emerson complained further “that refusing payment of the state tax does not reach the evil so nearly as many other methods within your reach.
The state tax does not pay the Mexican War.
Your coat, your sugar, your Latin & French & German book, your watch does.
Yet these you do not stick at buying.”
This is mere byplay, however, since Emerson was convinced that Thoreau had other motives.
“The abolitionists ought to resist & go to prison in multitudes on their known & described disagreements from the state.
They know where the shoe pinches; have told it a thousand times; are hot headed partialists.
I should heartily applaud them; it is in their system.…
But not so for you generalizers.
You are not citizens.…
Reserve yourself for your own work.”
At this point Alcott is dragged into the dock too:
A.B.A. thought he could find as good a ground for quarrel in the state tax as Socrates did in the Edict of the Judges.
Then I say, Be Consistent, & never more put an apple or a kernel of corn into your mouth.
Would you feed the devil?
Say boldly “There is a sword sharp enough to cut sheer between flesh & spirit, & I will use it, & not any longer belong to this double faced equivocating mixed Jesuitical universe.”
⋮
The Abolitionists should resist because they are literalists; they know exactly what they object to, & there is a government possible which will content them.
Remove a few specified grievances, & this present commonwealth will suit them.
They are the new Puritans, & as easily satisfied.
But you, nothing will content.
No government short of a monarchy consisting of one king & one subject, will appease you.
Your objection then to the state of Massachusetts is deceptive.
Your true quarrel is with the state of Man.83
It is difficult to separate the antagonists here — and in the long run perhaps it is unnecessary.
We can hear echoes of the epigram on Alcott’s “community of one,” written only a few months earlier, but the “you” addressed must at least include the “you” chastised elsewhere in these observations, that is, Thoreau.
His choice of going to jail rather than paying his taxes is equated with Alcott’s dissatisfaction with the universe. “This prison,” Emerson concludes, “is one step to suicide.”
Whatever hard words Emerson had for Thoreau in , by the time his crime had been turned into a lecture Emerson was softening the criticism.
Typical of his growing ambivalence is an anecdote from his trip to England not long after, recounted in English Traits.
The occasion was “a very rainy day,” when Carlyle and Arthur Helps asked “whether there were any Americans? — any with an American idea, — any theory of the right future of that country?”
Thus challenged, I bethought myself neither of caucuses nor congress, neither of presidents nor of cabinet-ministers, nor of such as would make of America another Europe.
I thought only of the simplest and purest minds; I said, “Certainly yes; — but those who hold it are fanatics of a dream which I should hardly care to relate to your English ears, to which it might be only ridiculous, — and yet it is the only true.” So I opened the dogma of no-government and non-resistance, and anticipated the objections and the fun, and procured a kind of hearing for it.
I said, it is true that I have never seen in any country a man of sufficient valor to stand for this truth, and yet it is plain to me that no less valor than this can command my respect.
I can easily see the bankruptcy of the vulgar musket-worship, — though great men be musket-worshippers; — and ’t is certain as god liveth, the gun that does not need another gun, the law of love and justice alone, can effect a clean revolution.
I fancied that one or two of my anecdotes made some impression on Carlyle.84
It is hard to imagine a sterner test of Emerson’s best hopes for America than the question put to him, as a representative voice, by these formidable Englishmen.
All this preface and apology for “the law of love and justice” suggests that he was more than a little intimidated by his company and their question, defensive about his country and its “purest minds,” who resist its laws and taxes.
In his anticipation of “objections and fun” he is uncomfortable rather than gleeful, and the edging back and forth between seriousness and embarrassed cynicism provides a guide to his own problems of belief in the doctrines of his friends.
Yet his answer, whatever its tonalities, nonetheless names nonresistance and no-government as the American contributions to the history of the race.
That surely is a significant footnote to his journal of .
In Emerson’s journal, the interest in nonresistance went back a long way.
In he was wishing that “the Christian principle, the ultra principle of nonresistance and returning good for ill might be tried fairly.”
Nor was he apologetic in , when he published his essay on “Politics”:
The tendencies of the times favor the idea of self-government, and leave the individual, for all code, to the rewards and penalties of his own constitution; which work with more energy than we believe whilst we depend on artificial restraints.
The movement in this direction has been very marked in modern history.… The power of love, as a basis of a State, has never been tried.
We must not imagine that all things are lapsing into confusion if every tender protestant be not compelled to bear his part in certain social conventions; nor doubt that roads can be built, letters carried, and the fruit of labor secured, when the government of force is at an end.85
Why this expectant vision should have given way to the annoyed reasonings of and the embarrassed defenses of , it is difficult to say.
In he could not “call to mind a single human being who has steadily denied the authority of the laws, on the simple ground of his own moral nature.”86 Apparently neither Thoreau’s nor Alcott’s individualist stand gave him the example of “valor” and “truth” he awaited, for the same messianic expectation is reaffirmed in English Traits — rather compulsively and fainter by half, but still the hope America gives rise to, scarcely a dozen years before the Civil War.
Then, to complicate matters still more, in Emerson agreed to the printing of his own major defense of the doctrine of nonresistance in its pacifist bearings, a lecture entitled “War” that he had delivered under the auspices of the American Peace Society in .
That was the year that the New England Non-resistance Society split off from the Peace Society.
Garrison, who was engineering the schism, made a point of praising Emerson’s speech to Alcott, as well he might.
The argument came out mildly but chiefly for the nonresistant position, and paid only the most polite lip service to the Congress-of-Nations projects of the conservative elements in the Peace Society.
That Emerson agreed to the printing of the essay in , given the European context of war and revolution, is much; that it appeared in Elizabeth Peabody’s Æsthetic Paper, along with Thoreau’s “Resistance to Civil Government,” is a great deal more.
Of course he must have known that Miss Peabody was printing Henry’s essay along with his, and that the two would be considered as mutually reinforcing.
How could a sentence like the following not apply to Thoreau?
“The man of principle, that is, the man who, without any flourish of trumpets, titles of lordship, or train of guards, without any notice of his action abroad, expecting none, takes in solitude the right step uniformly, on his private choice, and disdaining consequences, — does not yield, in my imagination, to any man.”87
Or again, remembering the accusation lodged in his journal that “No government short of a monarchy consisting of one king & one subject, will appease you,” how does this sound?
…a man should be himself responsible, with goods, health, and life, for his behavior;… should not ask of the State, protection; should ask nothing of the State; should be himself a kingdom and a state; fearing no man; quite willing to use the opportunities and advantages that good government throw[s] in his way, but nothing daunted, and not really the poorer if government, law and order went by the board; because in himself reside infinite resources; because he is sure of himself, and never needs to ask another what in any crisis it beho[o]ves him to do.88
Few if any readers would be able to compare these opinions with Emerson’s journal, but surely everyone would see the resemblance to a passage in “Resistance to Civil Government”:
For my own part, I should not like to think that I ever rely on the protection of the State.
But, if I deny the authority of the State when it presents its tax-bill, it will soon take and waste all my property, and so harass me and my children without end.
This is hard.
This makes it impossible for a man to live honestly and at the same time comfortably in outward respects.
It will not be worth the while to accumulate property; that would be sure to go again.
You must hire or squat somewhere, and raise but a small crop, and eat that soon.
You must live within yourself, and depend upon yourself, always tucked up and ready for a start, and not have many affairs.89
Thoreau pretends, for rhetorical purposes, to find such conditions “hard,” but the evidence of Walden all goes to show that “squatting,” “raising but a small crop,” and “living within yourself” were his preferences.
These are the virtues of self-reliance, and so it is appropriate that Emerson praise “the man of principle,” “disdaining consequences”; but Thoreau had actually chosen and enjoyed both the principles and their consequences.
It is as if Thoreau supplied the acts, Emerson the theory and the appreciation.
Yet, as we have already seen, Emerson was continually foretelling the appearance of this king and kingdom, without recognizing (or really desiring?) their advent.
He agreed that “the less government we have the better,” and argued that “the State exists” only to “educate the wise man” — “with the appearance of the wise man the State expires.… The wise man is the State.”
But apparently the time was not yet, and Thoreau not the man.
We live in a very low state of the world, and pay unwilling tribute to governments founded on force.
There is not, among the most religious and instructed men of the most religious and civil nations, a reliance on the moral sentiment and a sufficient belief in the unity of things, to persuade them that society can be maintained without artificial restraints, as well as the solar system; or that the private citizen might be reasonable and a good neighbor, without the hint of a jail or a confiscation.
What is strange too, there never was in any man sufficient faith in the power of rectitude to inspire him with the broad design of renovating the State on the principle of right and love.
All those who have pretended this design have been partial reformers, and have admitted in some manner the supremacy of the bad State.90
Emerson made the point often enough; one supposes Thoreau heard it.
In any case, it is likely that Thoreau had access to many of Emerson’s criticisms, expectations, and denials before he sat down to turn his confrontation with the state into literature.
Perhaps his decision to leave Alcott out of the published version reflects a desire, stimulated by Emerson’s commentaries, to separate himself from the nonresistant movement in general and Alcott’s special purist version of it in particular.
He is not one of the no-government men, he explains at the outset, and then he tries to find a path between Alcott’s anarchism and Emerson’s pragmatism. “It is not a man’s duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even the most enormous wrong.” That answered Alcott.
Next, addressing Emerson, he goes on to say that it is his duty, “at least, to wash his hands of it.”91 But the abolitionists and nonresistants would have denied the first proposition, and Emerson had already questioned the possibility of approaching the second without compromise.
Was Thoreau willing to give up his coat? his books?
What accessory of existence could remain untainted in a nation one-sixth slave?
A few paragraphs later Thoreau has a more telling formulation, perhaps because it is less guarded: “I came into this world, not chiefly to make this a good place to live in, but to live in it, be it good or bad.”92
The virtue of this axiom is that it cuts both ways, answering both Alcott and Emerson.
It is Thoreau’s business neither to make the revolution nor to exhaust himself in conventional dissent.
He too holds Emerson’s opinion, that it is the particular duty of the abolitionists to withdraw their financial support as well as their moral assent from a government that fosters slavery and aggressive war: “if onehonest man, in this State of Massachusetts, ceasing to hold slaves, were actually to withdraw from this copartnership, and be locked up in the county jail therefor, it would be the abolition of slavery in America.”93
But by making this point, he seems to separate himself and his responsibilities from the antislavery movement.
So why did he go to jail?
How was this “living” his own life?
In his journal Emerson had compare the state to “a poor good beast who means the best: it means friendly.
A poor cow who does well by you, — do not grudge it its hay.
It cannot eat bread as you can, let it have without grudge a little grass for its four stomachs.
It will not stint to yield you milk from its teat.
You who are a man walking cleanly on two feet will not pick a quarrel with a poor cow.”94 This put the question another way — not in terms of ethical responsibility, how to “live with yourself,” but rather as a matter of tolerance and common sense, “live and let live.” Thoreau had an answer for such arguments.
I think sometimes, Why, this people mean well; they are only ignorant; they would do better if they knew how: why give your neighbors this pain to treat you as they are not inclined to?
But I think, again, this is no reason why I should do as they do, or permit others to suffer much greater pain of a different kind.
Again, I sometimes say to myself, When many millions of men, without heat, without ill-will, without personal feelings of any kind, demand of you a few shillings only, without the possibility, such is their constitution, of retracting or altering their present demand, and without the possibility, on your side, of appeal to any other millions, why expose yourself to this overwhelming brute force?
You do not resist cold and hunger, the winds and the waves, thus obstinately; you quietly submit to a thousand similar necessities.
You do not put your head into the fire.
But just in proportion as I regard this as not wholly a brute force, but partly a human force, and consider that I have relations to those millions as to so many millions of men, and not of mere brute or inanimate things, I see that appeal is possible, first and instantaneously, from them to the Maker of them, and, secondly, from them to themselves.
But, if I put my head deliberately into the fire, there is no appeal to fire or to the Maker of fire, and I have only myself to blame.
If I could convince myself that I have any right to be satisfied with men as they are, and to treat them accordingly, and not according, in some respects, to my requisitions and expectations of what they and I ought to be, then, like a good Mussulman and fatalist, I should endeavor to be satisfied with things as they are, and say it is the will of God.
And, above all, there is this difference between resisting this and a purely brute or natural force, that I can resist this with some effect; but I cannot expect, like Orpheus, to change the nature of the rocks and trees and beasts.95
This is one of the strongest passages in “Civil Disobedience,” because it grapples with the ambiguities of the subject — “this double faced equivocating mixed Jesuitical universe.” The transformation of Emerson’s “poor cow” into Thoreau’s “brute force” is crucial.
It allows the analysis of the state as “millions of men” — not simply a helpless well-meaning beast and yet not Alcott’s thieving ruffian either.
It also paves the way for that disclaimer, in the end, of any desire to “change the nature of the rocks and trees and beasts,” that is, the universe.
Who now is the most reasonable and acquiescent in the nature of things, Emerson or Thoreau?
Emerson’s Letters Ⅲ 339–40.
Thoreau’s Correspondence, pp. 77–78.
Emerson’s Letters Ⅱ 335.
Letter from Charles Lane, “State Slavery — Imprisonment of A. Bronson Alcott — Dawn of Liberty,” Liberator 13, no. 4 (), 16.
See Emerson’s Letters Ⅲ 230; Emerson’s Works 1903 edn. Ⅹ, 440.
Lane, “State Slavery…,” p. 16.
Alcott’s Journals, p. 189.
Ibid., p. 179.
Ibid., pp. 183–84.
This passage, not printed in Odell Shepard’s edition of Alcott’s Journals, is quoted by the kind permission of Mrs. F.W. Pratt, and the Houghton Library of Harvard University, owners of the manuscript.
“Resistance to Civil Government,” Æsthetic Papers. 1 (1849), 199–200.
Ibid., p. 190.
Alcott’s Journals, p. 201.
“Resistance to Civil Government,” p. 205.
Emerson’s Journals Ⅸ, 323.
“Resistance to Civil Government,” p. 195.
Emerson’s Journals Ⅸ, 445.
Ibid., Ⅸ 446.
Ibid., Ⅸ 446–47.
English Traits, Emerson’s Works 1903 edn., Ⅴ 286–87.
“Politics,” Emerson’s Works 1903 edn., Ⅲ 219–20.
Ibid., p. 221.
“War,” Æsthetic Papers, (1849), 48–49. For Garrison’s praise, see Emerson’s Works 1903 edn., Ⅺ, 578.
Ibid., pp. 47–48.
“Resistance to Civil Government,” pp. 201–202.
“Politics,” Emerson’s Works 1903 edn., Ⅲ 215–26, 220–21.
Like the Garrisonians, Thoreau defied the fugitive slave law; he hid a fugitive in his house.
Like the Garrisonians, Thoreau advocated the secession of the North from the South.
Also like the Garrisonians, Thoreau did not vote.
In his early years he did not vote largely from indifference to politics, but even when he became concerned about the folly of the Mexican War and the corruption of slavery, he remained a nonvoter; in fact he remained a nonvoter all his life.
At an abolitionist meeting Thoreau explained tersely: “The fate of the country does not depend… on what kind of paper you drop into the ballot-box once a year, but on what kind of man you drop from your chamber into the street every morning.” All the Concord individualists, including Emerson, were likely to be nonvoters — they were likely to be willing to take but little responsibility for government, the economic order, education, or the church; they were anti-institutional and anti-establishment.
But Thoreau went beyond the Garrisonians by practicing one form of noncooperation with government that the Garrisonians seldom practiced.
“Some are petitioning the state to dissolve the Union,” Thoreau wrote.
“Why do they not dissolve it themselves — the union between themselves and the state — and refuse to pay their quote into its treasury?”
For six years Thoreau did refuse to pay poll taxes, and accordingly in , during the Mexican War, he was imprisoned in Concord for one night until a friend paid his fine.
Prison, said, Thoreau provocatively, “is the only house in a slave state in which a free man can abide with honor.”
The idea of tax refusals as a means of social protest was not new.
There was considerable tradition among Quakers both in England and America to refuse to pay war taxes, and when they did refuse, the government sometimes confiscated their property.
Just before the American Revolution, Americans resisting British encroachments often refused to pay stamp taxes.
During the Revolution the young Quaker-raised sailor, Paul Cuffee, the son of a Negro father and an Indian mother, refused to pay his Massachusetts taxes because as a nonwhite he was not allowed to vote.
He was jailed, but he continued to agitate the question, using the popular slogan, no taxation without representation, and by Massachusetts Negroes had won the right to vote.
In the early years of the Nonresistance Society, it considered the question of refusing to pay taxes.
For example, the society’s treasurer, Charles K. Whipple, argued in that the American Revolution could have been won more speedily and under more favorable circumstances for the later development of America if the Revolutionists’ tax refusals had been entirely nonviolent and on a larger scale.
[See ♇ 27 October 2007.]
The result would have been widespread suffering for Americans, Whipple admitted; their property would have been confiscated to pay the taxes.
But if they had patiently submitted to this and continued their noncooperation, the prisons would have been “filled to overflowing” with nonviolent rebels, the British could have accomplished nothing, and their power would have come to a stop without blood.
In Negro leaders became well aware of circumstances in which they felt it was unjust for them to be required to pay taxes. Charles Lenox Remond, writing from England — where he was lecturing with one of the Nonresistance Society’s tax-refusal advocates, John A. Collins — urged Negroes to be more radical in their demands, and added: “Let every colored man, called upon to pay taxes to any institution in which he is deprived or denied its privileges and advantages, withhold his taxes, although it costs imprisonment or confiscation.
Let our motto be — no privileges, no pay.” … The black national convention, meeting in Cleveland, adopted a resolution that came close to being an endorsement for Negroes refusing to pay taxes wherever they could not vote: “Whereas we firmly believe with the fathers of , that taxation and representation ought to go together; therefore, resolved, that we are very much in doubt as to the propriety of our paying any tax… until we are permitted to be represented.”
Garrisonians usually recommended paying taxes even if the taxes seemed unjust.
When the tax question came up during the Mexican War, the Negro antislavery lecturer W.W. Brown gave the stock Garrisonian answer: we are coerced to pay taxes; we are not to blame for what the government does with the money it seizes from us.
As usual with the Garrisonians, when they discussed whether they should pay taxes, they discussed it more in moralistic than in pragmatic terms.
They were more likely to ask whether paying taxes was consistent with nonvoting and disunion than to ask whether it would be an effective form of protest, and, if so, under what circumstances and at what cost.
Despite the usual Garrisonian opposition, there were a few abolitionists, in addition to Thoreau, who helped to strengthen the slender thread of tax-refusal tradition by deliberately refusing to pay taxes.
Before Thoreau refused to pay taxes, his Concord friend, nonresistant Bronson Alcott, had already refused.
Alcott had acted as a general protest against government interference with individual liberty, including government support of slavery.
Three years before Thoreau was sentenced to jail for tax refusal, Alcott had already been sentenced to jail for the same reason, but Alcott was released before being actually jailed because someone quickly paid his tax.
A Negro storekeeper in Bath, in upstate New York stopped paying taxes for a new school building in when he discovered that his children as Negroes were to be excluded from it.
The tax collector insisted on his paying, and when the storekeeper still refused, the collector auctioned off some of his goods in his store.
The storekeeper was noble, said Douglass’s North Star.
In , Garrisonian leader [Robert] Purvis protested the new policy that segregated his children in the public schools of Byberry, Pennsylvania, by refusing to pay school taxes; the Liberator called it a “manly protest.”
Purvis also protested at the same time by boycotting the segregated schools, having his children privately tutored.
Purvis’s influence was weighty.
He was the highest-ranking Negro in the antislavery societies; he had served as one of the vice-presidents of the American Antislavery Society and for at least five years as president of one of its strongest auxiliaries, the Pennsylvania Antislavery Society.
In addition, gentlemen farmer Purvis was the second largest taxpayer in his township.
Purvis’s weight made itself felt.
He succeeded in having the Byberry schools reopened equally to white and black children. [See ♇ 4 November 2013.]
In the struggle for the control of Kansas in the mid-1850s, free-soil settlers sometimes refused to pay taxes to the pro-Southern Kansas government because they did not recognize it as legitimate.
John Brown was a guerrilla abolitionist who supported such refusal, and his brother-in-law, American Missionary Association agent Samuel Adair, was a Tappanite nonviolent abolitionist who also supported it.
Adair joined his Kansas community in an open decision to refuse to pay taxes, for which pro-Southerners punished the community with violence.
The quote from Lenox Remond comes from a letter that appeared in the Liberator on .
Some recent links of interest:
In recent years, something in the neighborhood of 40–45% of American households have not owed any federal income tax.
This is due to a combination of factors including progressive tax rates and tax deductions & credits that shield a certain amount of income from tax.
Although fabulously wealthy people who do not pay income tax are certainly a thing, most of this group of “lucky duckies” come from the bottom half of the income scale.
In , with its pandemic-related economic disruption and the stimulus payments that took the form of refundable tax credits, the numbers jumped: the Tax Policy Center estimates that 61% of U.S. households paid no federal income tax .
Under a newish law the U.S. government will be issuing advance “Child Tax Credits” to qualifying families with children as checks periodically throughout the year.
These checks take the place of the refundable tax credit that such families would have used to offset their federal taxes at annual tax filing time in past years.
Interestingly, the IRS has directed its enforcement personnel to avoid seizing money from bank accounts in which these Child Tax Credits have been direct-deposited and to refund any inadvertently seized Child Tax Credits.
“Council Tax Strike” is a subproject of the Extinction Rebellion movement in the U.K. They claim: “There are people all over the U.K. withholding their council tax and demanding action on the things that matter to them.”
The National Catholic Reporter looks back on the nuclear disarmament activism of Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen:
“ ‘I think the teaching of Jesus tells us to render to a nuclear-armed Caesar what that Caesar deserves — tax resistance.
And to begin to render to God alone that complete trust which we now give, through our tax dollars, to a demonic form of power,’ he said in his ‘Faith and Disarmament’ speech.
‘Some would call what I am urging “civil disobedience.”
I prefer to see it as obedience to God.’ ”
