A newspaper from published a story about one John Randolph, who had been “found guilty of uttering seditious and scurrilous remarks concerning the United States government” and had defiantly defended his actions in court. The remarks in question, at least according to the summary of testimony given in the article, amounted to: “the government was rotten and composed of a bunch of crooks and robbers and that he would rather go to jail than be conscripted.”
The article came to my attention because of this sentence: “He had also been arrested in California for refusing to pay a poll tax.” Hunting through California newspapers from , however, turned up nothing, so this civil disobedience didn’t make much of a splash. I think the California state poll tax was abolished in , for what that’s worth.
