A related tactic is for tax resisters to flee or hide to evade arrest. Here are a couple of examples:
- Residents of St. Claire county, Missouri, in , used a number of methods to avoid being taxed to pay back railroad bonds that the county had issued as part of a swindle (the railroad was never built).
Among these was the election of local judges who were willing to refuse to enforce higher court rulings meant to force the county to raise the tax funds.
“[T]he judges were elected with the understanding that they would stay in the timber or in jail, as conditions might require, during their term of office.
Deputy United States marshals searched for them in the forests and the people of the county helped hide their fugitive officers.
Occasionally the courts would meet at nights and transact their business…” According to one account:
Since local taxpayers believed that the judges were, finally, obeying public opinion, they helped the judges evade the marshals and the law. Homeowners welcomed and hid any judge trying to escape the marshals. In Dallas County the court met in the woods, under culverts, in barns, and other places where marshals were not likely to look. At the county seat of Buffalo, residents developed an elaborate network to warn the judges whenever a stranger appeared who might be a marshal. These new forms of representative government, featuring imprisoned local officials and court meetings in the woods, restored to taxpayers the traditional control that citizens had exercised over elected officials. The plain truth was that those officials had abdicated their governing function, leaving the field of battle to local taxpayers and remote investors.
- During the Annuity Tax resistance in Edinburgh in , a group of resisters liberated an arrested resister. A newspaper report at the time said, “we hear that the constables are on the alert each night to catch the marked men; and that, fearing a visit in the dark, these persons quit their homes and sleep abroad.”
