How you can resist funding the government →
other tax resistance strategies →
rent strike
American anarchist Benjamin Ricketson Tucker was, briefly, a poll tax resister.
In he was imprisoned for failure to pay, and, in an outcome similar to that of Thoreau’s tax refusal, a friend eventually paid his fine and ended his experiment.
Tucker became dissatisfied with this tactic, and restricted himself thereafter to symbolic tax resistance — paying “under protest” and such.
Here’s something he wrote for his magazine, Liberty, about tax resistance in particular as part of a longer bit about the superiority of nonviolent resistance over violent resistance as a means to gain worthwhile ends:
“Edgeworth” makes appeal to me through Lucifer to know how I propose to “starve out Uncle Sam.”
Light on this subject he would “rather have than roast beef and plum pudding for dinner in sæculâ sæculorum.”
It puzzles him to know whether by the clause “resistance to taxation” on the “sphynx head of Liberty on ‘God and the State’ ” I mean that “true Anarchists should advertise their principles by allowing property to be seized by the sheriff and sold at auction, in order by such personal sacrifices to become known to each other as men and women of a common faith, true to that faith in the teeth of their interests and trustworthy for combined action.”
If I do mean this, he ventures to “doubt the policy of a test which depletes, not that enormous vampire, Uncle Sam, but our own little purses, so needful for our propaganda of ideas, several times a year, distrainment by the sheriff being in many parts of the country practically equivalent to tenfold taxes.”
If, on the other hand, I have in view a minority capable of “successfully withdrawing the supplies from Uncle Sam’s treasury,” he would like to inquire “how any minority, however respectable in numbers and intelligence, is to withstand the sheriff backed by the army, and to withhold tribute to the State.”
Fair and pertinent questions these, which I take pleasure in answering.
In the first place, then, the policy to be pursued by individual and isolated Anarchists is dependent upon circumstances.
I, no more than “Edgeworth,” believe in any foolish waste of needed material.
It is not wise warfare to throw your ammunition to the enemy unless you throw it from the cannon’s mouth.
But if you can compel the enemy to waste his ammunition by drawing his fire on some thoroughly protected spot; if you can, by annoying and goading and harassing him in all possible ways, drive him to the last resort of stripping bare his tyrannous and invasive purposes and put him in the attitude of a designing villain assailing honest men for purposes of plunder — there is no better strategy.
Let no Anarchist, then, place his property within reach of the sheriff’s clutch.
But some year, when he feels exceptionally strong and independent, when his conduct can impair no serious personal obligations, when on the whole he would a little rather go to jail than not, and when his property is in such shape that he can successfully conceal it, let him declare to the assessor property of a certain value, and then defy the collector to collect.
Or, if he have no property, let him decline to pay his poll tax.
The State will then be put to its trumps.
Of two things one — either it will let him alone, and then he will tell his neighbors all about it, resulting the next year in an alarming disposition on their part to keep their own money in their own pockets; or else it will imprison him, and then by the requisite legal processes he will demand and secure all the rights of a civil prisoner and live thus a decently comfortable life until the State shall get tired of supporting him and the increasing number of persons who will follow his example.
Unless, indeed, the State, in desperation, shall see fit to make its laws regarding imprisonment for taxes more rigorous, and then, if our Anarchist be a determined man, we shall find out how far a republican government, “deriving its just powers from the consent of the governed,” is ready to go to procure that “consent,” — whether it will stop at solitary confinement in a dark cell or join with the Czar of Russia in administering torture by electricity.
The farther it shall go the better it will be for Anarchy, as every student of the history of reform well knows.
Who can estimate the power for propagandism of a few cases of this kind, backed by a well-organized force of agitators without the prison walls?
So much, then, for individual resistance.
But, if individuals can do so much, what shall be said of the enormous and utterly irresistible power of a large and intelligent minority, comprising say one-fifth of the population in any given locality?
I conceive that on this point I need do no more than call “Edgeworth’s” attention to the wonderfully instructive history of the Land League movement in Ireland, the most potent and instantly effective revolutionary force the world has ever known so long as it stood by its original policy of “Pay No Rent,” and which lost nearly all its strength the day it abandoned that policy.
“Oh, but it did abandon it?”
“Edgeworth” will exclaim.
Yes, but why?
Because there the peasantry, instead of being an intelligent minority following the lead of principles, were an ignorant, though enthusiastic and earnest, body of men following blindly the lead of unscrupulous politicians like Parnell, who really wanted anything but the abolition of rent, but were willing to temporarily exploit any sentiment or policy that would float them into power and influence.
But it was pursued far enough to show that the British government was utterly powerless before it; and it is scarcely too much to say, in my opinion, that, had it been persisted in, there would not today be a landlord in Ireland.
It is easier to resist taxes in this country than it is to resist rent in Ireland; and such a policy would be as much more potent here than there as the intelligence of the people is greater, providing always that you can enlist in it a sufficient number of earnest and determined men and women.
If one-fifth of the people were to resist taxation, it would cost more to collect their taxes, or try to collect them, than the other four-fifths would consent to pay into the treasury.
The force needed for this bloodless fight Liberty is slowly but surely recruiting, and sooner or later it will organize for action.
Then, Tyranny and Monopoly, down goes your house!
This brought to my attention that I’ve pretty much ignored the topic of rent strikes here at The Picket Line.
I haven’t given this much thought, but it seems to me that there is probably a class of rent strike that is essentially a variety of tax resistance.
For instance, a case in which the powers-that-be have granted legal ownership of land to well-connected people, without regard for the people currently occupying the land.
Isn’t this just a variety of taxation — that is, a government authorizing some people to regularly rob others under cover of law?
This article, which was reprinted in the Plattsburgh Sentinel () trumpets the rent strike called in Ireland against the English landlords:
The Land League have issued a manifesto declaring that only one constitutional weapon now remains in the hands of the League.
It is the strongest, swiftest and most irresistible of all.
We hesitate to advise our fellow countrymen to employ it until the savage lawlessness of the English government has provoked a crisis in which we must either consent to see the Irish tenant farmers disarmed of their organization and laid once more prostrate at the feet of the landlords, and every murmur of Irish public opinion suppressed with an armed hand, or appeal to our countrymen to at once resort to the only means left in their hands of bringing this false and brutal government to its senses.
Fellow countrymen, the hour to try your souls and redeem your pledges has arrived.
The executive committee of the National Land League is forced to abandon its policy of testing the land act, and feels bound to advise the tenant farmers in Ireland from this day forth to pay no rents under any circumstances to their landlords until the government relinquishes the present system of terrorism, and restores the constitutional rights of the people.
Do not be daunted by the removal of your leaders.
Do not let yourselves be intimidated by threats of military violence.
It is as lawful to refuse to pay rents as it is to receive them.
Against the passive resistance of the entire population the military power has no weapon.
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.
You have only to show you are not unworthy of their boundless sacrifices; one more crowning struggle for your land, your homes, your lives, a struggle in which you have all the memories of your race, all the hopes of your kindred, and all the sacrifices of your imprisoned brothers.
American anarchist Benjamin Ricketson Tucker praised this strike in an article for Liberty, saying that the Land League was “the most potent and instantly effective revolutionary force the world has ever known so long as it stood by its original policy of ‘Pay No Rent,’ and which lost nearly all its strength the day it abandoned that policy.”
James Warren Doyle, Catholic bishop of Kildare and Leighlin in the early nineteenth century, was an insightful pioneer of the tradition of mass nonviolent civil disobedience that would later be developed by Gandhi and King.
On , Doyle wrote to the pastor of Graig at the beginning of a tithe resistance campaign he was promoting:
The new Government will make a show of vigour, but they will shortly learn that no coalition can ever take place between those who plunder and they who are plundered.
Irish Catholics were required by law to pay a significant tax for the upkeep of the Anglican Church of Ireland (as were Irish non-Catholics), which, though the “official” church, was not the chosen church of most of the country (less than 10% of the population of Ireland were Anglicans).
As one historian put it: “The Protestant [Anglican] clergy lived comfortably all through the country, and ministered on Sundays in decent well-kept churches to congregations of perhaps half a dozen, or less; for all which the Catholic people were forced to pay… while their own priests lived in poverty, and celebrated Mass to overflowing congregations in thatched cabins or in the open air.”
Even for members of the Church of Ireland sometimes their only contact with the church was with the tithe collector, as the Church was content to collect its dues without bothering to establish a church house or to deign to send a minister.
Indeed, the Church had in many cases abandoned parishes outright (some parishes — one source says 160 of them — had no Anglican parishioners to minister to at all), and instead leased or auctioned tithing rights to professional “tithe proctors” whose profits were limited only by the extent of their ruthlessness.
Adding to the resentment was that while most subsistence farmers were required to turn over 10% of their produce to the Church of Ireland, wealthier (and usually Protestant) owners of grassland for grazing had long been exempt (an early attempt at reform in abolished this exemption, and changed the 10% tithe requirement to an apportioned and more consistent salary).
Furthermore, exemptions like these were regional.
Presybterian farmers in the North had managed to get potatoes and flax exempt from tithes there, while Catholic farmers in the South still were forced to pay tithes on potatoes, and didn’t grow flax.
The whole thing reeked of being a tax on poor Catholics to support Anglican absentee landlords.
And the poor Catholics occasionally made their feelings known.
One writer said: “The despoiled peasant is recorded to have now and then revenged himself upon the agent of ecclesiastical extortion by placing that functionary, deprived of his nether habiliments, astride upon a restive horse, with no other saddle than a furze bush.”
In , the new Anglican tithe-proctor of Graigue (a parish of 4,779 Catholics and 63 Protestants) decided to break with the tradition of his predecessor and collect tithes not just from the local Catholics, but also from their priest: one Father James Warren Doyle.
Doyle refused to pay, and the proctor seized his horse.
A mass civil disobedience campaign that would become known as the Tithe War followed.
Doyle, though a strong foe of tithes, and an early (for a priest) member of the Catholic Association, was of a reformist bent, and from the pulpit he denounced the lynch-mob violence of radical levellers who had banded together in secret societies like the “Blackfeet” and “Whitefeet” (descendants of the Whiteboys) to combat extortionate tithes and rents by force.
Eager to avoid the revolutionary excesses he feared from Daniel O’Connell’s popular independence movement, and opposing O’Connell’s periodic campaigns to repeal the Act of Union that bound the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland together, Doyle tried to counsel his friends in government to pass reforms that would take the wind out of the agitators’ sails and preserve the Union.
Doyle wrote to Edward Bligh, Lord Darnley, about the state of affairs in Ireland, warning:
The people in parts of this country, of the counties Kilkenny, Wexford, and Tipperary, have, within the last fortnight, assembled in bodies of several thousands to demand the reduction of tithes, and in some places have resolved not to pay any tithe until such reduction is made.
In , O’Connell and other agitators were arrested.
This served mostly to make them prominent martyrs and to increase Irish distrust of the government.
The law under which they were charged expired during the course of the prosecution, turning the case into an embarrassing sham.
Doyle was caught between being sympathetic to the cries for justice coming from his Catholic flock, and trying to dampen an emerging violent rebellion he was certain would be a bloody and disastrous one.
He warned:
There is a very extensive combination against the payment of either tithes or a composition for tithes existing at the present moment.
Government has assembled in the County Kilkenny a large police force to awe the people into the payment of them.
This proceeding will not be successful.
The clergy should be instructed to make abatements and keep things quiet; but there is a military spirit in the Government, which creates the necessity for employing force.
On , in Newtownbarry, some 120 British yeomanry fired on a group of tithe resisters who were trying to recapture some seized cattle, killing eighteen people.
Doyle had counseled against calling out the yeomanry (“who for many years past have been religious or political partisans,” that is, Orange protestants) to repress the tithe resisters, saying this would needlessly inflame matters and deepen the conflict between the people and the government.
Later that year, Irish patriots — hopeless of legal redress (there were no Catholic judges or magistrates in Ireland) — struck back violently, killing eighteen of the yeomanry in a retaliatory ambush.
(The numbers of dead and wounded in both of these cases vary with the source you consult.)
William John Fitzpatrick (Doyle’s biographer) writes:
A number of writs against defaulters were issued by the Court of Exchequer, and intrusted to the care of process-servers, who, guarded by a strong force, proceeded on their mission with secrecy and despatch.
Bonfires along the surrounding hills, however, and shrill whistles through the dell, soon convinced them that the people were not unprepared for hostile visitors.
But the yeomanry pushed boldly on: their bayonets were sharp, their ball-cartridge inexhaustible, their hearts dauntless.
Suddenly an immense mass of peasantry, armed with scythes and pitchforks, poured down upon them — a terrible struggle ensured, and in a few moments eighteen police, including the commanding-officer, lay dead.
The remainder fled, marking the course of their retreat by their blood just as, through the intricacies of English law, the decadence of Ireland had long been traced.
In the mêlée, Captain Leyne, a Waterloo veteran, narrowly escaped.
A coroner’s jury pronounced “Wilful murder.”
Large Government rewards were offered, but failed to produce a single conviction.
Doyle reported another tithe-related killing that took place on : “[A] most brutal murder was committed near Gowran.
The victim was employed, I heard, levying distress for tithes.
There is a radical error in the mode of conducting the affairs of this country.”
He then published two essays, one of which concerned the tithe question, in the form of a letter to Secretary of the Treasury Thomas Spring Rice.
It celebrated historical Irish resistance to mandatory tithes as growing from their “innate love of justice and an indomitable hatred of oppression” and recommended that the current mandatory tithes be replaced by a land tax that would be distributed by secular authorities (for the support of the poor, which subject the first of the essays addressed)
Henry Maxwell, Lord Farnham, attacked Doyle in the House of Lords, saying that Doyle was the head of a tithe resistance conspiracy and was responsible for the Newtownbarry massacre.
Fitzpatrick again:
It was quite true that Dr. Doyle had frankly adverted to the tithe system as unjust in principle and odious in practice — as an impediment to the improvement of Ireland in peace as well as in agriculture — as injurious to the best interests of religion, oppressive to the poor, inconsistent with good government, and intolerable to the Irish people.
In justification of those strong phrases the Bishop detailed many striking proofs of their truth, from the tithe laws enacted in the Irish Parliament to the Battle of Skibbereen*; and he inquired whether the recent slaughter at Newtownbarry was the effect of a cause different from that which produced the former collisions.
The exaction of tithe was incompatible with the peace of Ireland.
It had been hated and resisted before [Doyle] was born, and it would be cursed when he lay in his tomb.
That the system was not less injurious to agriculture than to peace he clearly demonstrated.
He had seen the hay left to rot and the field unfilled rather than pay the tithe of the produce to the parson.
The ministers of the Church of Ireland, Doyle concluded, are “taking the blanket from the bed of sickness, the ragged apparel from the limbs of the pauper, and selling it by auction for the payment of tithe.”
This was no exaggeration.
People had testified in Parliament to just such Scrooge-like abuse.
To the tithe collectors, nothing was too petty to seize, and nobody was too poor to be collected from.
One auction notice from Ballymore in read:
To be soaled by Publick Cant in the town of Ballymore on 15 Inst one Cowe the property of Jas Scully one new bed and one gown the property of John quinn seven hanks of yearn the property of the Widow Scott one petty coate & one apron the property of the Widow Gallaher seized under & by virtue of a leasing warrant for the tythe due the Revd. John Ugher.
The opposition to the tithes became increasingly bold and creative.
One worried parliamentarian noted in a news account of a mock funeral held in Ireland at which 100,000 people attended, “who assembled to carry in a procession to the grave two coffins, on which were inscribed Tithes and Rent.”
The thought that resistance to the taxes levied by foreign, absentee clergy might spill over into resistance to the rents levied by foreign, absentee landlords was frightening to the ruling class.
“But in your opposition to this pest of agriculture and bane of religion,” Doyle wrote to his parishioners, “keep always before your eyes a salutary dread of those statutes which guard the tithe.
Let no violence or combination to inspire dread be ever found in your proceedings [alluding to the Whitefeet and other such guerrilla groups].
Justice has no need of such allies.
In these countries, if you only obey the law and reverence the constitution, they both will furnish you with ample means whereby to overthrow all oppression, and will secure to you the full enjoyment of every social right.”
Doyle was summoned to London to testify before a hostile “Tithe Committee,” which suspected that rhetoric like the above was given with a wink and a nod to the resisters.
Doyle used the occasion to prosecute the tithe system, giving a history that proved that the tithes had been loathed and resisted from the beginning, that furthermore their original justification had been as money set aside for the poor with the clergy as the administrators of this trust but that over time the clergy had simply taken over the tithes as their own salary, and that outbreaks of paramilitary violence in Ireland over the centuries were empowered by the tithe system.
Asked whether his statements encouraging the Irish to see the tithe laws as unjust encouraged lawless behavior, he replied by reminding the committee of the noble disobedience in their own history: the opposition to ship writs, the revolution of , and so forth.
Then, in a passage that reminded me of the rhetoric of Martin Luther King, Jr., he said:
[N]o man ought to be condemned for exhorting people to pursue justice in a certain line, though he may foresee that in the pursuit of that justice the opposition given to those who are proceeding in a just course may produce collision, and that collision lead to the commission of crime; but our duty, as I conceive, is to seek for the injustice, and there to impute the crime … It is to that injustice, and not to those who pursue a just course for the attainment of a right end, that the guilt is to be ascribed.
He was now frankly advocating “passive obedience and nonresistance” — that is, refusal to pay the tithes, and using any legal methods to avoid them, but unresistingly accepting any legal consequences of refusal to pay.
“I maintain the right which [Irish Catholics] have of withholding, in a manner consistent with the law and their duty as subjects, the payment of tithe in kind or in money until it is extorted from them by the operation of the law.”
Fitzpatrick says that Doyle ended his first day of testimony “by declaring that he would allow his last chair to be seized — nay, sacrifice his life, before he would pay an impost so obnoxious and iniquitous.”
The next day he was asked whether by advising his parishioners to resist the tithes, he wasn’t essentially urging them to steal from those to whom the tithes were due.
In response to this question, he brought up the Quakers:
I find in Ireland the religious denomination of Quakers; and they, on account of a peculiar tenet of their religion, refuse to pay tithes in money or kind to the parsons within whose jurisdiction they live; they suffer their cattle or goods to be distrained, and they have never been charged on that account with robbing the parson.
He concluded by presenting the government committee with what must have been a very tempting proposal: why not have people pay their 10% tithes to the government instead of the Church, and then the government can divvy out the money in a more fair manner.
Shrewd.
But victory was some ways off yet.
Doyle encouraged the resisters to trust in the strength of what Gandhi would later call satyagraha:
The advocacy of truth will always excite hostility, and he who enforces justice will ever have to combat against the powers of this world.
I have, through life, regardless of danger or injury, sought to maintain the cause of truth and justice against those “who seek after a lie” and “oppress the weak.”
We, who are now embarked in this cause, have to renew our determination, and in proportion as power is exerted against us to oppose ourselves to it as a wall of brass.
Let us receive but not return its shocks; for if we abide by the law and pursue truth and justice we may suffer loss for a moment, but as certainly as Providence presides over human affairs every arm lifted against us shall not prosper, and against every tongue that contendeth with us we will obtain our cause.
Peace, unanimity, and perseverance are, therefore, alone requisite, under the Divine protection, to annihilate the iniquitous tithe system, to lift up the poor from their state of extreme indigence, and consequent immorality, and to prepare the way for the future happiness of our beloved country.
In there was another “massacre” when a protestant clergyman led a military force to claim his tithe of growing crops direct from the soil of a farmer.
Doyle continued to counsel nonviolence, though his idea of staying within the law got more and more flexible.
Fitzpatrick says in an unsourced footnote “A man in confession to Dr. Doyle said, ‘I stole from the pound a cow which had been seized from me for tithe.’
Dr. Doyle made no comment: the penitent thought he might be dozing, and repeated that confession.
‘What else?’ was the sole response.”
Elsewhere, Fitzpatrick writes:
Dr. Doyle told the people not to infringe the law, but gave it to be understood that they might exercise their wit in devising expedients of passive resistance to tithes.
The hint fell upon fertile soil.
An organised system of confederacy, whereby signals were, for miles around, recognised and answered, started into latent vitality.
True Irish “winks” were exchanged; and when the rector, at the head of a detachment of police, military, bailiffs, clerks, and auctioneers, would make his descent on the lands of the peasantry, he found the cattle removed, and one or two grinning countenances occupying their place.
A search was, of course, instituted, and often days were consumed in prosecuting it.
When successful, the parson’s first step was to put the cattle up to auction in the presence of a regiment of English soldiery; but it almost invariably happened that either the assembled spectators were afraid to bid, lest they should incur the vengeance of the peasantry, or else they stammered out such a low offer, that, when knocked down, the expenses of the sale would be found to exceed it.
The same observation applies to the crops.
Not one man in a hundred had the hardihood to declare himself the purchaser.
Sometimes the parson, disgusted at the backwardness of bidders, and trying to remove it, would order the cattle twelve or twenty miles away in order to their being a second time put up for auction.
But the locomotive progress of the beasts was always closely tracked, and means were taken to prevent either driver or beast receiving shelter or sustenance throughout the march.
This harassing system of anti-tithe tactics, of which an idea is merely given, soon accomplished important results.
Archbishop Whately mentioned some interesting facts.
“I have received information which leads me to feel certain, in some instance, and very strongly to suspect in many others, that the resistance to tithe payment in numerous parishes may be traced to the reading of Dr. Doyle’s letter.
All composition has been refused.
Every possible legal evasion has been resorted to to prevent the incumbent from obtaining his due.
A parish purse has been raised to meet law expenses for this purpose, and the result has been that in most instances nothing whatever, in others a very small proportion of the arrears, has been recovered.
I know that in one parish some extensive farmers had reduced into writing a form of proposal for a composition, and that the proposal was signed by the parishioners at a fair in the neighbourhood.
The fair was held on Saturday; and in consequence, as is supposed, of Dr. Doyle’s letter having been read and commented on next day, instead of his receiving the proposal for composition, notices were served on the clergymen, by those very persons, to take the tithe in kind.
He was forced to procure labourers to the amount of sixty, from distant counties, and at high wages, who yet were incapable of obtaining more than a small portion of tithes, being interrupted by a rabble — chiefly women — though men were lurking in the background to support them.
He instituted a tithe-suit which was decided in his favour; but, instead of receiving the amount, he was met by an appeal to the High Court of Delegates, and is informed that a continued resistance to the utmost extremity of the law is to be supported by a parish purse.”
The Carlow journals of the day furnish graphic details of a tithe seizure in that town, and of the surrender of the cattle to their owners.
The following is culled from “The Sentinel,” a Conservative organ, and cannot, therefore, be suspected of exaggeration:— “Yesterday being the day on which the sheriff announced that, if no bidders could be obtained for the cattle, he would have the property returned to Mr. Germain, immense crowds were collected from the neighbouring counties — upwards of 20,000 men.
The County Kildare men, amounting to about 7000, entered, led by Jonas Duckett, Esq., in the most regular and orderly manner.
This body was preceded by a band of music, and had several banners on which were ‘Kilkea and Moone, Independence for ever,’ ‘No Church Tax,’ ‘No Tithe,’ ‘Liberty,’ &c. The whole body followed six carts, which were prepared in the English style — each drawn by two horses.
The rear was brought up by several respectable landholders of Kildare.
The barrack-gates were thrown open, and different detachments of infantry took their stations right and left, while the cavalry, after performing sundry evolutions, occupied the passes leading to the place of sale.
The cattle were ordered out, when the sheriff, as on the former day, put them up for sale; but no one could be found to bid for the cattle, upon which he announced his intention of returning them to Mr. Germain.
The news was instantly conveyed, like electricity, throughout the entire meeting, when the huzzas of the people surpassed anything we ever witnessed.
The cattle were instantly liberated and given up to Mr. Germain.
At this period a company of grenadiers arrived, in double-quick time, after travelling from Castlecomer, both officers and men fatigued and covered with dust.
Thus terminated this extraordinary contest between the Church and the people, the latter having obtained, by their steadiness, a complete victory.
The cattle will be given to the poor of the sundry districts.”
This sort of contest continued for some time, until at last Mr. Stanley, in Parliament, avowed that notwithstanding a vigorous effort made by the Crown to collect arrears of tithe, with the aid of the military, police, and yeomanry, they were able to recover from an arrear of £60,000 little more than one-sixth of that sum, and at an outlay of £27,000. £1,000,000 was voted by the Legislature for the relief of the Protestant clergy.
There was also a subscription opened.
The Duke of Cumberland, the Duchess of Kent, the Duke of Wellington, Lords Kenyon, Bexley, and even Dr. Doyle’s correspondent, Lord Clifden, contributed £100 each.
The government responded with a repressive Coercion Act, which instituted martial law and banned public meetings.
The resisters got creative:
It was illegal to summon public meetings, and so no public meeting was summoned.
But it was not illegal for the people of a particular town or parish to announce that on a certain day they were going to have a hurling match, and it was not illegal for the people of other counties and towns and parishes to come and take part in the national sport.
It was perfectly plain, however, that the large assemblages that thus came together, met, not for the purpose of ball-playing, but for the purpose of opposing a strong front to the hated tithe system.
Men came to these hurling matches to talk of other topics than balls and sticks.
These hurling matches became the recognized medium of public opinion, and the public opinion of Ireland was dead against the payment of tithes.
That public opinion hinted pretty plainly to those who were willing, for peace and quietness, to pay tithes to their Protestant masters, that such payment would not necessarily secure to them peace and quietness.
The government insisted that there was nothing legal about this “passive obedience and nonresistance” campaign: “[I]t is not compatible with law to evade the performance of the obligations it imposes, and to frustrate the means it provides for their enforcement.”
Doyle responded, some years before Thoreau made the same point, that “some laws may be so unjust and so injurious to the public good that ‘to evade them’ is a duty, and ‘to frustrate the means provided to enforce them’ is an exercise of a social or moral virtue.”
Still, he insisted on nonviolence:
We bless those who sympathize with us, we shun those who co-operate in the enforcement of an odious law against us; but if any one resort to violence or intimidation whilst our goods are taken from us, him do we disown.
The government eventually (in ) enacted concessions that maintained most of the revenue from the tithe system while making it less confrontational: they lowered the tithe rates by 25% and made them collectible from the landlords as “rent”, not directly from the tenants as “tithe”.
Mandatory tithes were nominally abolished in Ireland.
The million-pound loan that Parliament had made to cover the tithes in arrears was converted into a gift, an additional quarter of a million was added to that, and the outstanding tithe debts were canceled.
This effectively ended the Tithe War.
The Church of Ireland was made formally independent from the government, and the mandatory tithes/rents for its support were given a 52-year sunset period, in .
Most of the information and quotes in this Picket Line entry come from The Life, Times, and Correspondence of the Right Rev. Dr. Doyle, Bishop of Kildale and Leighlin () by William John Fitz-Patrick.
* The “Battle of Skibbereen” was an earlier, , tithe-related massacre.
In the reports I’ve been able to find out about it on-line, a protestant parson by the name of Morrit, who was the beneficiary of the tithes, actually was the one to give the order to fire.
The following poem was an imagining of Morrit’s address to the police:
Brave Peelers, march on, with the musket and sword And fight for my tithes in the name of the Lord! Away with whoever appears in your path — And seize all each peasant in Skibbereen hath!
Hesitate not — the law is on our side you know! “The Church is in danger!” and yonder the foe! If women and children expire at your feet! ’Tis a doom good enough for the Papists to meet!
The rebels refuse their last morsel to part — Let your bullets and bay’nets be fleshed in each heart! No matter what Priests or Dissenters will say — I’llgetallmy tithes, or I’llperishto-day!
The inscription from a monument dedicated to victims of a massacre that took place during the tithe resistance campaign.
Photo by Kman999, some rights reserved.
Some excerpts from a report from a House of Commons select committee that investigated the ongoing Tithe War in Ireland, showing just how successful the tax resistance campaign had become, and how frightened it had made the government:
In the prosecution of the inquiries of your committee into the very important subject which has been intrusted to them, evidence has been adduced to establish beyond a doubt the existence of an organised and systematic opposition to the payment of tithe in several parts of Ireland.
In some instances it appears that this opposition has been accompanied and enforced by acts of violence; but in most it appears to have been effected by a species of passive resistance to the operations of the law, in which the inhabitants of whole parishes, some voluntarily, and some from intimidation, have been induced to join.
The protection of the military and police, so far as it is authorized by the existing laws, appears to have been afforded to the Clergy of the Established Church in their endeavours to enforce their legal rights; but your committee regret to be compelled to add, that while the assistance thus afforded has led to collisions with the peasantry, deeply to be lamented in their immediate as well as in their ulterior results, the object sought has been only very partially attained.
Although, under warrants of distress, payment of the demand has been in some instances enforced, such cases bear a very small proportion to those in which the evasion of the law has been successful.
The nature of the opposition given is such as to elude the mere application of physical force, so long as the law remains unaltered; and it appears that the clergy, unwilling to risk the effusion of blood in attempts, probably unavailing, to recover their dues, have latterly acquiesced in the total cessation of their income, as to abstain from taking active steps, and to await with patience the decision of Parliament.
In making, however, this temporary submission to the dictates of an imperious necessity, it is in evidence that many of them have been reduced to a state of the deepest pecuniary distress; and that more especially in the diocese of Ossory and of Leighlin, in which the opposition to the payment of tithe commenced, and in that of Cashel, several clergymen, with large nominal incomes, are in actual want of the ordinary comforts of life.
Your committee cannot but be of opinion that they should be wanting in the duty that they owe to the House, were they to postpone till the final close of their inquiries, calling the attention of Parliament to the distressing circumstances in which a highly-respectable class of men are placed by the success of the combination to deprive them of their legal income; and suggesting such temporary measures of relief as in their view appear calculated to meet the exigencies of the case.
But however strongly your committee might have been led to this conclusion by the circumstances to which they have already referred, they feel that there are other considerations connected with the same subject, which yet more imperiously press for the early attention of Parliament.
Your committee are deeply impressed with the danger which must threaten the whole frame of society, if a combination against a legal impost be permitted ultimately to triumph over the provisions of the law.
They cannot but feel how small the step from successful resistance to tithe, to resistance to rent and taxes; and how great is the temptation held out by the experience of such success in one case, to a similar opposition to the payment of other pecuniary demands.
If the sanctity of the law be systematically violated, if the proof be once afforded that turbulence leads directly to relief, and that popular combination is sufficiently powerful to overbear legitimate authority, the most effectual security of all property is shaken, the framework of Government and of society is disorganized, and a state of confusion and anarchy must ensue.
Your committee have too much reason to apprehend that the general success which has hitherto attended the resistance to tithe, has already given proof of its tendency to produce this effect.
Not only is the opposition to that species of property rapidly extending, not only has the same cessation taken place in the payment of the lay impropriations, the resistance to which cannot rest upon the same religious scruples which have been urged with respect to ecclesiastical tithes, but intimidation and violence of a similar character have, in some few instances, been manifested against the recovery of the landlord’s rent; and your committee are deeply impressed with the necessity of resorting, without delay, to such measures as may enable the executive government, by a vigorous interposition of its authority, to put a stop to a system ruinous to the tranquility and welfare of the empire.
More on the Tithe War, from the edition of The [New Brunswick] Courier:
The combination in Ireland against the payment of tithes has of late assumed a new shape.
Immense meetings are held, which form themselves into tribunals, before which persons accused of the crime of tithe-paying are summoned to appear, and give an account of their conduct; and defaulters undergo the punishment of being abandoned at once by every person in their employment.
Country gentlemen and farmers are left without a servant or labourer to perform the most necessary work.
The hay is left to rot on the ground, and the cattle to perish for want of the necessary food, drink, and care; and even on the roads it is common for the horses of the mails and stage-coaches to be changed by the coachmen and passengers, because the unhappy recusant innkeeper has been deserted by every one, even to his hostler.
Such is the terror of this new species of judicial authority, that numbers of highly respectable persons have found it necessary, in order to avert ruinous consequences, to appear before these self-constituted courts, acknowledge their jurisdiction, and promise to give obedience to their decrees!
For this new evil the Irish government is providing a remedy.
An official circular has been issued, under the authority of the Lord Lieutenant, to the magistracy, in which they are informed, that, whether the means employed in resisting the payment of tithes be actual violence or intimidation, they are illegal, and that the most prompt and effectual measures should be adopted to counteract them.
In regard to such meetings as the above, it is stated that the recurrence will render it incumbent on Magistrates to exert the powers with which the law invites them, to suppress the mischief and bring the guilty to punishment.
And with respect to cases of doubt whether the law has been violated, they are directed to cause the parties implicated to be identified, and to have informations of the particulars of the case sworn and transmitted to Government for the opinions of the law officers.
Another report from the same paper reads:
The people of Ireland have now virtually abolished tithes.
They will neither pay the tax themselves, nor have any dealings or intercourse with those who do.
They will not even purchase for a twentieth or hundredth part of their value goods and cattle which have been distrained for tithes.
The man who in any way upholds the obnoxious system, whatever his previous character or services may have been, is branded as an object of universal execration.
The people meet in thousands and hundreds of thousands — peaceable, orderly, quiet; but animated with one strong and universal sentiment — the detestation of tithes.
It is admitted on all hands that a most richly-endowed Church in the midst of an impoverished people, nine-tenths of whom do not belong to her communion, and receive no return whatever for their forced contributions on her behalf, is an anomaly which cannot much longer exist.
This comes from the edition of The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser (showing that certain tactics of the “Tithe War” were already in place well before ):
The Irish papers describe many recent outrages.
The last offences on record are — 1st, a wanton burning of farm produce, and barbarous mutilations of cattle, in the neighbourhood of Doneraile, county of Cork; 2d, the destruction of a Mr. Nash’s house, at Balivaloon, in the same county, the villainy of which act was doubly detestable, because it was in charity to a tenant that the proprietor had taken this farm off his hands, after remitting to him a large arrear of rent;— 3d, a large quantity of stacked corn, the property of a churchwarden of Morne Abbey, consumed by fire;— 4th, a horse butchered near Garrycloyne, as a punishment to the owner who had lent him to draw home some tithe corn;— 5th, a stack of wheat burned near Limerick, because it had been seized and sold for an arrear of rent; some other corn, sold for a similar cause, carried off;— 6th, cows and gunpowder plundered from the owners near Limerick, by a gang of men in arms.
This comes from the edition of The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser (the reason so many of these reports of Irish tax resistance are from Australian papers, is that the Historic Australian Newspapers project has put large archives on-line for free searching and browsing):
CORK.
— A most extraordinary scene has been exhibited in this city.
Some cows seized for tithes were brought to a public place for sale, escorted by a squadron of lancers, and followed by thousands of infuriated people.
All the garrison, cavalry and infantry, under the command of Sir George Bingham, were called out.
The cattle were set up at three pounds for each, no bidder; two pounds, no bidder; one pound, no bidder; in short, the auctioneer descended to three shillings for each cow, but no purchaser appeared.
This scene lasted for above an hour, when there being no chance of making sale of the cattle, it was proposed to adjourn the auction; but, as we are informed, the General in command of the military expressed an unwillingness to have the troops subjected to a repetition of the harassing duty thus imposed on them.
After a short delay, it was, at the interference and remonstrance of several gentlemen, both of town and country, agreed upon that the cattle should be given up to the people, subject to certain private arrangements.
We never witnessed such a scene; thousands of country people jumping with exulted feelings at the result, wielding their shillelaghs, and exhibiting all the other symptoms of exuberant joy characteristic of the buoyancy of Irish feeling.
At Carlow a triumphant resistance to the laws, similar to that which occurred at Cork, has been exhibited in the presence of the authorities and the military.
Some cattle had been seized for tithe, and a public sale announced, when a large body of men, stated at 50,000, marched to the place appointed, and, of course, under the influence of such terror, none were found to bid for the cattle.
The sale was adjourned from day to day, for seven days, and upon each day the same organised bands entered the town, and rendered the attempt to sell the cattle, in pursuance of the law, abortive.
At last the cattle are given up to the mob, crowned with laurels, and driven home with an escort of 10,000 men.
From The Hobart Town Courier :
Carding the tithe proctors (who certainly were the genuine tyrants of Ireland) was occasionally resorted to by the White Boys, and was performed in the following manner.
The tithe proctor was generally waked out of his first sleep by his door being smashed in; and the boys in white shirts desired him “never to fear,” as they only intended to card him this bout for taking a quarter instead of a tenth from every poor man in the parish.
They then turned him on his face upon the bed; and taking a lively ram cat out of a bag which they brought with them, they set the cat between the proctor’s shoulders.
The beast, being nearly as much terrified as the proctor, would endeavour to get off; but being held fast by the tail, he intrenched every claw deep in the proctor’s back, in order to keep up a firm resistance to the White Boys.
The more the tail was pulled back, the more the ram cat tried to go forward; at length, when he had, as he conceived, made his possession quite secure, main force convinced him to the contrary, and that if he kept his hold, he must lose his tail.
So, he was dragged backward to the proctor’s loins, grappling at every pull, and bringing away, here and there, strips of the proctor’s skin, to prove the pertinacity of his defence.
When the ram cat had got down to the loins, he was once more placed at the shoulders, and again carded the proctor (toties quoties) according to his sentence.
From The Hobart Town Courier :
Tithe Affray.
Ireland.
— An affray, attended with the loss of two lives, occurred on between the peasantry and some persons who were endeavouring to issue notices upon some tithe defaulters, in the parish of Blarney, near Cork.
A Mr. Hudson, a very respectable man, took upon him unfortunately to accompany and direct a small body of men (not police) who were commissioned by Mr. Beresford, the rector of Inniscarra, to serve notices upon several in the parish spoken of; and as they proceeded in the discharge of their duty they were assailed violently by the country people, who continued to fling stones and other missiles at them for a considerable time before any hostile defence was adopted by the other party.
At length Mr. Hudson cautioned the crowd to desist, at least, from offering any assault, whatever else they might please to do.
However, this forbearance had quite a contrary effect, and the multitude were approaching Hudson with the evident intention of sacrificing him, when he fired and shot one of the ruffians; the rest immediately withdrew.
The men whom Hudson had in his immediate charge very imprudently scattered; and thus, abandoned by them, he was brutally murdered by the mob, who mangled his corpse in a very frightful manner.
Finally, this editorial from The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, :
Tithe Horrors.
The state of Ireland, according to the latest accounts, has by no means tended to allay the anxiety so generally felt in regard to the stern and deadly feeling of resistance to the levy of tithes, prevailing throughout every province of that noble Country.
The Catholic peasantry had evidently become embued with a sullen spirit — they suffered their property to be torn from them, rather than yield a little to pay the Protestant Clergyman from whose religion they derived no benefit.
This state of things cannot long last — patience must become exhausted, and rebellion or violence overspread the Country.
We had, during the Whig Government of Earl Grey, some prospect of a change, favourable to the Catholics, as a people who are fleeced and oppressed by a lavish non-resident Aristocracy, and a ravenous Clergy.
When Tory mis-rule superseded the Liberals and Reformers, anticipation ceased to operate freely and favourably.
The Whigs have again a voice in the National Council — but we fear much that the prediliction of His Majesty, as the third estate, and the rooted determination of the Lords, as the second, to support the Protestant Church in all its abuses, and power, will frustrate for a long time, the zeal of the Commons and the energy of the British people.
When we see a tithe of only one shilling raised by expenses to two pounds more, and property actually sold under the bustle of bayonets, because the Catholic peasant will not pay this trifle, surely such a feeling presents an ominous picture, and should oblige Government to pause before the endurance of an oppressed people seeks a fierce and violent remedy for all the injuries of which they have been the victims. This grievous and sacrilegious exercise of a sovereign power can hardly be excelled by any act of wanton extravagance in a conquered province, on the part of an insolent and powerful enemy.
One instance of this dreadful state of existence, will serve as an index to thousands equally enormous.
We have before us a list of six persons against whom collectively the Reverend H.F. Williams, a Protestant Clergyman, had a tithe claim of twenty shillings and two pence; they refused to pay — expenses on this trifle, by separate processes, were incurred to the amount of twenty-four pounds, and shameful to narrate, the miserable furniture of these conscientious Catholic peasants was brought to the hammer, in presence of the claimant, and a party of armed soldiers!!!
This “extract from a letter received this morning at our office from a
Gentleman of high character and the most unquestionable veracity” comes from
The Morning Post of :
Middleton, . — Rents
have at length been resisted in this county; a few days ago Mr. Spratt, of
Pencil Hill, near Mallow, went to a tenant to receive his rent on an appointed
day, but instead of his money he was told that the men had removed the cattle,
corn, &c.
&c., and
desired him to get what he could, adding, that passive resistance need not be
resorted to, as the people were determined to be no longer oppressed by rents,
tithes, or taxes, and that they knew how to right themselves. There
have been several instances of a similar nature, especially in the barony of
Duhallow, where the above occurred. The Mail often
told with its own powerful voice what the effect of the “passive resistance”
system, so absurdly encouraged by the Whigs, would end in.
