American Taxation, American Slavery (review)

Any neoconservative who rushes out to buy this book will be disappointed. Its misleading title notwithstanding, this monograph is not yet another diatribe against federal taxation, but rather a thoughtful examination of how the existence of slavery in the young republic in the decades following the American Revolution shaped national policies. If many Americans now trace the republic's persistent anti-tax tendencies back to the Boston Tea Party, Robin Einhorn instead demonstrates that the origins of modern anti-government rhetoric lay in the persistent attempts of southern planters to protect slavery rather than in the northern discourse of liberty and freedom.

Scholars have long understood that the need to defend slavery against growing northern sensibilities lurked just beneath the early national South's budding support for states' rights theories. But only Einhorn has examined the impact that slaveholding had on state and federal tax policies. If national taxes other than the tariff amounted to but a small slice of federal revenues, southern politicians expended a great deal of energy in making sure that their human chattel remained beyond the clutches of the Treasury Department. As early as the 1787 Constitutional Convention, delegates like Thomas Lynch sought to convince the conference that planters could not afford to pay their share of taxes as slave labor was ultimately more expensive than free-wage labor (a reversal of their usual insistence that only cheap, unwaged laborers could help southern agriculture turn a profit). "Our slaves being our Property," Lynch wondered, "why should they be taxed more than the Land, Sheep, Cattle, Horses, &c." South Carolinians and Georgians won that debate—which Einhorn calls "an outrageous argument"—with implicit threats of secession, and such saber rattling helped them to maintain this victory for decades more (pp. 122–123).

Einhorn's fresh perspective on the connection between direct taxation and the much misunderstood three-fifths clause is particularly useful. Early on, American politicians were divided as to how apportioned direct taxes would function. Some believed that levies should act as requisitions with each state collecting its share, whereas others advocated a direct tax on property, of which slaves would be a logical part. As was typical, white southerners won this debate as well. At the Philadelphia convention, a committee dominated by South Carolinians wrote a number of explicit protections for slavery into the draft constitution. By the time that Congress began to consider legislation for national taxes in the early 1790s, southerners had coalesced around the argument that "direct taxes" on land or slaves were undesirable levies best reserved for time of national emergencies. Once the Jeffersonian Republicans (dominated as they were by southern planters) came to power in 1801, they abolished all internal taxes and the collection apparatus, relying only on a low tariff for federal revenues.

If Einhorn is more than comfortable with economic theory, she concedes that her study does not rest upon an analysis of tax lists but instead "analyzes the political theory that shaped them" (p. 272). As luck would have it, early American policy makers—unlike their modern brethren—proved wonderfully honest when discussing their need to protect unfree labor. Especially at the Constitutional Convention, when debates were held behind closed doors and delegates were sworn to maintain secrecy, southern voices consistently demonstrated their concern that the nation's need to build a strong fiscal structure not infringe upon their ownership of black humans. As Patrick Henry worried, not only would future debates over national taxation motivate northern capitalists to attack slavery, but the federal tax power itself, by authorizing Congress to do anything "necessary and proper" to ensure the stability of the nation, gave future abolitionists the weapon with which to do it (p. 181).

Although Einhorn's study breaks new ground by piecing this complicated story together in a way that no previous historian has, she at times writes as if the voluminous historiography of the past four decades simply did not exist. Early on, she insists that scholars "must...