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Reviewed by:
  • American Taxation, American Slavery
  • James L. Huston
American Taxation, American Slavery. By Robin L. Einhorn. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2006.

How slavery affected southern culture, politics, and economics is a subject of ongoing controversy, and Robin Einhorn has entered this debate through the vantage point of taxation policy. In no uncertain terms she finds that slavery, an institution hostile to democratic practices and supportive of hierarchical structures, shaped policy to make taxation impotent to fund public services. In essence, she finds laissez faire economics in the United States had its origins in slaveholding, and she leaves no room for misunderstanding the application of her research for present times: she writes that today’s anti-government rhetoric “is rooted in slavery rather than liberty” (7).

Einhorn offers three basic interpretations. The strongest and most striking is that during colonial times the southern colonies, run by the slaveholding gentry, wanted taxation that was minuscle and simple: its form was the poll tax. Interestingly, Einhorn resorts to explaining this outcome by accepting the southern claim that slavery was a familial institution, and the family, in English tradition, resisted intrusion by government agents— a form of patriarchy in which the male father/husband was the king of his tiny domain who warded off any and all outsiders. Thus the familial outlook that slavery evoked led southerners to reduce to the lowest point possible government inspections for the purpose of tax assessments. By contrast, and in a tour de force of research ingenuity and interpretation, she uses the township records of colonial Massachusetts to show that even with a dispersed, agrarian population, “democratic” Massachusetts created tax assessors who estimated the value of property and thus could produce taxation based on assessed value rather than having to resort to the simple expedient of a poll tax. On this comparison, Einhorn is superb and her findings demonstrate how the early United States could have possessed a sophisticated tax system (direct taxes) without an extensive bureaucracy.

Her second interpretation centers on Congress and why the tariff became the source of the nation’s income until the second or third decade of the twentieth century. Southerners wanted a version of the flat poll tax nationally, they wanted to steer government away from property assessments, and they especially did not want federal employees invading their “families.” Thus, they directed federal taxation to the tariff. Her third major interpretation was how this push to reduce federal taxation to simplicity conflated democratic principles with low and flat taxation policies. Southerners did not justify their federal taxation preferences with a defense of slavery because they knew that such rhetoric would invoke a northern backlash. Instead, they created a defense of low, flat taxes by stressing its democratic nature (or more probably, its republican nature) and its justice to all citizens. Einhorn believes the western states—the Great Lakes area—bought the argument and instituted the simple taxation policies of the southern states; thus taxation [End Page 147] policies purposely designed to favor slaveholding became for Americans the desired norm for democratic polities.

This short review cannot do justice to all the subjects that Einhorn covers and the nuances of many of her interpretations—for example, all colonial taxation was equally regressive except for South Carolina, a most interesting oddity. Her book is a treasure chest of information about taxation in the colonies and early republic. She has written her work forcefully and lucidly; it is well worth the time of anyone interested in American Studies, as well as in the culture of slavery.

But the larger question remains unresolved. Was it indeed slavery that tilted taxation toward simplicity, regressivity, and impotence? Alternative explanations exist—for example, the impact of the low labor-to-land ratio as well as the staple crop production of the region for export. Was southern taxation the result of slavery or the lack of urban development? While Einhorn uses the family analogy to explain slaveholder psychology, she could have used another: the beast analogy. What if slaveholders only considered slaves to be cattle, a form of animal property? Under that analogy, it is not clear that slaveholders would have had any different taxation ideas than ranchers...

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