The Peculiar Origins of American Taxation

"This book is not about how taxation enslaved Americans," warns Robin Einhorn in the opening lines of American Taxation, American Slavery (p. 1). It's an unusual pre-emptive strike, but a necessary one, given the ambiguity of the title of her study. Readers hoping for a libertarian screed against high taxes will come away from this book disappointed, though not necessarily unenlightened. Like Edmund Morgan's classic work on the twinned history of slavery and freedom, Einhorn is after something far more interesting: the troubling connections between property taxation, democratic political representation, and chattel slavery from the founding of the first colonies to the coming of the Civil War.

Like Morgan, Einhorn has an eye for paradoxes and contradictions. In this provocative history, she argues that the American tradition of low taxes and small government did not originate in a revolutionary defense of liberty against real and imagined enemies. Rather, it grew out of attempts by a slaveholding minority to shield the "peculiar institution" from potential threats posed by majority rule. Thanks to their power to tax slavery out of existence, "strong, competent, and democratic governments were the only institutions in American life that posed credible threats to slavery"—a legacy that continues to reverberate today. "The American mistrust of government is not part of our democratic heritage," writes Einhorn. "It comes from the slaveholding elites who . . . knew only one thing about democracy: that it threatened slavery" (pp. 7–8). The power to tax, in other words, was the power to destroy.

This is an intriguing argument, one predicated on an important but often neglected insight. In a healthy democracy, taxes are something that the majority of voters sanction and approve in order to pay for things they want (or in the case of eliminating slavery, something they don't want). In other words, contrary to what the past few decades' worth of political rhetoric would lead people to believe, the assessment and allocation of taxes is not the antithesis of democratic liberty, imposed by a faceless and autonomous "big government." Taxes are instead the expression of the will of the majority, who turn to government to administer their wishes. As Einhorn puts it at one point, "the history of American taxation is a history of taxation with representation"—not without it (p. 21).

Einhorn begins her narrative in the colonial era by examining the tax systems of the different colonies. While she assures her readers that she does not catalog "every state-level tax measure," much of the book bristles with arcane details of tax assessment and collection, and the opening chapters are no exception. There are extended descriptions of the inner workings of poll taxes on free individuals and slaves; import and export taxes on tobacco and liquor; property taxes on carriages, riding chairs, silver plate, and land; licenses and fees for taverns and marriages; and other sources of revenue. It's pretty slow going at first, and readers may find themselves overwhelmed by the complexity of the systems that Einhorn doggedly describes.

Einhorn sifts these details with an eye toward the larger differences between colonies where slavery played a pivotal role in the economy versus those where it was destined to disappear. Moving beyond the cliché that New England was the bastion of elitist politics and the South a place where slavery "elevated the status of poor white men," Einhorn argues that northern colonies enjoyed a far more democratic "tax politics" as early as the seventeenth century. Colonists there developed robust institutions for the assessment and collection of taxes, a "recognizably modern story in which various groups competed over the distribution of tax burdens. Farmers, artisans, merchants, and professionals sought favorable valuation rules [and] town representatives contended over apportionments" (p. 78). The upshot was a set of competent public institutions that could tax—and spend—in an effective and responsive fashion. Similar systems prevailed elsewhere in the North.

No southern colony had comparable systems of taxation...