Taxation in the US: Tax resistance (Part Two)

Undermining Reconstruction state governments.

After the American Civil War, the United States government established Reconstruction era governments in the states of the former Confederacy that included black and carpetbagger representatives. The loss of political power by the formerly dominant white supremacists led to resentment, protest, and the formation of paramilitaries and parallel governments. Occasionally, tax resistance was used as a tactic to withdraw financial support and political legitimacy from the reconstruction governments in favor of the white supremacist parallel governments.

For example, tax resistance was used as a tactic by South Carolina Democrats in the months leading up to the collapse of the carpetbagger administration of Republican Daniel Chamberlain and his replacement by former Confederate Army officer Wade Hampton III.

White supremacist gubernatorial candidate John McEnery established a parallel government in Reconstruction Louisiana, in opposition to the carpetbagger government of governor William Pitt Kellogg, and urged sympathetic citizens to pay taxes to his government rather than the Kellogg "usurpation."

Railroad bond shenanigans.

In the 1870s a number of American localities were victims of railroad bond swindles. Promoters would ask the residents to vote to issue bonds to pay for the running of a railroad line to their area, these bonds being backed by the local tax base. In theory the economic growth that would come from the new rail line would more than pay for the bonds by the time they were mature and the bondholders needed to be paid off. In fact, the railroad never materialized and the bond promoters vanished with the money.

Some of these localities organized and refused to honor the bonds they had issued. Because by the time the bonds had matured they had likely been sold to new owners who did not participate in the original fraud, the court system was not usually very sympathetic to the defrauded taxpayers.

But this led to some notable examples of organized tax resistance in the United States.

For instance, in Cass and St. Clair counties, Missouri, local judges were elected who refused to enforce higher court rulings in favor of the bondholders that would have forced the County to inflict a tax in order to pay off the bonds. For a time, the judges held court in a cave in order to evade their eventual jailings for contempt of court.

In Steuben County, New York, the bondholders succeeded in forcing the community to create a property tax to pay off the bonds, but property owners refused to pay the tax and rallied to the support of those whose property was seized for failure to pay, successfully disrupting tax auctions.

In Kentucky, refusal to assess or pay taxes to pay off the bond swindle persisted for decades. Some towns refused to elect sheriffs or public officials of any kind (or no candidates could be found for the positions) so that nobody was legally qualified to assess taxes or engage in property seizures for failure to pay taxes. Local judges went into hiding to evade the rulings of higher courts. Armed citizens intimidated outsiders who tried to come and collect taxes by force.