Tax after the American War of Independence: A consideration of the federalist and the anti-federalist papers

The road leading to the American Constitution’s explicit taxing powers was long, tortuous and costly in lives, blood spilt and money. To rid themselves of Great Britain’s monarchical tax overlordship, the colonists, effectively, ended up transferring that overlordship to their own Republican Congress. The fact that they managed to do this, and establish their own national taxing powers of a similar kind to the British ones they had thrown off, without further armed conflict is testament to that cost, and also to their willingness to debate and compromise. The key issue, of course, is that tax would be levied by a body to which they could send representatives, rather than by an overseas power to which they could send none. What emerges from the review of taxation above is the degree of sophistication that the individual states had reached in adapting or imposing tax to meet their own needs and state of development, which was not appreciated by the British Parliament in London, which was primarily concerned with its own finances and protection of its own trade and home markets. Conceptually, in terms of the ‘faculty tax’, many of the colonies had advanced the development of tax well beyond anything in place in Great Britain, and it is more than understandable that, after the War, the individual states did not want to give up their state taxing rights. Before, during and after the War, tax remained a contentious and sensitive topic.

There were many thinkers who influenced the colonists and Founding Fathers, as the work of Lutz and others has shown. It is clear that the forerunners in terms of influence as regards tax were Locke, Montesquieu and Hume, but what is particularly interesting is that both sides of the tax debate, the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists, knew their works so intimately and both cited them or showed their influence in their support or otherwise for the taxing powers incorporated into the Constitution in regard to the rule of law, consent and custom. It is, perhaps, surprising that the works of Thomas Paine and Jean-Jacques Rousseau do not feature more explicitly as significant influences on the Federalists or the Anti-Federalists, since both were noted for their social contract views/writings. In the case of Paine, it might be because he was himself regarded as one of the Founding Fathers (see earlier), and through Jefferson became a lasting voice in American democratic discourse. Rousseau was probably rejected for his advocacy of absolute government (i.e., democracy). Montesquieu’s works, although written likewise originally in French, had been widely available in English from the 1750s and had had a longer period during which to exert their influence.