Hi
Did loyalists pay taxes during the Revolutionary War and which ones if any did they refuse to pay?
I look forward to your feedback.
I’m not an expert on the subject, but my understanding is that objection to certain taxes was widespread even among what would later be known as Loyalist communities (at first, nearly everyone was Loyalist), but that when it came to the crunch, for a certain portion, revolution and independence was a step too far. Not sure if they stopped resisting taxes at that point given there was now a rebellion that required aid to suppress…
I don’t know the answer except to say - like most other situations, and especially centuries ago before concern for due process and before the fourth amendment, paying taxes had an element of coercion. It’s not like today where you fill out a form (or not) and mail it in. A local authority was in charge of collecting certain taxes for an area, and if you didn’t pay, you got a visit from the local authorities. Typically these taxes were hard to avoid. A shipload of tea (or whatever) arrives in port, taxes have to be paid to offload the cargo. You want to buy a property, the stamp tax had to be paid or the document was not stamped with the official seal and not legally binding. And so on…
If the loyalist authorities had been run out of town and the revolutionaries set up their own administration, presumably that administration appointed itself tax collector for the area, and if you didn’t pay, then appropriate penalties were adjudicated; after a “fair and balanced” trial.
Parliament abolished most of the taxes that the Americans had complained about. The Stamp Act, for example, had been repealed in 1766 (it was only in effect for four months). So nobody was paying it during the Revolution.
The only tax that was still in effect during any part of the war was the tea tax established by the Tea Act of 1773 and that was repealed during the first year of the war by the Taxation of Colonies Act of 1778. And even while it was in effect, it was an indirect tax; the tax was paid on shipments of tea as they arrived in American ports. Nobody other than the cargo owners had to hand over money. Everyone else paid the tax indirectly by buying tea. Most people protested the tax by boycotting tea. Loyalists presumably continued to buy and drink tea but they didn’t have to directly pay any tax.
The American Revolution wasn’t really about taxes. It was a protest over how a legislative body in which Americans had no representation was enacting laws which applied to Americans.
Those were the specific taxes imposed by parliament to which the colonials objected. I assume there were assorted taxes imposed by the local governments; plus the whole of each empire, IIRC from history class, had a wall of duties imposed to ensure trade happened between the mother country and among the colonies, to wall out other empires’ colonies. Certainly the local governments did not operate on goodwill, and IIRC another history lesson, many appointed governors used their position to line their pockets courtesy of local taxes. Democratically elected governments needed money too.
To paraphrase the joke about capitalism vs. communism… Before the American Revolution, man exploited his fellow man. After the Revolution, it was the other way around.
The Whiskey Rebellion in 1791 occurred because the feds needed money, and the first federally imposed tax was an excise tax on whiskey. Locals objected.
But again, to answer the OP - whoever controlled the militia in the area collected the taxes when due.
Taxes during the Revolutionary era were collected by state and local governments. The British were out of the tax business by late 1775, when their collectors and officials were driven from the colonies, and the American federal government didn’t get into the tax business until 1789.
State taxes included property taxes, capitation taxes, licensing fees, and tariffs. The mix varied from state to state. States had to significantly increase taxes during the Revolution, both because they had to take over functions formerly provided by the British (paying the legislature, courts, and governor) and because expenses (for example, the militia) increased along with the war. As you might imagine, this caused grumbling among Loyalists and Patriots alike.
In general, however, outing yourself as a Loyalist by refusing to pay these taxes was a very, very bad idea. Loyalists were subjected to a variety of legal disabilities, were at risk of tarring and feathering (or worse), and could legally have their property confiscated by the state. I know of no organized Loyalist tax revolts. It just wasn’t practical.
What was practical, if the British army was anywhere near your home, was to flee behind British lines. Many Loyalists did that, especially to New York which the British occupied throughout the war. The writ of the states didn’t run behind British lines, so once there, you were secure from taxation. But, you would probably have your land and any property that you left behind confiscated.
So in general Loyalists behind British lines didn’t pay taxes; Loyalists elsewhere did or faced very, very severe consequences.
I don’t even know what you’re implying here, but FOX News wouldn’t exist for over a century yet, and they’re the ones who came up with that.
The Colonists didn’t want radical change, necessarily; they wanted their rights as Englishmen, and the Revolutionaries felt that the Crown was getting in the way of those rights. One of those rights was due process of law, including the accused having a jury of their peers. That wasn’t utterly novel to their mindset, and if the Crown wasn’t respecting that right very well, they could still feel it was something owed to them, and which they could provide for themselves.
Oh hell, the other colonies put up with it. The American colonies didn’t want to pay taxes to reimburse the crown for defending them in the French and Indian War.
That’s not really accurate. Parliament was urged by knowledgeable politicians from the start to simply ask the colonies for contributions, which they would have had supply - much like Parliament itself had to approve taxes. Parliament, however, conceived of itself as the master of all British domains, period, end of story. To that end, they began pushing farther and farther in the direction of demanding total control over the colonies, to the point of essentially denying them any of the rights of Englishmen (or Scots). Further, Parliament was keeping a standing army and requiring the colonies to pay for it… at the exact moment when there was no enemy to fight, while further restricting colonial trade even when it was necessary to pay the very taxes being imposed.
This is sort of hilarious, as it’s surprisingly similar in general concept to what sparked the English Civil War. Arbitrary taxation, assumption of executive authority not granted by consent, poor government, and the list goes on.
Freddy P. has made the same point as me. Do you think any legal action (if there was one) by the revolutionary authorities would have been the least bit fair? Or balanced? (hence the sarcasm). The mob mentality during a war is pretty blatant.
The desire to keep their Englishman rights seems to have faded for many with the presence of English (or rather German) troops marching across their land to take away any further rights. Sticking up for the “invaders” was a bad idea. The choice was pay taxes to the local authorities, whatever their current or forced loyalties, or suffer the legal consequences *and *moral outrage that ensued.
Note that the Ontario population got its main start from Loyalists who flocked to Canada after the revolution, so a number of loyalists disagreed enough to leave, or feared consequences of staying.
The government in America during the Revolution was based on elected legislatures. Granted, not everyone was represented (women, slaves, and Native Americans were all ineligible to vote and there were often other restrictions as well) but overall the people had the same control over what the government did as they have in any democracy; if you don’t approve of what the government’s doing you elect a different government.
In fact, much of the acrimony leading up to the revolution had more to do with self-important, London-appointed governors in some states assuming the legislatures were advisory and they had the right to ignore them… and order the judiciary around also.
But in situations of heightened emotions defying the common will of the people was unlikely to get you a fair trial. All the grandiose constitutional verbiage in the world means nothing if people don’t follow it. (Think Patriot Act, renditions, and the continuing NSA surveillance that should be antithecal to all America stands for.) Most of the Loyalists didn’t uproot and move a thousand miles because they preferred George III - they left because of serious fears for safety.
No, you set up a new, revolutionary government and take over. Take New York, for instance. Patriots there created a new New York Provincial Congress to replace the old, loyalist New York Assembly. One of the acts of the new revolutionary government (before writing a constitution, for instance) was to create “Committees of Sequestration” to confiscate and resell property owned by loyalists. Talk about efficient: the state raises money, its supporters get new land, and its opponents are dispossessed. Neat website here: Dispossessing Loyalists and Redistributing Property in Revolutionary New York | The New York Public Library
All this, while unpleasant, was much more polite than the lynchings and house burnings more common in the southern colonies.
Thanks Ispolkom. By the way is it acceptable among mainstream historians now to call the Revolutionary War a s civil war as well?
Thank you also.
I bolded some bits which basically say the same as I had earlier. The middle of a war was not a society politely observing everyone’s rights, regardless of the final outcome. They had set out to replace the “legitimate” power and had to force cooperation from anyone who questioned their power.
And, it seems, the Loyalists had (s) fair and balanced (/s) judgements entered against them to confiscate their property. The power du jour was not above using its power to exact cooperation, using the façade of rule of law.
So for the OP - given those circumstances, presumably one declined to pay taxes at your own risk.
It was not the complete overthrow of the old order you’re implying. Most of the members of the post-independence legislative bodies had been members of pre-independence assemblies. The same people were still in charge but now they had greater powers because they didn’t recognize London’s authority to overrule them.
And the property crimes didn’t just go one way. When Loyalists were in charge of an area, they used their power to confiscate property belonging to the Revolutionaries.
To me the fact that there was some continuity of cadres between the two governments is less important than the fact that the government itself was replaced by a completely separate new one, based on completely different legal theory, with the colonial charter replaced by a state constitution. I can’t remember how the new delegates to the provincial congresses and constitutional convention were chosen in any of the states. County elections? Self selection?
I know that the British harbored runaway slaves in the southern campaign, but otherwise where were loyalists in power long enough to confiscate property from patriots? New York City? Long Island? Georgia? I’m sure they would have acted as ruthlessly as the patriots if they could have, but I can’t think of when they had a chance.
Like md2000 writes, making a revolution isn’t playing pattycake. The patriots had to maintain and increase support for independence, and they did it though any means necessary. Compared to revolutions in the 20th century, though, it is impressive how limited, generally, those means were, and how quickly the methods were rejected after the war by the Constitutional Convention.
Variously. In some states, such as Massachusetts, the legislature simply designated itself as a Provincial Congress and began meeting without the sanction of the Crown.
In others, such as New York and Pennsylvania, where the legislature proved insufficiently radical to take such a step, rebels elected their own Provincial Congresses which gradually usurped the legislature. Given their extralegal origin, there was a degree of informality in such elections. For example, the county Committee of Correspondence might meet in somebody’s barn to elect a delegate.
Most of the Congresses doubled as Constitutional Conventions, writing new constitutions to replace the antiquated royal charters. (Connecticut and Rhode Island, however, kept their royal charters with only minor amendments [to remove the role of royalty] well into the Nineteenth Century.) In the 1780’s, Massachusetts and New Hampshire were the first states to organize separately elected Constitutional Conventions to devote full time to Constitutional contemplation, an important and often overlooked precedent for the national Constitutional Convention of 1787.
This is, as far as I can tell, not really accurate. The “revolutionary” governments were the same people, operating under the same legal systems, as in the colonial era. The only thing which changed about the “theory” was that they no longer acknowledged the sovereignty of the King. That is obviously a significant change in itself, but the substitution of a highly theoretical sovereign in a far-off-land who was de facto denying that the Americans were his people. Laws, tax authority, and continuity of government was all maintained more or less without incident except as occasioned by the war itself.
The reason for this was that Patriot sentiment was so widespread that throughout the colonies, on more or less a county-by-county and town-by-town basis, all lower or more local government accepted the legitimate sovereignty as residing in the state. But this itself was not really a change, since that’s basically the theory of government Americans had before the Revolution began. In a practical sense, two major changes did occur: First, the colonies began coordinating their activities through the Continental Congress, although it would not be until after the war that this would be more or less formalized as an American version of Parliament. Second, colonial governors were replaced with other men, with very different incentives and ideology, but often of the same class.
If anything, the Revolution was pretty quiet on this front, however. Loyalists who didn’t openly side against their countrymen were usually tolerated and accepted without much bickering. At most, only 10% or so of the Loyalist population left the Americas following the war. This might seem like a lot of people, around 50 to 60 thousand. But consider that something like 20 thousand actively fought on the British side during the war, and that with families these alone would have been more than the number of migrants, and it seems as though life under the Revolution could not have been especially unlivable. It may be particularly noteworthy that a sizable proportion of “Loyalists” who left to Canada did so to take advantage of preferable tax treatment, which does not imply that they found life intolerable.
Then they weren’t legal.