Chapter One
Virginia
At the outbreak of the American Revolution, Virginia had an extraordinarily primitive tax system. It levied several different taxes, giving the system as a whole an air of complexity, but each tax in this system was primitive in design and simple to implement. Nothing in Virginia''s tax system required local officials to perform complex administrative tasks and nothing imposed serious administrative burdens on taxpayers. Nothing in this system involved even a hint of the sacrifice of simplicity to equity that is the hallmark of modern taxation.
Virginia levied an annual poll tax on "tithables" (defined as free men plus enslaved men and women), which financed both the colony government and its local governments, and it taxed key exported and imported commodities at flat rates by volume (as in two shillings per hogshead of tobacco exported). It taxed carriages, levying one flat rate on four-wheel "chariots" and another on two-wheel "chairs," licensed taverns at flat annual rates, and charged fees for the use of its legal system. Landholders paid a small tax to the British crown or, in part of the colony, to a private proprietor. Known as the "quitrent," this tax levied a flat rate on each hundred-acre tract, regardless of its value, use, or location. Finally, Virginia taxed imported slaves at a percentage of the price paid by the purchaser. This was the only tax Virginia ever had levied on an ad valorem basis (at a percentage of the taxed item''s value), and it was highly vulnerable to fraud, as the buyers and sellers of imported slaves colluded to report prices from transactions that nobody monitored. Yet the really striking fact about the history of taxation in colonial Virginia is that this oldest, largest, and richest of the thirteen colonies-whose ruling gentry were proud of their tradition of self-government-actually had never asked its tax officials to measure the value of anything.
The massive costs of the Revolutionary War forced Virginia''s newly independent state government to modernize this tax system in a hurry. Virginians scrambled to implement drastic reforms that the northern colonies had learned to administer through more than a century of day-to-day practice. Suddenly, armed only with vague directions from the legislature, local officials were expected to determine the value of various forms of property held by individuals and then to use these valuations to assess and collect extremely high taxes. The officials were supposed to do all this while British warships blockaded the coast, marauding armies marched and pillaged around the countryside, African Americans abandoned the plantations in large numbers, and the inflation caused by huge emissions of depreciating paper money threw the financial system into disarray. Needless to say, the results were less than salutary.
Why did Virginia find itself in this mess? Why hadn''t it developed a more sophisticated tax system earlier? The answers to these questions are complicated, but the crucial point is that Virginia did find itself in this mess during the Revolution because it had not developed a more sophisticated tax system earlier. In its one-hundred-fifty-year history as a colony, Virginia had developed only quite rudimentary public institutions. Its gentry gloried in the accomplishments of their House of Burgesses, which had asserted certain decision-making prerogatives against royal governors, but this gentry had acquired remarkably little experience in either framing or administering complex public policies of any kind. They simply were not equipped to defend their independence against a king who was determined to keep his empire. Looking back at the spectacle, we can applaud the quixotic faith of a confident gentry-it takes a special kind of person in an underdeveloped society to proclaim "Give me liberty or give me death" to a superpower-but we also must ask what was wrong with them. Where had the Virginians been all those years?
The short answer is they had been in two places. For much of the seventeenth century, Virginia was a charnel house. Dying almost as quickly as they arrived, from disease, warfare, and other violence, the survivors may have opted for simple institutions as the only ones they had any hope of being able to implement. By the eighteenth century, a more stable society with greater wealth had emerged, but the gentry class who emerged with it enjoyed the private worlds of their plantations, where they ruled as sovereigns over "families" of slaves, servants, and other dependents, far more than the public world of colonial government, whose political jockeying they loathed-though they did not loathe it enough to cede it to their social inferiors. Virginia had little electoral politics. The assembly''s lower house, the Burgesses, were the colony''s only elected officials, its county governments consisting of gentry cliques who co-opted new members themselves. It also had little legislative politics in the modern sense of hammering out policies to arbitrate diverse and competing interests. Slavery, gentry rule, and the elite prerogatives that followed from sovereign mastership inhibited the development of Virginia''s public institutions in the eighteenth century as effectively as social disorganization had done in the seventeenth.
The only policy system that Virginia elaborated with any vigor in the colonial period was tobacco inspection, an effort to protect the value of the colony''s staple crop on the world market in the eighteenth century. Yet even the tobacco inspection system required its officials to make only yes-or-no decisions (to approve or reject proffered tobacco) rather than the more complex judgments that might have followed from a series of grades, like the ones Pennsylvania used for flour inspection. Virginia''s political elite, in short, embarked on the Revolutionary War with hardly any usable traditions of competent governance. Their primitive tax system exemplified a more general lack of sophistication in their public institutions. The war forced them to consider whether they wanted to solve these problems. It turned out that they didn''t.
Society
Virginia was a terrible place in the seventeenth century. Epidemic diseases and rampant personal and organized violence yielded a life expectancy of about fifty for settlers who survived their first summer (the "seasoning" that killed half the people who arrived) and simply ravaged the Indian population of Britain''s first mainland American settlement. From 1622 to 1640, the English population of Virginia rose from about 2,000 to 8,000-but more than 15,000 settlers had arrived. As for the Indians, the Powhatan Confederacy was a well-organized network of 30 to 40 tribes when the English established Jamestown in 1607, but it had disintegrated by 1646. Of 28 tribes whose presence the English recorded in 1608, only 11 still existed in 1669. Over the same period, an Indian population of about 20,000 fell to about 2,000, with the survivors losing their independence, their land, most of their towns, and much else of what had comprised their way of life. They mounted two major attacks on the settlers, in 1622 and 1644. These efforts not only failed to dislodge the English but provoked massive reprisals and a long-term military response that can be described only as a policy of extermination.
Virginia''s settlers did not treat one another all that much better than they treated Indians. Overwhelmingly male and with a variety of useless specialized occupations, the early groups of them would have starved if the energetic Captain John Smith had not established a dictatorship and forced them to grow food, and if Powhatan, the confederacy''s leader, had not provided more food because he viewed them as pawns in his diplomatic relations with other Indian groups. The Virginia Company, which was chartered by James I in 1606, chose these settlers to pursue what turned out to be a series of harebrained schemes to bring wealth back to England: goldsmiths and refiners to process gold that did not exist, glassmakers, silk dressers, perfumers, apothecaries, and a huge oversupply of "gentlemen," who paid their own way to Virginia but had no plans to engage in manual labor. Virginia actually fulfilled nobody''s plans, and the settlers who survived were disappointed. They did not take their disappointment calmly. They reacted with extreme violence, toward each other and Indians, despite depending on the Indians for food. The ensuing disasters climaxed in the 1622 massacre of one-third of the settlers. The Virginia Company went bankrupt, and the crown took over the colony.
Meanwhile, the Virginia settlers had managed to find a crop they could grow profitably. For all the criticism tobacco provoked, both in Europe and Virginia, it was what made the colony a viable venture. Tobacco was easy to grow, easy to ship, and easy to sell. A boom in the 1620s led to bust in the 1630s, when Virginia''s tobacco production increased so dramatically that prices collapsed. By the 1650s, however, tobacco''s still-falling prices were offset by lower production costs, and this staple crop was shaping a society that had begun to look permanent. The drastic death rates of the early years fell, the settlers supplemented their ubiquitous tobacco with corn, cattle, and hogs to feed themselves, and, after Powhatan''s son Opechancanough failed to destroy the colony in a major 1644 attack, the region''s Indians were defeated decisively.
Yet all was not well for the settlers. Most, and perhaps ninety percent of them, arrived as indentured servants, which meant that they sold the next four to seven years of their lives for the price of crossing the Atlantic. They made these deals at English ports, turning themselves into commodities. They could be bought, sold, and even gambled away as the private property of the men who owned the remaining time of their contracts. Virginia landowners purchased servants in large numbers until about 1680, when a series of complex economic changes made them stop buying English servants and start buying African slaves. Most servants were male, especially in the early years, but increasing numbers of female servants and other migrants led to somewhat more balanced sex ratios by the 1690s, of about two women to every three men. Virginia''s laws treated servants harshly. The courts punished servants who deprived their masters of labor (by running away, becoming pregnant, breaking other rules) by adding time to their terms. Masters used these and similar laws-which they made by controlling Virginia''s assembly and enforced by controlling its courts-to squeeze additional time and labor out of their servants.
If male servants survived their terms, they had relatively good chances of acquiring land and perhaps even their own servants. But, as the likelihood that they would survive went up, the availability of land for them went down. The sharp decline in mortality that began in the 1650s was accompanied by an increased concentration of landownership in the hands of the small elite that began to be identifiable as Virginia''s "gentry." The land most accessible to former servants, moreover, was located on the "frontier," in areas where Indians were still in a position to resist white encroachment. The fact that this land was located upriver from the landing places of the British tobacco fleets also forced small-scale farmers to depend on gentry planters in selling their tobacco and buying imported goods. Simmering conflicts between the gentry and poorer settlers exploded over specific issues. The major explosion, Bacon''s Rebellion (1676), was sparked by the coastal gentry''s rejection of an all-out war against all neighboring Indians, regardless of their diplomatic relations with the colony. Starting with genocidal raids against Indians, the rebellion expanded into a murderous civil war, with white yeomen, servants, and African slaves fighting together against the corrupt oligarchy centered on Governor William Berkeley. Bloodthirsty reprisals featuring extortion (sign over your property to us or we''ll hang you) confirmed the rebels'' view of their triumphant enemies. They also persuaded the royal commission that arrived with 1,000 soldiers to help Berkeley defeat the rebels to oust his regime as well. The Plant Cutters'' Rebellion (1682) resulted from efforts to curtail tobacco production to raise prices. It was less serious than Bacon''s Rebellion, though it too ended in a series of hangings.
By 1700, Virginia had been transformed by the enslavement of Africans. Although some African slaves had toiled in Virginia since at least 1619, the large numbers arrived in the decades after 1680, and continued to arrive until the 1770s, when the Virginia planters decided they had as many slaves as they could use. In 1690, Africans and their African American children were seven percent of the population. From 1750 to 1780, they were forty percent of the population. The economic history of eighteenth-century Virginia is the history of slavery, and its social and cultural history reflected struggles by an increasingly American-born slave population to control their own community life and elaborate their own culture, with particular success in the quarters of the larger plantations. In spite of (or really because of) its violence and exploitation, slavery turned Virginia into a more congenial place for whites, who generally treated one another with more respect than before. This is the era of the fabled Virginia gentry, the grand houses and families, and the men who led the American Revolution.
Virginia remained a terrible place for blacks and, as white settlement extended further westward, for ever more groups of Indians. For them, life in Virginia remained as violent as it ever had been for whites and a good deal more oppressive. As long as these very large facts are kept in mind, however, eighteenth-century Virginia looks like the society we normally think of as the world of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. A majority of white families worked on land they owned, wealthy planters owned large labor forces of African and African American slaves, most white males could vote for representatives in the House of Burgesses, and while gentry slaveholders and yeoman farmers disagreed about a range of issues and developed increasingly divergent lifestyles, they made the Revolution together-as slaveholders and as farmers who hoped to be able to buy slaves in the future.
Government
The government of Virginia was hopelessly corrupt in the seventeenth century, and its institutions remained primitive in the eighteenth. The Virginia Company allowed the settlers to establish rudimentary representative institutions that, under crown control, became the tripartite government of House of Burgesses, council, and governor by 1650. The burgesses were elected and the council was appointed by the governor, who in turn was appointed by the British crown. The governor also appointed Virginia''s local officials, the county court commissioners who acted as judges, legislators, and executives in the counties. After 1654, the governor was required to appoint new county court commissioners from lists supplied by the incumbents. While this rule clearly represented a victory for local control, removing county jobs from the British patronage network, it was far from democratic. It created a system of self-perpetuating county oligarchies in which membership carried life tenure and essentially passed as a family heirloom. Virginia''s voters did not win the right to elect their local government officials until 1851.
Starting in 1662, meanwhile, the county court members, now known as justices of the peace, also served as county sheriffs, rotating the job among themselves to guarantee each a shot at the lucrative fees sheriffs received for their services. Rounding out the Virginia government system, vestries supervised religious affairs, levying taxes to pay ministers'' salaries and build and maintain churches. Initially elected (when a new vestry was established), vestrymen served for decades at a time and chose new members themselves-in a self-perpetuation even more direct than the county court nomination lists. Burgesses, county courts, and vestries usually were the same men, serving in all three posts simultaneously, although they stepped down from the county courts temporarily while serving as sheriffs. These men overwhelmingly were wealthy planters, the owners of large numbers of white servants in the seventeenth century and large numbers of enslaved Africans in the eighteenth. Members of the council tended to be even wealthier, while the governors were British aristocrats or near-aristocrats with connections to top crown officials in London.
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Excerpted from AMERICAN TAXATION, AMERICAN SLAVERYby Robin L. Einhorn Copyright © 2006 by The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission.
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