From EnidNews.com: A taxing question
From the very founding of this nation, Americans have been averse to paying taxes.
The seeds of the American Revolution were sown from the debate over whether England and the British Parliament could levy taxes against the American Colonies to help in paying the mother country’s massive war debts.
In fact, the United States of America was nearly wrecked before it began, when individual states either refused or were unable to levy taxes on citizens to help pay the Continental Army.
You see, the Continental Congress had no way of imposing taxes to pay for the American Revolution. America owes its very existence to men and women who volunteered — sometimes without pay or even adequate food and clothing — to establish the United States.
That fact stems from the incongruous notion Americans wanted to be free from England, they just didn’t want to pay for it out of their pockets.
Of course, these were the days long before a central federal government had much power.
And, as history has shown, the 13 original colonies never could quite agree on the issue of taxation.
In fact, taxation was one of the very first headaches President George Washington found himself dealing with in the early days of the republic.
The so-called Whiskey Rebellion of 1794, now seems like a quaint little tidbit for historians.
But in its day, this little rebellion by a group of Pennsylvania farmers nearly was as far-reaching as the Civil War, the Revolutionary War or any subsequent segment of our nation’s story. It was the fledgling nation’s first test of our commitment to the constitutional rule of law.
In 1790, the new national government of the United States still was attempting to establish itself.
Because the government had assumed the debts incurred by the individual colonies during the Revolution, it was deeply in debt, with few ways to remedy the problem.
During the winter of 1791, both houses of Congress approved a bill that placed an excise tax on all distilled spirits — proposed by Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton to help prevent the national debt from growing.
Angered by the excise tax, farmers in the western counties of Pennsylvania engaged in a series of attacks on excise agents sent to collect taxes.
The new tax effectively eliminated any profit the farmers gained from the sale or barter of one of their most important cash crops — the distilling of whiskey.
The rebelling farmers rioted in many towns on the frontier, roughing up the new tax collectors.
Open rebellion broke out in July 1794, when a federal marshall was attacked in Allegheny County, Pa.
Hundreds of farmers attacked the residence of the regional inspector, burning his home and farmstead. Mobs rioted in Pittsburg as well.
On Aug. 7, 1794, President Washington issued a proclamation which called out the militia to maintain order and help send the irate farmers back to their farms.
Washington’s order mobilized an army of almost 13,000 men — as large as the one which had defeated the British a few years before — under the command of Gen. Light-Horse Harry Lee, who was serving as governor of Virginia.
In fact, to demonstrate his new presidential authority, Washington himself set out at the head of the troops to suppress the rebellion.
This action was the first use of the Militia Law of 1792, which set precedent for the use of militia to execute the laws of the Union and suppress insurrections.
It also set in motion the power of the national government to enforce order in one state, with troops raised from other states.
It went even further, testing the power of the newly formed federal government to establish primacy in disputes within and between individual states.
It is interesting to note, somewhat akin to what we are seeing in today’s Occupy Wall Street movement across the country, the farmers of the 1790s were convinced a tax upon liquor, which was a common drink of the nation, operated in proportion to the number — and not to the wealth — of the people.
These rebels, as they then were called, saw this as an injustice in itself, and oppressive upon the poor.
To their way of thinking, poor farmers were being taxed for the product of their labors, while the rich and well to do simply enjoyed the whiskey, without paying their fair share of the tax.
By November 1794, Hamilton wrote to Washington the list of prisoners taken by the militia had grown to about 150.
Calling the militia home after having successfully put down the Whiskey Rebellion, the father of our country, on July 10, 1795, issued a pardon to all insurgents who had been taken prisoner, but who had yet to be sentenced or indicted.
By this time, however, most of the rebellious farmers had been acquitted for lack of evidence.
And so, out of this historical context, the federal government was born.
