| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

American Taxation, American Slavery. By Robin L. Einhorn. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. xii, 337 pp. $35.00, ISBN 0-226-19487-6.)
Robin L. Einhorn's American Taxation, American Slavery presents useful new information on tax policy for several states in the colonial and antebellum periods, and it is an important contribution for both general and economic historians. Her detailing of taxation debates in this period provides interesting insight into aspects of the American fiscal system. There is material on the establishment of tax sys tems—what was taxable and at what rates, how assets were assessed, and what the politics were of the collection system. This book is a useful complement to Robert A. Becker's Revolution, Reform, and the Politics of American Taxation, 1763–1783 (1980).	1
Einhorn has two related hypotheses for consideration. One is that the North and South differed in the nature of their tax systems, based on the relative importance of slavery. There is, however, little explanation of how and why "starting in the 1830s, the state tax systems grew more similar" (pp. 105, 218). The other concerns what is presented as the seemingly superior intellect of the southern slaveholders that permitted them to continually dupe northerners (who "did not understand") into accepting their preferences (pp. 204–5).	. . .

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