Reviewed by Max M. Edling | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 63.4

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Reviewed by Max M. Edling | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 63.4 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Max M. Edling, Uppsala University

American Taxation, American Slavery. By Robin L. Einhorn. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. 349 pages. $35.00 (cloth).
Robin L. Einhorn is angry. She is angry with the politicians who run her country. She is angry with the citizenry, who lack faith in their ability to govern themselves and are too willing to be duped by corporate America and its political allies. She is angry with the history books "filled with things that we already know" (8), which make Americans ignorant "about who they are or who they were in the past" (2). She is angry with Jefferson and Madison, who fabricated and sold a false story of the American founding that has passed for truth ever since. At first sight fiscal history may seem an unlikely topic to generate so much passion. But though American Taxation, American Slavery contains much information about fiscal policies and institutions between the seventeenth century and the Civil War, it is not primarily a work about the American tax system. It is rather "an extended essay about democracy in America over this long period" (1), which uses "the history of tax policies and tax debates as a lens to focus in on when, where, and with what kinds of results democratic governments existed in the early United States" (8).	1
Einhorn belongs to a growing number of political historians who practice "institutionalist history." Though she is concerned with governmental institutions, Einhorn does not subscribe to the institutionalist claim that they have the power to shape society. To the contrary she repeatedly says that tax issues were peripheral to the development of the nation during most of the period she studies. In her view it was instead slavery and the conflict between slaveholders and nonslaveholders that drove national development, including the shaping of the American fiscal system. Einhorn's account is therefore in line with what most historians would argue: it is society that shapes governmental institutions, not the other way around.	2
On the eve of American independence, there existed not one American fiscal system but many. What was taxed, how, and how much varied from one state to another and reflected social, economic, political, and cultural differences with deep colonial roots. The most important line of division ran between the slaveholding South and the free North. In the North fiscal systems were more sophisticated than in the South. This sophistication was the result of a high level of popular participation in the administration of government, including fiscal administration, and of a lively democratic culture where different groups debated and struggled over the distribution of the tax burden. In the South, by contrast, there was little tradition of democracy or political struggle. Southern societies were run by elites who expected social inferiors to defer to their betters. In the North, where society was democratic and free, government became strong and competent. In the South, where society was undemocratic and shaped by slavery, government became aristocratic, weak, and incompetent. One of Einhorn's most arresting conclusions thus challenges the view of American democracy as yoked to limited government by claiming that "democracy and liberty produced stronger and more competent governments in early American history" (7).	3
Slave-owning elites were often willing to shoulder a significant part of the tax burden as long as they controlled the tax process. The Revolution confronted them with the need to share power with the free people of the North and thereby threatened the loss of such control. Any attempt to devise a national fiscal regime taxing property was bound to raise the issue of slavery and the value of slave property. Southern planters wished to avoid this eventuality because they feared that a national majority would impose heavy taxes on slaves, thereby threatening their economic and social position. Until the Civil War, they were largely successful in blocking a federal property tax. For most of the period from 1789 to 1861, the federal government levied only customs duties, which could be raised without any valuation of slaves or any ensuing discussion of slavery. Hence the federal fiscal regime was a system created by default rather than design. Customs duties were simply the only tax available to the federal government. The result was a weak, decentralized, and distant national government.	. . .

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