The Second Continental Congress realized it could not levy a direct tax on a population without directly confronting the institution of slavery, a confrontation which ostensibly would impugn the radical notion that “all men are created equal.” Instead, Congress opted for a colorblind tax policy—a non-direct tax on imports called the “impost”—that would allow the fledgling federal government to circumvent questions of slavery altogether and, support its proliferation, albeit tepidly.
The Second Continental Congress evaded the problem of apportionment—and therefore the sharp reality slavery— by designing in 1781 a “flat 5% ad valorem duty on all imported goods” to pay off war debts. In the words of historian Robin Einhorn, author of the magisterial American Taxation, American Slavery, “the impost required no apportionments, no decisions that would force Congress to talk about slavery.” Though Congress approved the “impost” unanimously in both 1781 and 1783, the Articles of Confederation made it impossible to enact without approval from every state legislature. Despite enthusiasm from Congress, neither the first nor second “impost” proposal became law because, in short, the state of Rhode Island refused to approve it on the grounds that it would lose revenue to Connecticut (with whom the state had its own preferential tariff already intact).
In many ways, debates from 1775-1783 helped to set the political stage for the ratification of the 3/5 clause in 1787. Both the arcane “impost” tax and the widely known 3/5 clause emerged as a Revolutionary-era alternative to taxation based on property apportionment.
Einhorn forcefully argues that these early discussions of tax policy have shaped the contours of the way Americans conceive of the relationship among wealth, race, and taxes today. Einhorn notes that “Americans are right to think that our anti-tax attitudes…have deep historical roots.” Our mistake, she writes,
is to dig for them in Boston instead of Virginia…because the origins of these attitudes have more to do with American slavery than the history of American freedom. They have more to do with protections for entrenched wealth than with promises of opportunity, and more to do with the demands of privileged elites than with the strivings of the common man. Instead of reflecting a heritage that valued liberty over all other concerns, they are part of the poisonous legacy we have inherited from the slaveholders who forged much of our political tradition.
Retracing the history of the first federal tax policy proposal—the impost tax—helps to demonstrate that the idea of taxation is rife with contestations over racialized power, wealth, and its (re)distribution. As we engage in contemporary debates over the various ways in which colorblind federal tax policy continues to disadvantage working class people—and more pointedly, working class people of color—through racialized wealth building instruments like preferential tax treatment of capital gains over earned income, as just one example, we should acknowledge that deliberations over taxes have always served as a proxy for questions of the consolidation of white racial interests. The impost tax, in fact, arguably serves as the prototype for an ostensibly colorblind tax code which, despite appearing race neutral, sidesteps real issues of racial wealth disparities and continues to disadvantage people and communities of color.