The History of Quaker War Tax Resistance

Quaker historian Paul Buckley discusses the history of Quaker war tax resistance since the founding of the Religious Society of Friends.

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Transcript:

Some Friends – a man named Wallace Collett, who was a member of this Meeting, Cincinnati Community Friends... he was a banker, and what he would do is he would send a letter saying, “I have put aside money in the amount of the taxes owed plus all the penalties and I put it in an account at this bank.” And then he would go to the bank – to people he knew – and he would tell them, “the government’s going to come and ask for that money. It's there for them.” That gave him an opportunity to not just resist the war taxes – the portion of his income taxes he was estimating went to support the war – but to tell people in the business community and the banking community that he was doing it, why he was doing it, and try and prick their conscience; try and get them to realize that when you pay taxes to support the war, you earn a share of the guilt.

The History of Quaker War Tax Resistance

War taxes have been an issue for Friends almost from the beginning of the Society of Friends. It really becomes something that they need to deal with in a very immediate way in the 18th Century, in particular in Pennsylvania, where Quakers controlled the government and it was a colony of Britain. Britain got engaged in wars, and in those days when you had war, you passed specific taxes to pay for the war.

17th Century: Wrestling With the Question of War Taxes

The society of Friends had pretty much been able to ignore war, to just kind of say, “that was their problem,” but once they were in control of the government of Pennsylvania, it became our problem. How can we say that we as a people are not going to be involved in warfare, but we're going to pay money so that other people can be involved in warfare. They tried some subterfuges. They would pass a law that says that the citizens of Pennsylvania would be taxed for, I don’t know, their use of beer or, I don’t know – I don’t remember exactly what kinds of taxes they passed – but the tax would be designated “for the use of the King” or the “use of the Queen”. Now, they knew perfectly well what the use was going to be (and that was to support the military) but they could pretend that they were just doing their duty as citizens to render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s.

18th Century: The End of Quaker Participation in Government

It worked for a while, but then in the 1750s there was what what we in the United States call the French and Indian wars, and there was sufficient resistance to this... frankly, lying– that Philadelphia Yearly Meeting (which covered the territory that most of Pennsylvania was in) made a statement that it was inconsistent for Friends to participate in any way, not just in supporting wars, but participate in any ways in government, and that they needed to withdraw so that we could remain a peculiar people: a people who would demonstrate a different way of living than the one that was represented by the wider society, by the wider society that got itself involved in wars that we could not be part of.

19th Century: Saying No Publicly

After the Revolutionary War, the United States government also tended initially to have specific taxes for specific purposes, so when the War of 1812 came along, the United States government passed taxes to support the war. Individual states also passed taxes to support the war, and a lot of Quakers the time just said no, but they didn't say no by trying to hide from the tax. They would say no publicly.

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The views expressed in this video are of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the views of Friends Journal or its collaborators.

Видео The History of Quaker War Tax Resistance канала QuakerSpeak