"Taxation provided yet another example of the inequitable turn taken by public policy. Before the war, landed property in most Southern states had gone virtually untaxed, while poll taxes and levies on slaves, luxuries, commercial activities, and professions provided the bulk of revenue. As a result, white yeomen paid few taxes, planters paid more, although hardly an amount commensurate with their wealth and income (partly because they generally assessed the value of their own holdings), and urban and commercial interests complained of an excessive tax burden. War and emancipation inevitably increased the demands upon state revenues while the region's poverty made even low tax rates seem a hardship. Under these circumstances, the tax system became a battleground where the competing claims of various classes of Southerners were fought out.59"
Throughout the world, political elites have employed poll or 'head' taxes, which require individuals to obtain cash, to prod self-sufficient peasants to enter the labor market. In Presidential Reconstruction, tax policy was intended, in part, to reinforce the planter's position vis-a-vis labor. Heavy poll taxes were levied on freedmen, encouraging them to work for wages, while those unable to pay were deemed vagrants, who could be hired out to anyone meeting the tax bill. Meanwhile, levies on landed property remained extremely low (one tenth of 1 percent in Mississippi, for example), shielding planters and yeomen from the burden of rising government expenditures. As a result, 'the man with his two thousand acres paid less tax than any one of the scores of hands he may have had in his employ who owned not a dollar's worth of property.' He also paid less than town craftsmen, whose earnings were taxed at rates far higher than real estate. In Mississippi's Warren County, the three largest landowners each paid less than $200 in taxes, while the owner of a livery stable paid nearly $700, a butcher over $200, and a shoemaker $75. In addition, localities added poll taxes of their own, sometimes, in black belt counties, raising the bulk of their revenue in this manner. Mobile levied a special tax of $5 on every adult male 'and if the tax is not paid,' reported the city's black newspaper, 'the chain-gang is the punishment.' With state, county, and local levies, blacks might find themselves paying $15 in poll taxes alone.60"
Reconstruction - America's Unfinished Revolution - 1863-1877, Eric Foner, pp.205-206
