called personal property in existence—that is, there were no credit or paper representatives of property, but everything in the nature of property existed in the form of land, slaves, houses, animals, agricultural products, tools, or furniture.
The record of the assemblage (convention) that drafted the Constitution, which by adoption by the parties (States) thereto called the United States into existence as a nation, on this subject of guarding and limiting the taxing power on the part of the prospective State or Government which they proposed to create, is comparatively full and complete. The Revolution, which involved the renouncing of all allegiance of the British-American colonies to the mother country, had its origin in unjust taxation; and in the Declaration of Independence this fact was made conspicuous among the reasons that were relied on by the colonies to justify their action in the opinion of mankind. The attempt in 1778 to establish a General Government by the union of all the colonies under certain conditions, known as Articles of Confederation, was found after a few years of experience to be wholly lacking in all the elements of strength and stability, through the lack of any proper adjustment of the power of taxation; thereby entailing an almost complete inefficiency of sovereignty. Thus, there was no power in the Congress of the Confederation to raise money by taxation; but the Confederation depended for revenue upon requisitions on the several States, with which the States might comply or not, as they chose, and with which they generally did choose not to comply, either promptly or fully, if at all. Some of the States levied duties on the imports of merchandise at the expense of their neighbors; and adjacent ports in different States competed with each other by arbitrarily varying the rates on imports, as the Congress of the Confederation had no authority to regulate commerce, or legislate on this subject for the whole country.[1] The result was, as Mr. Madison expressed it, that "the Federal authority had ceased to be respected abroad, while at home it had lost all confidence and credit." It was to remedy this one radical infirmity, more than any other, that the present Constitution was projected and formed. Other great improvements in the Articles of Confederation were contemplated and made in the Constitution when it was formed, but the most important of all was in the regulation of taxation. Hamilton, who drafted the address to the States inviting them to send dele-
- ↑ The author of The Federalist (No. 7) refers to the situation of New York, as compared with that of Connecticut and New Jersey, as affording an example of the opportunities which some States had under the Confederation of rendering others tributary by a monopoly of the taxes on imports, and said that New York would neither be willing nor able to forego the advantage of levying duties on importations, a large part of which must be necessarily paid by the individuals of the other two States in their capacity of consumers.
