SEVERAL MORNINGS AFTER MICHAEL BROWN was shot and killed, and a group of angry youths burned down the local Quick Trip gas station, I ran into a few gentlemen assembled in that same burned-out parking lot, arguing and talking about politics as they cleaned up the site. One man in his fifties, with a wiry intensity, looked into the camera I had with me and said, “We want the world to know that we are a dignified, intelligent people, and we deserve every liberty that the United States Constitution affords any citizen.”
But what was the Constitution doing, really, in Ferguson? It seemed an absurdly remote abstraction, as practical a piece of protection as reciting a poem into the barrel of a gun. And yet in a grand irony the document itself, and the nation it binds together, was born of almost the exact same set of grievances as those of the protesters getting teargassed in the streets of Ferguson.
We are taught in grade school that the motto of the America Revolution was “No taxation without representation.” The tyrannical King George III insisted on taxing the colonies against their will, employing ever more draconian measures to do so, until the colonists could take it no longer.
The idea that unjust taxation triggered the American uprising stays with us (or at least it stayed with me). But dig a little deeper into the history, and it turns out the spark of the revolution was not so much taxation as the enforcement of a particular tax regime—in other words, policing.
Today the word taxes conjures up images of our modern administrative state, with automatic payroll deductions, marginal brackets, and sales tax, a system in which the collection of taxes is a bureaucratic affair. But that image fails to capture what taxation meant in the colonies at the time of the revolution. Under the British colonial system (and indeed for the first century of the United States), the lion’s share of taxes was assessed as tariffs: duties imposed on those wishing to import or export goods. These tariffs were central to the entire colonial system erected by England and other empires during the era of mercantilist trade wars that dominated the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries.
Under British law (codified in the Navigation Acts), merchants and consumers in the colonies had to import nearly all of their products from British companies and pay very steep tariffs to do it. While Adam Smith would show, in The Wealth of Nations (published the same year as the Declaration of Independence), how self-defeating this system of trade ultimately was, to the mercantilist empires at the time the logic was impeccable: colonies meant cheap commodity imports for the home country, a lucrative market for manufactured exports, and significant revenues through tariffs on all those exchanges. (The British would later employ this same logic to outlaw Indians on the subcontinent from making their own salt, or weaving their own garments, so they’d have to purchase both from their colonial ruler.)
So if you lived in the colonies and wanted to buy something that wasn’t produced or grown there—whether tea to drink or the molasses your distillery needed to produce rum—you had to import it through the Crown and pay a steep tariff. And that’s when you could actually get the thing you wanted. Often you couldn’t, since many popular products weren’t produced anywhere in the British Empire. Madeira wine was made in rival Portugal and became quite popular in the colonies, but it had to be smuggled in. (A shipment of Madeira would be at the heart of the 1768 Liberty Affair, an early skirmish over smuggling enforcement that would pave the way to the revolution. George Washington was a famous devotee of the beverage.)
In the American colonies, local shipping magnates provided illicit goods like Madeira. Despite their businesses’ illegitimacy before British law, they were men of great wealth, prestige, and power. John Hancock, the man whose iconic signature dominates the founding documents, was one of the most infamous smugglers of his day. He was a criminal, basically—and he and his fellow smugglers kept the colonies running. Without the goods they smuggled, there would have been little local economy to speak of. Because the black market was so widespread, agents of the Crown tended to view the colonies as a den of iniquity, a seedy place overwhelmingly populated by hustlers, hucksters, and shady characters. One British officer referred to the residents of Newport, Rhode Island, one of the main smuggling hubs at the time and now a famous bastion of privilege, as “a set of lawless piratical people . . . whose sole business is that of smuggling and defrauding the King of his duties.”