Anthony C. Infanti's "The Human Toll"

Anthony C. Infanti is the Christopher C. Walthour, Sr. Professor of Law at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law and author of Tax and Time: On the Use and Misuse of Legal Imagination and Our Selfish Tax Laws: Toward Tax Reform That Mirrors Our Better Selves.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his latest book, The Human Toll: Taxation and Slavery in Colonial America, with the following results:

At the top of page 99, a chart documents the amount of tax collected on the importation of enslaved persons to South Carolina from 1765 to 1775. The text surrounding that figure contains the last paragraph of the section in chapter 3 describing how the South Carolina legislature used taxation to manipulate the racial balance of the colony’s population during the quarter century preceding the Revolutionary War. That text describes the effect of a temporary £100 tax on the importation of enslaved persons:

This “prohibitory duty” mimicked the tenfold increase built into the 1740 General Duty Act after the Stono Rebellion, but it stiffened the disincentive by multiplying the highest rate of tax by ten and applying that additional tax to all imported enslaved persons on top of the base tax rate. The additional tax was in effect for three years beginning January 1, 1766. As indicated in figure 3.3, the additional tax—abetted by the Stamp Act controversy—led to a steep drop in import tax collections, evidencing a correspondingly steep drop in the importation of enslaved persons while the tax was in force. Nonetheless, import tax revenues—and imports—quickly bounced back in the early 1770s when a credit crisis led to a decline in demand in the eastern Caribbean that “caused captains … to seek more lucrative markets” in the leeward islands and South Carolina.

At the bottom of page 99, the final section of chapter 3 opens, recapping and reflecting on how “South Carolina’s legislature spent the final decades of the colonial period fine-tuning the legal regime through which it deployed the power to tax in the service of the evils of slavery, racism, and White supremacy.”

If a reader were to open The Human Toll to page 99, they would obtain a good sense of the book. As indicated at the bottom of that page, the book describes how taxation was used to support and promote the institution of slavery in the colonies that later became the United States of America. As exemplified by page 99, each chapter contains both historical data and analysis and a concluding “reflection.” That reflection synthesizes the data and analysis in the chapter and explores how the connections between taxation and slavery detailed in the chapter are similar to and/or different from those detailed elsewhere in the book.

Page 99 falls at the end of the portion of the book focused on South Carolina. South Carolina provides such an excellent example of the variety of connections between taxation and slavery in colonial America that it takes up nearly half the book. The remainder of the book is devoted to describing the connections between taxation and slavery in the other American colonies, broken down into chapters focusing on the northern, middle, and southern colonies. In addition to reflecting on the book as a whole, the conclusion suggests lessons that this fiscal history holds for present-day discussions of reparations.

Yet, page 99 provides only a teaser regarding the connections forged between taxation and slavery in colonial America. These connections, which vary from colony to colony and even within a single colony over time, fall into three categories: First, taxation was used to dehumanize enslaved persons by marking them as taxable “property.” Second, most colonies’ tax systems served as a mechanism for redistributing slaveholders’ economic losses when their enslaved persons were killed or executed under colonial slave codes, thereby opening a revealing tax window onto life in these colonial societies. Finally, the power of taxation was used to manipulate the racial balance of the colonies with the aim of better controlling the enslaved population—whether through tax incentives that shaped behavior (e.g., encouraging the purchase of more tractable enslaved persons from Africa rather than “seasoned” enslaved persons from other colonies) or through tax penalties like the one described on page 99 that were designed to curtail the importation of enslaved persons.

Learn more about The Human Toll at the NYU Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue