468 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



the sums for wliicli they were severally assessed and liable to pay 

 into the national Treasury. In the case, however, of the levy in 

 1801, eleven States openly in insurrection against the Federal Gov- 

 ernment, one loyal State, and one Territory (Utah) refused or 

 neglected to pay their assessment ; whereupon a law was passed 

 by Congress authorizing the appointment of special officials, 

 whose duty it was to go into such States as soon as it was prac- 

 ticable and levy the proper assessments, seizing and selling real 

 property whenever it became necessary to enforce payments of 

 the amount required. And these provisions of law were enforced 

 by threat or action to such an extent that about 83,800,100 were 

 collected up to 1870, out of an aggregate quota of $5,153,891 due 

 from all the States that adopted ordinances of secession; the total 

 amount assessed on all the States having been $20,000,000. 



The confusion attendant on the settlement after the war of 

 the unpaid liabilities of the impoverished insurrectionary States 

 to the Federal Government, on account of the direct tax of 1801, 

 finds further illustration in the circumstance, that the Comptroller 

 of the United States Treasury decided in 1883 that the sum of 

 $35,555, appropriated by an act of Congress to refund to the State 

 of Georgia money expended by it in 1777, or one hundred and six 

 years previously, for the common defense in the War for Inde- 

 pendence, should be paid to the Treasurer of the United States, 

 "to the credit of Georgia on account of direct taxes charged 

 against the State." The Supreme Court of the United States also 

 decided in 1887 (United States vs. Louisiana, 37, 123) that the 

 direct-tax law in 18G1 did not create any liability on the part of a 

 State to pay the tax ; and that the apportionment merely desig- 

 nated the amount to be levied upon the property of individuals in 

 the several States, without any liability attaching to the State in 

 its political and corporate character. " This decision finally left 

 the unpaid quota of the direct tax of 1861 in precisely the same 

 position as any other tax assessed upon individuals, which the 

 United States has been unable or has neglected to collect in full." 

 (Dunbar, Direct Tax of 18G1, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 

 July, 1889.) 



At the time when it was proposed to enforce the tax on de- 

 faulting States by the seizure and sale of land, a doubt was ex- 

 pressed whether the tax in question was, in its essence, "a tax on 

 the land and all the various estates into which the fee may have 

 been divided, or was a tax on the owner of the land and levied on 

 the interest of the owner in it, and on no other subordinate or 

 incorporeal interest. But no tax was ever collected or any land 

 sold under the act of seizure and sale." (Hillard, Law of Taxa- 

 tion.) 



But, apart from a unison of opinion as to the methods by which 



