Ben Franklin and the “essential Liberty” of taxation

“Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”

It is among the better-remembered quotes from an eminently quotable founder. Few, however, would guess at the context: the “essential Liberty” was the right to levy a property tax.

Franklin’s words are not of Revolutionary War vintage, but rather much earlier, from 1755, as part of the Pennsylvania Assembly’s reply to Deputy Governor Robert Hunter Morris on a matter of financing.

It had been a bad year for the Province of Pennsylvania. A year prior, a young Colonel Washington committed a blunder that arguably transformed isolated skirmishes into what would become a world war. The Dinwiddie Expedition was responding to a series of raids by several French-allied Native American tribes in the turbulent frontier of the Ohio Valley. Washington established a stockade he called Fort Necessity, but soon advanced beyond it in an ill-conceived assault from which he quickly retreated.

The French converged on Fort Necessity, and in the melee that followed, the brother of the French commander, approaching under a white flag, was captured by Washington’s troops. What ensued is shrouded in mystery, with the French insisting, and Washington denying, that Washington had sanctioned the man’s murder by a Native ally to avenge a grudge. Whatever the case, the effect of the “Jumonville Incident” was almost immediate: France and Great Britain were at war, and Western Pennsylvania was the first theater.

The British sent General Braddock to lead an expedition against the French. It ended with Braddock dead, his aide (again, Washington) fleeing, and the French turning Fort Necessity into Fort Duquesne. Raids on British settlements in the Alleghenies increased, alarming the Crown and Pennsylvania’s Deputy Governor.

Pennsylvania was a proprietary colony controlled by two Penn heirs. The Deputy Governor was head of government, and legally served the interests of the proprietors, not the people. Most land outside Philadelphia was proprietary, held in fief by a few major landowners. And since most of this land was forested and unproductive, the charter exempted it from taxation. The Assembly’s powers were highly circumscribed in other ways as well.

But with a military crisis unfolding on the colony’s western frontier, the Penns and Deputy Governor Morris needed the Assembly to approve defensive expenditures. And just as the British Parliament won many of its supposedly “ancient liberties” by knowing when to grant or withhold a subsidy, the Assembly recognized that it finally held a valuable bargaining chip.

The Assembly repeatedly voted revenues for the defense of the territories, but exclusively from taxation of the exempt proprietary estates. Repeatedly, the Deputy Governor returned the bills. Eventually, Morris proposed a compromise: if the Assembly would commit to raising the revenue, he would sign legislation petitioning King George II on the question of proprietary estates. Should the King authorize their taxation, the Penns and Morris would yield.

This was insufficient for many in the Assembly, confident that the King would refuse, their bargaining chip spent. They countered the proposal in a response written by Franklin, proposing that the bill levy tax on the estates, to be stayed pending the King’s decree. Arguing for the liberty of the Assembly, Franklin wrote:

“In fine, we have the most sensible Concern for the poor distressed Inhabitants of the Frontiers. We have taken every Step in our Power, consistent with the just Rights of the Freemen of Pennsylvania, for their Relief, and we have Reason to believe, that in the Midst of their Distresses they themselves do not wish us to go farther. Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety...”

In the buildup to a later conflict, American colonists would insist on the principle of “no taxation without representation.”

Here, Franklin stood on the idea that no government could be truly representative if the taxing power (whether in exercise or forbearance) lay wholly elsewhere. Taxing authority, he believed, belonged with the people and their representatives, and it was just as repugnant to the emerging principles of representative government for the Assembly to be thwarted in the exercise of its taxing powers as it was for an unelected government to levy taxes without its consent.

The political battle ended in stalemate. The Assembly’s petition was rejected, and the proprietors failed to persuade the Assembly to commit funds.

Shortly after, a militia was established, but with no powers of conscription, fighting under no articles of war, and funded by voluntary subscription. The French and Indian War was just the first theater of the Seven Years’ War waged across continents. And the liberty Franklin refused to surrender — a liberty the Assembly never properly possessed, nor successfully exercised — would not be realized until the start of a later conflict, when, with the commencement of the American Revolution, Pennsylvania was made a Commonwealth, the feudal lands were broken up, and the Penn family was deposed.

Liberty it was, and purchased at the cost of more than a little safety.

Jared Walczak is a Tax Fellow at Mountain States Policy Center.

Note: A longer version of this piece was originally published in The SALT Road.