SPECIES OF PROPERTY: THE AMERICAN PROPERTY-TAX UNIFORMITY CLAUSES RECONSIDERED

Abstract

Economic historians have traced the origin of the uniform property tax in the United States to the insertion of uniformity clauses into state constitutions in the Northwest and to efforts to tax commercial wealth. This article shows that the tax was created by legislation in the Northeast and that the first constitutional clauses were adopted in the South to protect slaveholders. It is time for historians of the U.S. political economy to abandon the dated paradigms of the “progressive history” tradition.