American taxation, American slavery

"For all the recent attention to the slaveholding of the Founding Fathers, we still know remarkably little about the influence of slavery on American politics. American Taxation, American Slavery tackles this problem in a new way. Rather than parsing the ideological pronouncements of charismatic slaveholders, it examines the concrete policy decisions that slaveholders and non-slaveholders made in the critical realm of taxation. The results are surprising - that the enduring power of antigovernment rhetoric in the United States stems from the nation's history of slavery rather than its history of liberty."--BOOK JACKET.