The first period of Quaker war tax resistance
Quakers refused to pay for war almost from the beginning. As early as 1659, “books of sufferings” record persecutions of English Quakers for refusing to pay war taxes with names like “trophy money,” the “charge of the trained-bands,” and the “charge of the militia.” Robert Barclay wrote in 1676 that Quakers “have suffered much . . . because we neither could ourselves bear arms, nor send others in our place, nor give our money for the buying of drums, standards, and other military attire.”
But as governments changed how they raised money for war, Quaker discipline failed to keep up. Things like “trophy money” were replaced by less-conspicuous war taxes. For example, in 1695 Parliament authorized a new tax on marriages, births, and burials to raise money “for carrying on the war against France with vigour.” When Elizabeth Redford tried to convince Quakers to refuse to pay this war tax, her meeting charged her with violating Quaker discipline and told her to keep quiet about her peculiar scruples.
It was not until 1755 that Quakers began to reexamine war taxes in earnest. This started the strongest period of war tax resistance in Quaker history.
That year, the Quaker-dominated Pennsylvania Assembly voted to fund a military defense against French allies in the Seven Years’ War. This explicit betrayal of the peace testimony by an assembly that had been paying lip service to it for years was too much for some Quakers. Several, including John Woolman and Anthony Benezet, wrote the colonial assembly to say their consciences would not allow them to pay taxes for military fortifications.
At first, their position was seen as dangerously extreme. The assembly was unmoved. London Yearly Meeting, in order to bring these dissenters back in line, sent emissaries to the colonies to “explain and enforce our known principles and practice respecting the payment of taxes for the support of civil government.” But the radical war tax resistance position, and the sincerity of those who held it, proved influential. The London emissaries returned home with their own views softened, and the radical position began also to take hold in England.
By the time of the American Revolution, a firmer policy of war tax resistance had become a near orthodoxy in many American meetings. In 1776, Philadelphia Yearly Meeting added this line to its discipline: “It is the judgment of this meeting that a tax levied for the purchasing of drums, colors, or for other warlike uses, cannot be paid consistently with our Christian testimony.”