A flat tax? Tax cuts? Complete elimination of the income tax? These ideas have most certainly been advocated by members of the Republican Party during the past few decades. Party leaders such as George W. Bush, Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich expressed disdain for the income tax and utilized their power to remove it as a revenue source. At the time of the Civil War, many Republicans, mainly in the Northeast, were opposed to the new Federal Income Tax. Initially used to finance that war, the Federal income tax became a hotly-debated issue at a time when America was trying to put back together a fractured nation. The issue split the party, with Midwestern and Southern Republicans wanting to continue the income tax, and Northern and Western Republicans championing its demise. In the end, the anti-income tax wing took control of the Republican Party and shaped its economic principles for the future. The book is an in-depth look into how the Republicans in Congress dealt with the creation of the United States' first income tax and how it affected the party for the future. The author argues that the anti-income tax faction of the Republican Party won the debate and took over the party – and to this day, the Republican Party typically promotes either cutting taxes or eliminating them altogether. The author gives a brief history of the formation of the Republican Party and how they developed their economic views in distinction from the declining Whig Party, who mostly sought to fund the federal budget through tariffs and not by taxing the people directly. The second half of the book looks at the different income tax legislations and how Republicans in Congress responded to them. Each chapter begins with a brief historical context at the time when an income tax bill was being discussed in Congress. The views of Republicans on the income tax were altered throughout the war and its aftermath. In the beginning, Republicans enthusiastically supported the income tax as a measure needed to sustain the fighting. As the war came to a close, however, many Republicans began to change their view. They originally backed progressive rates, then they wanted just one flat tax rate, and, by 1870, many wanted the tax to be ended. There was a divide in the Republican Party, though. Western Republicans wanted to keep the income tax intact while Northern Republicans called for its repeal. The last chapter of the book looks at the Republican Party and the income tax since 1872. Many of the arguments made by current and past Republicans (e.g., George W. Bush, Eisenhower, Elihu Root and even Earl Warren) against the income tax are shown to be the same ones made by many Republicans in the debate over the Civil War income tax. Apparently, the Northern anti-income tax wing won the debate and took over the party 140 years ago.

A flat tax? Tax cuts? Complete elimination of the income tax? These ideas have most certainly been advocated by members of the Republican Party during the past few decades. Party leaders such as George W. Bush, Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich expressed disdain for the income tax and utilized their power to remove it as a revenue source. At the time of the Civil War, many Republicans, mainly in the Northeast, were opposed to the new Federal Income Tax. Initially used to finance that war, the Federal income tax became a hotly-debated issue at a time when America was trying to put back together a fractured nation. The issue split the party, with Midwestern and Southern Republicans wanting to continue the income tax, and Northern and Western Republicans championing its demise. In the end, the anti-income tax wing took control of the Republican Party and shaped its economic principles for the future. The book is an in-depth look into how the Republicans in Congress dealt with the creation of the United States' first income tax and how it affected the party for the future. The author argues that the anti-income tax faction of the Republican Party won the debate and took over the party – and to this day, the Republican Party typically promotes either cutting taxes or eliminating them altogether. The author gives a brief history of the formation of the Republican Party and how they developed their economic views in distinction from the declining Whig Party, who mostly sought to fund the federal budget through tariffs and not by taxing the people directly. The second half of the book looks at the different income tax legislations and how Republicans in Congress responded to them. Each chapter begins with a brief historical context at the time when an income tax bill was being discussed in Congress. The views of Republicans on the income tax were altered throughout the war and its aftermath. In the beginning, Republicans enthusiastically supported the income tax as a measure needed to sustain the fighting. As the war came to a close, however, many Republicans began to change their view. They originally backed progressive rates, then they wanted just one flat tax rate, and, by 1870, many wanted the tax to be ended. There was a divide in the Republican Party, though. Western Republicans wanted to keep the income tax intact while Northern Republicans called for its repeal. The last chapter of the book looks at the Republican Party and the income tax since 1872. Many of the arguments made by current and past Republicans (e.g., George W. Bush, Eisenhower, Elihu Root and even Earl Warren) against the income tax are shown to be the same ones made by many Republicans in the debate over the Civil War income tax. Apparently, the Northern anti-income tax wing won the debate and took over the party 140 years ago.

In the Civil War, the United States and the Confederate States of America engaged in combat to defend distinct legal regimes and the social order they embodied and protected. Depending on whose side's arguments one accepted, the Constitution either demanded the Union's continuance or allowed for its dissolution. After the war began, rival legal concepts of insurrection (a civil war within a nation) and belligerency (war between sovereign enemies) vied for adherents in federal and Confederate councils. In a "nation of laws," such martial legalism was not surprising. Moreover, many of the political leaders of both the North and the South were lawyers themselves, including Abraham Lincoln. These lawyers now found themselves at the center of this violent maelstrom. For these men, as for their countrymen in the years following the conflict, the sacrifices of the war gave legitimacy to new kinds of laws defining citizenship and civil rights. The eminent legal historian Peter Charles Hoffer's Uncivil Warriors focuses on these lawyers' civil war: on the legal professionals who plotted the course of the war from seats of power, the scenes of battle, and the home front. Both the North and the South had their complement of lawyers, and Hoffer provides coverage of each side's leading lawyers. In positions of leadership, they struggled to make sense of the conflict, and in the course of that struggle, began to glimpse of new world of law. It was a law that empowered as well as limited government, a law that conferred personal dignity and rights on those who, at the war's beginning, could claim neither in law. Comprehensive in coverage, Uncivil Warriors' focus on the central of lawyers and the law in America's worst conflict will transform how we think about the Civil War itself.

Now an Apple TV+ documentary, Lincoln's Dilemma, airing February 18, 2022. One of the Wall Street Journal's Ten Best Books of the Year | A Washington Post Notable Book | A Christian Science Monitor and Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2020 Winner of the Gilder Lehrman Abraham Lincoln Prize and the Abraham Lincoln Institute Book Award "A marvelous cultural biography that captures Lincoln in all his historical fullness. . . . using popular culture in this way, to fill out the context surrounding Lincoln, is what makes Mr. Reynolds's biography so different and so compelling . . . Where did the sympathy and compassion expressed in [Lincoln's] Second Inaugural—'With malice toward none; with charity for all'—come from? This big, wonderful book provides the richest cultural context to explain that, and everything else, about Lincoln." —Gordon Wood, Wall Street Journal From one of the great historians of nineteenth-century America, a revelatory and enthralling new biography of Lincoln, many years in the making, that brings him to life within his turbulent age David S. Reynolds, author of the Bancroft Prize-winning cultural biography of Walt Whitman and many other iconic works of nineteenth century American history, understands the currents in which Abraham Lincoln swam as well as anyone alive. His magisterial biography Abe is the product of full-body immersion into the riotous tumult of American life in the decades before the Civil War. It was a country growing up and being pulled apart at the same time, with a democratic popular culture that reflected the country's contradictions. Lincoln's lineage was considered auspicious by Emerson, Whitman, and others who prophesied that a new man from the West would emerge to balance North and South. From New England Puritan stock on his father's side and Virginia Cavalier gentry on his mother's, Lincoln was linked by blood to the central conflict of the age. And an enduring theme of his life, Reynolds shows, was his genius for striking a balance between opposing forces. Lacking formal schooling but with an unquenchable thirst for self-improvement, Lincoln had a talent for wrestling and bawdy jokes that made him popular with his peers, even as his appetite for poetry and prodigious gifts for memorization set him apart from them through his childhood, his years as a lawyer, and his entrance into politics. No one can transcend the limitations of their time, and Lincoln was no exception. But what emerges from Reynolds's masterful reckoning is a man who at each stage in his life managed to arrive at a broader view of things than all but his most enlightened peers. As a politician, he moved too slowly for some and too swiftly for many, but he always pushed toward justice while keeping the whole nation in mind. Abe culminates, of course, in the Civil War, the defining test of Lincoln and his beloved country. Reynolds shows us the extraordinary range of cultural knowledge Lincoln drew from as he shaped a vision of true union, transforming, in Martin Luther King Jr.'s words, "the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood." Abraham Lincoln did not come out of nowhere. But if he was shaped by his times, he also managed at his life's fateful hour to shape them to an extent few could have foreseen. Ultimately, this is the great drama that astonishes us still, and that Abe brings to fresh and vivid life. The measure of that life will always be part of our American education.

Provides a coherent way to think about the intersection of religious practice and taxes.

The larger our governments, the greater the competition for their spoils—therefore our divisions. “There simply is so much at stake today. As a result, our governments that benefit so many, employ so many, and tax so widely—in short our governments that pick so many winners and losers—are understandably subject to an intense competition for their control.” So writes author Thomas Del Beccaro in this fascinating study of the history of political unity and division in the US, from the Revolution to the adoption of the Constitution, the Civil War through Reconstruction, The Gilded Age to our present Divided Era. While we have had our conflicts over large issues and the role of government in the past, and still do today, an emerging cause of the partisanship and division we now know today did not exist at our nation’s founding. Our governments were smaller, levied minimal taxes, and thus held out fewer spoils for citizens to fight over. Can the US find its way back to being a less divided country? Yes, says Del Beccaro, but only if citizens understand the growing source of our divisions: ever larger governments. Americans must demand that government shrink back to a less divisive size and scope and support leaders capable of setting unifying goals—for which Del Beccaro offers five key strategies. In fact, the consequences of not slimming the behemoth governments—federal, state, and local—will only lead to an ever widening divide, and more acrimonious and harmful partisanship. The Divided Era lays out the case for smaller government, more responsive political leadership, and ultimately a more cohesive citizenry.

Was Canada's Dominion experiment of 1867 an experiment in political domination? Looking to taxes provides the answer: they are a privileged measure of both political agency and political domination. To pay one's taxes was the sine qua non of entry into political life, but taxes are also the point of politics, which is always about the control of wealth. Modern states have everywhere been born of tax revolts, and Canada was no exception. Heaman shows that the competing claims of the propertied versus the people are hardwired constituents of Canadian political history. Tax debates in early Canada were philosophically charged, politically consequential dialogues about the relationship between wealth and poverty. Extensive archival research, from private papers, commissions, the press, and all levels of government, serves to identify a rising popular challenge to the patrician politics that were entrenched in the Constitutional Act of 1867 under the credo "Peace, Order, and good Government." Canadians wrote themselves a new constitution in 1867 because they needed a new tax deal, one that reflected the changing balance of regional, racial, and religious political accommodations. In the fifty years that followed, politics became social politics and a liberal state became a modern administrative one. But emerging conceptions of fiscal fairness met with intense resistance from conservative statesmen, culminating in 1917 in a progressive income tax and the bitterest election in Canadian history. Tax, Order, and Good Government tells the story of Confederation without exceptionalism or misplaced sentimentality and, in so doing, reads Canadian history as a lesson in how the state works. Tax, Order, and Good Government follows the money and returns taxation to where it belongs: at the heart of Canada's political, economic, and social history.