USA > Connecticut > Tercentenary pamphlet series, v. 1 Connecticut and the British Government > Part 23
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24 Treasury Accounts, P.R.O., T. 30: II.
25 Conn. Col. Rec., X. 65, 128-129; 197, 318, 624.
26 In 1756 the population of the colony was given at 126,975, not counting blacks and Indians. Ibid., X. 618.
27 This of course relates to taxes on polls and rateable estate, which, how- ever, was practically the only basis of taxation in Connecticut. Ibid., XIV. 500. There was an excise on liquors which went to the support of the local schools (ibid., XII. 463), and import and tonnage duties which in the case of the port of New Haven amounted to £728 3s. 11/2d. for the period from 1759 to 1768. Account Book of Joseph Talcott, p. 6.
28 One Abraham Spooner, in testifying before a parliamentary committee in 1730, declared that at Dudley in Worcestershire the poor rates had risen from some two or three shillings on the pound to eight shillings. Hist. Soc. of Penn., Penn. MSS., misc., doc. 45, Committee Report of the House of Commons on the Iron Industry. I find in 1735 a rate of two farthings on the pound raised at New Haven for defraying the charges of the year. This is probably typical. Town Records, MSS. (1735), p. 439.
29 Account Book of Joseph Talcott.
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terms of sterling, seven shillings and ninepence for that year. During the years immediately preceding the Ameri- can Revolution it dropped to a per capita level of seven pence and two farthings sterling as against a per capita tax in England which could not have been less than twenty shillings with taxation rising to ten million pounds by the time of the outbreak of the American Revolu- tion.30 With respect to Connecticut, it should be further added that a very substantial proportion of the taxes levied in the course of the French and Indian War was not paid into the treasury at the time specified. In 1765 the arrears in taxes amounted to £80,000 for the period from 1755 to that year;31 in 1769 over £45,000 still re- mained to be collected on the levies referred to. Indeed, some of these arrears were not paid by the defaulting towns until as late as 1780.32
What, therefore, is the explanation of Connecticut's solvency and splendid financial showing in the face of the default in taxes on the part of the towns?
The key to the taxation situation in the colony during this period undoubtedly lies in a study of its relationship to parliamentary reimbursement for expenses incurred in the prosecution of the war. From 1757 to 1763 the British Parliament made a series of grants, in all amounting to over {1,150,000, as compensation to the American col- onies for war expenditures upon the basis of the recom- mendations of the ministry. Provision for the first of these grants was made in 1756 when Parliament authorized the appropriation of a sum not to exceed £115,000, to be dis- tributed to the colonies of New England, New York, and
30 Stephen Dowell, A History of Taxation and Taxes in England, II. 129- 163.
31 Ingersoll's Letters, p. 44.
32 See the Account Book of John Lawrence, MS., Conn. State Library. Also section I of this paper.
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New Jersey, as a reward for past services and an en- couragement to the colonials to continue their exertions with vigor. Of this sum Connecticut received £26,000, of which £24,828 Ios. Id. in gold and silver Spanish and Portuguese coins were packed in twenty-three chests and eighteen bags and sent to the colony, the remainder having been disbursed in the payment of fees at the exchequer and treasury and for insurance, cartage, freight, and other charges incidental to the shipping of specie. In 1757 Parliament voted direct compensation to Connecticut and Massachusetts, the former receiving £13,736 17s. 7d., one-half of which was forwarded to America in seven chests containing gold and silver,33 and in 1759 the General Assembly authorized its agent, Jared Ingersoll, to send to the colony £15,000 sterling of the sum granted the previous year by Parliament.34
In 1759 the colony seems to have come to the conclu- sion, on account of the enhanced price of foreign coins in England and the increased demand for bills of exchange, that it was more advantageous to keep the funds re- ceived for reimbursement in some London bank rather than go to the expense of transporting the specie to America. As a result, in that year the General Assembly authorized the sale of £22,000 sterling of the amount re- tained in England to those willing to pay the highest price for the bills of exchange drawn against these funds; in 1761, £34,000 was sold; in 1762, £35,000; and in 1765 the money received for the services rendered in 1761.
33 29 George II., c. 29; 31 George II., c. 33. Conn. Col. Rec., X. 547-548. The writer's fared Ingersoll, p. 72. Conn. Arch., Finance and Currency, IV. 229.
34 Conn. Col. Rec., XI. 345. The remainder was to be put in some safe bank in England. Of the remaining funds, {2000 sterling was to be sold for the full value thereof in gold, silver, or bills of credit of this colony emitted by act of the assembly in March, 1758.
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From March 15, 1759, to July 28, 1765, bills of exchange amounting to £172,467 IOS. 8d. sterling were drawn by Governor Fitch against the Connecticut funds on de- posit in London.35 In December, 1765, there still re- mained on reserve in the hands of Richard Jackson, the colony's agent in England, the sum of £9263, while in the spring of 1767 bills of exchange were sold by the colony against funds in London amounting to £10,656 6s. 33/4d. lawful money.36 In other words, adding to the sums dis- posed of in form of bills of exchange, the funds brought to the colony in form of specie gives a total of £237,591 3s. 2d. sterling or £316,788 45. 273 d. lawful money drawn by Connecticut from England without including the fees paid at the exchequer and treasury offices.
In the solicitation of these funds a factor enters which, in so far as it operated, was distinctly beneficial to Con- necticut. That factor is the distinction referred to above between "lawful money" and "current lawful money." It has been stated that Connecticut in order to meet its extraordinary war expenditures issued bills of credit which although not legally a tender, in practice circulated as "current lawful money" and ultimately were returned to the government in the form of taxes, or exchanged at the proclamation rate for hard money or for bills of ex- change on England. In so far as the value of these bills was less than their actual face value for the purposes of
35 Conn. Col. Rec., XI. 346, 490-491; XII. 61; Fitch Papers, Conn. Hist. Soc., Collections, XVIII. 353.
36 In the Account Book of Joseph Talcott are found on page 4 the following items:
1766/7 To bills emitted March 1764 for bills of
exchange
£428.16.1I £ 57.16. 6
To Rec'd in hard money for Bills of Exchange
£486.13.5 {10,169.12.103/4
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tax payments, just so far did Connecticut benefit in the receipt of these parliamentary aids which were in sterling and based upon a fixed relationship to "lawful money" values in contrast to "current lawful money" values. If one were to assume that the value of the bills of credit in the course of the war declined from a ratio of six shillings to four shillings and sixpence sterling, the lawful money exchange rate, to a ratio of six shillings to three shillings sterling the difference would be as follows: £100,000 sterling amounted to £133,333 lawful money, and to £200,000 current lawful money. Yet the agent of the colony in seeking reimbursement for an expenditure on the part of the colony of {200,000 demanded £150,000 sterling, that is, the sterling equivalent of lawful money, which would be one-third more than the actual exchange value,37 in the ordinary course of business in Connecticut.
Without unduly emphasizing the significance of the above figures it is a fact that the financial support given by England to Connecticut was so generous as to lead to the conclusion that for every pound actually paid by the people of Connecticut in the way of taxes during the course of the war, the people of England made a gift to the colony of an equal amount. It may also be pointed out that when in the year 1763, the outstanding certificates of indebted- ness of the colony reached their widest circulation they amounted only to £250,000 lawful money,38 which was actually £66,788 4s. 273d. lawful money less than the total amount received from England. What this liberal financial assistance meant in the way of relief to the Con- necticut taxpayer can be easily appreciated. The full ex- tent of the benefit is so extraordinary as to make almost incredible the furious anti-ministerial agitation, stirred
37 Conn. Col. Rec., XII. 339.
38 Conn. Arch., Finance and Currency, V. 5.
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up in that colony, as well as in other colonies, during the very period when these benefits were enjoyed at the ex- pense of the English taxpayer. Because of these grants from England the Connecticut taxpayer found, doubtless somewhat to his surprise, that from 1760 onward until practically the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, there was being lifted from his back much of the load of taxa- tion that. the General Assembly had saddled upon him for the calling in and sinking of the bills of credit. In 1761 a rate of but ten pence on the pound was levied, whereas at the time of issuing the bills of credit maturing in that year a rate of eight pence and another of six pence had been authorized. In 1762 but five pence and three far- things on the pound was levied, although a tax of five pence and another of two pence and one farthing had been authorized; in 1763 but six pence on the pound was levied although a tax of ten pence and another of five pence had been authorized; in 1764 but eight pence on the pound was levied although a tax of nine pence and another of six pence had been authorized; in 1765 but one penny on the pound was levied although a tax of seven pence had been authorized; in 1766 there was no levy, al- though a tax of eight pence on the pound had been au- thorized, nor were there levies of taxes for the years 1767, 1768, 1769. In 1770 a levy of two pence on the pound fell due on December 31 39 and then until the outbreak of the war there were annual levies of one pence or two pence on the pound. But, to analyze this situation more carefully- in 1764 there were still outstanding as evidence of the colony's indebtedness the emissions of March, 1762, amounting to £65,000, to be called in no later than March, 1767; that of May, 1763, to be called in no later than May, 1765, and amounting to {10,000; and that of 39 Ibid., IV. 224, 226, 235, 383, 393.
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March, 1764, amounting to £7000, to be called in no later than March, 1768. At the October session of the assembly of the year first mentioned, the deputies made an attempt to abate two-thirds of a tax of six pence on the pound, amounting to £30,000, due the last day of December, 1764, and one-half of a tax of eight pence, amounting to £40,000, due the last day of December, 1766. This tax-reduction measure failed in the upper house although, as was made clear, but eight pence was actually levied on the pound in place of a total of fifteen pence provided for by law. There came out in the dis- cussion the important information that the colony had on hand enough money to cover these tax reductions and the deputies naturally preferred to draw upon this rather than submit their constituents to the levy.40 In the May session of the year 1765, the popular branch continued to fight. When the upper chamber demanded a tax of two pence to be collected the first day of the following December and one of a penny to be collected in May, 1769, "to meet emissions of bills," they held to a penny levy-which was never collected. They nega- tived the further bill providing for a tax of one and one- half pence to be collected the last day of the following December.41 From May, 1765, to May, 1769, a period of four years, there is silence in the records as to all matters pertaining to the levying of taxes, except that in 1767 the assembly took up the question of the collection of back taxes42 and the assessors made up their annual lists as required by the law. In the spring of 1769 another un- successful attempt was made to persuade the deputies to agree to a levy, this time of one and one-half pence, and
4º Ibid., V. 8.
4I Ibid., V. 72.
42 Conn. Col. Rec., XII. 560-561.
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in the October session still another equally unsuccessful to accept a levy of a penny.43 In this contest the upper house was probably thinking in terms of sound public finance, remembering the obligations imposed on the colony by the parliamentary statute of 1751; the lower, in terms of immunity from taxation and the advantages of an expanded currency in the form of outstanding bills of credit. The year following, a tax of two pence on the pound was voted, to be collected the last day of Decem- ber, 1771, for the purpose of calling in £10,000 in bills of credit, and a tax of two pence on the pound "for the pay- ment of debts, etc. due from this Colony." In 1771 a tax of one penny was voted, one-half to be paid in December, I772, and one-half in September, 1773.44
The significance of this struggle lies not only in its demonstration of the fact that Connecticut had prac- tically freed herself from debt by the year 1765, the year of the Stamp Act crisis, but more important still is the disclosure of Connecticut's determination to guard, as a profound official secret, the existence of financial re- sources so large as to make it possible not only to refrain from making a number of the tax levies falling due be- tween 1761 and 1770 but actually to free the people of the colony for five years from the burden of any taxation at all. "When I ask the members of our General Assembly the reason," wrote a correspondent to a local journal in 1770, "by some I am told the colony has paid no taxes since the year 1766, and those monies appropriated to the sinking the bills have been applied to the support of government ever since that time."45
The relation of resources to obligations will be clearer
43 Conn. Arch., Finance and Currency, V. 24, 27.
44 Conn. Col. Rec., XIII. 301, 516.
45 Connecticut Journal, Aug. 31, 1770.
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when it is pointed out that in 1764, £82,000 in bills of credit was the total sum outstanding against the colony although £346,500 in bills had been issued during the war crisis. This sum by 1769 had been reduced to £31,713 8s., which represented practically the only claim against the colony. At the same time there were assets amounting to £45,369 7s. Iod. in the form of back taxes due from the town collectors and £21,995 19s. IId. still to be accounted for by Talcott who had just gone out of office as treas- urer.46 In other words, as a result of the businesslike dis- position made of the funds appropriated by Parliament for the purpose of aiding the colony to sink its bills of credit it was possible for Connecticut not only to accom- plish this but also, as has been stated, to relieve her people of the burden of supporting their own colonial government for a considerable period of time.
It is, therefore, much to be feared that the committee of the General Assembly which drew up the financial report sent to the Board of Trade in 1764, regarding the issues of bills of credit and the means provided for their redemption, left a very wrong impression as to the weight of the burdens that the taxpayers would be obliged to face in the coming years. This committee said nothing of certain assets that still remained on hand after the par- liamentary grants had ceased;47 and nothing of the relief from taxation that those grants made possible for the people of Connecticut. It is likewise much to be feared that when, in that same year, the colony sent to the government of Great Britain its Reasons why the British Colonies in America should not be charged with Internal Taxes by Authority of Parliament, it did not present a
46 Conn. Arch., Finance and Currency, V. 26, Report of the auditor, May, 1769.
47 Conn. Col. Rec., XII. 339.
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correct view in asserting that its expenses during the war, over and above the parliamentary grants, amounted to upward of £400,000, "the large Arrears of which Sum will remain a heavy distressing Burden upon the People for many years to come."48 This was repeated by Gov- ernor Pitkin in a letter to the Earl of Shelburne in 1767 when, to a request for information regarding the financial situation of Connecticut, he replied, "The late War hath Loaded us with such a large and heavy Debt that we are now so in arrears that we are put to great Difficulties to Discharge those Debts, and support the present charge of government."49 His communication, however, was so noncommittal that the following year the Earl of Hills- borough, who had assumed the new office of colonial secretary, wrote to him complaining that the information furnished was "not so compleat as it ought to have been" and that it would be necessary to have the treasurer's account of the disposition of the public funds.50 There was, of course, nothing to do but to forward the required papers, with the inevitable disclosure regarding the re- mission of taxes. But Pitkin in a letter that accompanied it prepared Hillsborough for the discovery :
I beg leave further to acquaint your Lordship that [of] the heavy debt on this Colony Incurred during the last Warr (although the taxes were early laid for the payment thereof and the utmost efforts used to Collect them yet by reason of our Exerting ourselves therein beyond our Abilities the great loss Sustained in our Labouring Men, our Lands Depreciated at least one-third in their Value) there still remains to the amount of forty-eight thousand pounds unpaid, still a heavy Weight on the people, on Account of which the Assembly
48 Ibid., XII. 668.
49 William Pitkin to the Earl of Shelburne, June 1, 1767, Pitkin Papers, Conn. Hist. Soc., Coll., XIX. 86.
5º Earl of Hillsborough to the Colony of Connecticut, Feb. 23, 1768, ibid., XIX. 114.
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have Omitted for two years past laying any tax on the people to give them time to Struggle through and Discharge their former outstanding Debt.51
But the financial statement was so adroitly framed as to hide the essential facts. Indeed, in writing to William Samuel Johnson, Connecticut's agent in London in the summer of 1768 about the time of the sending of the Pitkin letter to Hillsborough, Jonathan Trumbull, who was then deputy governor, referred to the necessity of sending this information about the finances. "In obedi- ence," he declared, "the Treasurer's Acct. for one year past, and the Establishment of Civil Offices and their Salaries duly Authenticated are transmitted-I fancy they will prove Satisfactory to answer the Design." He, however, went on to say most significantly: "I rather thought they wanted also the Public Lists of Polls of Estates-and were that asked it might appear in a light to them which might prove disadvantageous to the colony."52
The British ministry had come to feel that some relief should be secured for the British taxpayer bent under a crushing load of taxation. Hillsborough, the new secre- tary of state for the colonies, in an interview with Johnson in 1768 insisted that the Connecticut people were infinitely better off when it came to taxes than were the people of England and in all fairness should make some definite contribution to the exchequer for imperial administration. In view of the determination of the Con- necticut authorities to mislead the British government, it is perhaps not surprising that the Connecticut agent
51 Gov. Pitkin to the Earl of Hillsborough, undated, ibid., XIX. 152-153. Conn. Col. Rec., XIII. 78.
52 Jonathan Trumbull to William Samuel Johnson, July 4, 1768, Johnson MSS., Conn. Hist. Soc. What, of course, Trumbull had in mind was the non- collection of back taxes.
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should reply to this suggestion that the burdens of the Connecticut people "were truly very great, and even more than we knew how to bear."53 However, writing the following year confidentially to his friend Joseph Trum- bull, to congratulate the people of the colony on their happy financial situation, he declared, "I am glad to find the Colony so nearly out of debt," and then proceeded to caution his correspondent that he desired Parliament to know "as little as possible of our internal circumstances and police [policy], especially in point of taxation, which," he said, "they will never clearly understand, and which may be liable to much misconstruction."54 The opinion, however, may be ventured that the one thing Johnson and the colonial authorities were most solicitous about was that Parliament and the ministry should never understand the real taxation situation in Connecticut.
It is now well known that this was the period when Connecticut made her first appearance as a center of wealth. Well might a writer in a local paper in 1770 "con- template New Haven's great Increase within those few Years past, by the many and Elegant Buildings erect- ed."55 That which was true of this town was also true of other flourishing centers of population. A traveler journeying up the Connecticut in 1769 declared that parents were sufficiently wealthy to provide farms and equipment for their numerous children as soon as the latter were ready to marry.56 In England it is well known that such a provision for children was utterly impossible for parents in the same station in life. Indeed, according
53 William Samuel Johnson to William Pitkin, Feb. 13, 1768, Mass. Hist. Soc., Coll., 5th series, IX. 262.
54 William Samuel Johnson to Joseph Trumbull, Apr. 15, 1769, ibid., IX. 333-334.
55 Connecticut Journal, Dec. 7, 1770.
56 Connecticut Courant, Sept. 6, 1769.
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to abundant contemporary evidence, the burden of taxation in England was so overwhelming with respect to the rural population that the yeoman class of small farmers was rapidly disappearing, giving place to a race "of puny, abject wretches, tamed by want into servitude."57 One needs, therefore, to qualify very considerably the statements made by Pitkin and Johnson regarding the great financial discouragement and poverty under which the people of the colony were laboring.
Connecticut, in truth, occupied a privileged position within the empire. She was practically autonomous so far as her government was concerned, and she paid scant respect to the laws of Parliament that were supposed to bind her, at least when those laws, such as the navigation and trade acts, were as she conceived, against her in- terests. She sought the benefits of the imperial connection without. desiring to assume reciprocal responsibilities. When the crisis finally arose over the question of the liability of the colonies to make some definite, direct con- tribution to the charges of the imperial administration, she did not hesitate to join in the efforts then made to wreck the British Empire, identification with which seemed no longer to bring benefits but rather, obligations. Then it was that she proceeded to call into her treasury the outstanding arrears of taxes for the years from 1758 to 1765 which, since she had not required them, had been left, as it were, a loan to those towns that had failed to make payment.58 These back taxes with interest charges from the year 1767, turned into the commonwealth treasury between 1770 and 1780, aided the colony to make those preparations not only to defy Great Britain
57 Robert Nugent, Considerations upon a Reduction of the Land Tax (Lon- don, 1749), p. 22. See also The Present Taxes compared to Payment made to the Publick within the Memory of Man (1749), pp. 46-48.
58 See Section I of this paper.
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in attempting to maintain over her an effective control, but to establish her independence. It is, indeed, one of the ironies of history that the munificence of the mother country to Connecticut in her hour of need should ulti- mately have been returned by the colony from the muz- zles of the guns of her embattled farmers.
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Connecticut, History
TERCENTENARY COMMISSION OF THE STATE OF CONNECTICUT
QUI
SUSTINET
TRANSTULIT
COMMITTEE ON
HISTORICAL PUBLICATIONS
Boundaries of Connecticut
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PUBLISHED FOR THE TERCENTENARY COMMISSION BY THE YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS 1933
TERCENTENARY COMMISSION OF THE STATE OF CONNECTICUT
COMMITTEE ON HISTORICAL PUBLICATIONS
Boundaries of Connecticut
ROLAND MATHER HOOKER
T HE modern map of the state of Connecticut reveals peculiarities in its boundaries which incite interest and curiosity as to their causes. On the north the boundary with Massachu- setts runs straight from the northwestern corner of the state, until it reaches the town of Granby, where the town of Southwick, Massachusetts, forms an indentation three miles by about two and three-quarter miles square. The boundary then continues along the same general line as before, until the Connecticut River is reached, where on the east side there is another small indentation into the township of Enfield; after which the line remains straight until the northeast corner of the state is reached.
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