NC: Taxes Only for Public Objects and Ends

 

In May of 1882 Delaware’s Senator Bayard recalled the meaning of the Mecklenburg Resolves and warned against the continuing expenditure of public tax dollars on projects unrelated to a strictly “public objects and ends.” Americans then were witnessing a federal government, unrestrained since 1861, complicit in subsidies to private businesses and pursuing vast imperial ambitions.
Bernhard Thuersam, www.Circa1865.com  The Great American Political Divide

Taxes Only for Public Objects and Ends

“The commemorative celebration of the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence took place at Charlotte on May 20th [1882]. The streets were fairly decked with flags and banners, filled with citizen soldiers in bright uniforms, and at least 20,000 people from the surrounding country.

Governor [Thomas] Jarvis and his staff, Senators Vance, [Matt] Ransom, Wade Hampton and [Thomas] Bayard were present. The Mecklenburg Declaration was read by Senator Ransom, and Senator Vance introduced the orator of the occasion, Thomas F. Bayard of Delaware. The address was enthusiastically received, especially the sentiments contained in the following extract:

“I wish I could impress upon you gentlemen, and not upon you only but upon our fellow-countrymen everywhere, the fatal fallacy and mischief that underlies and inheres to every proposition to use the money of the people — drawn from them by taxation, the powers of the government, the force of their government, under any name or pretext — for any other than really public objects and ends.

I include the maintenance of the public honor, dignity, and credit, the protection of American citizenship everywhere, among the just objects for the exercise of governmental powers; but I wish to deny . . . the rightfulness of involving the welfare and happiness of the 50,000,000 men, women, and children of the country, whether by laying taxes upon them which are not needed for the support of their government, or paying bounties and subsidies to maintain lines of private business which are too unskillfully or unprofitably conducted otherwise to sustain themselves, or promising the presence of our fleets or armies, or risking the issue of peace or war, or shedding the blood of our soldiers and sailors in aid of schemes of private greed or personal ambition under the guise of claims foreign or domestic.”

(North Carolina, Appleton’s Annual Cyclopedia, 1882, New Series Vol VII, D. Appleton and Company, 1883, page 634)