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Illustrated Episode · Volume I, chapter 19 · 17 February 1632

Watertown will not pay

In a plain timber room, a farmer in a brown coat raises one hand in argument at the end of a table, facing a grave man in black seated behind it with other magistrates, while his neighbors stand behind him.
Boston, 17 February 1632. The men of Watertown stand before Governor Winthrop and the assistants and argue that paying a tax laid without their consent would bring them and their children into bondage. Rothbard calls it the first tax strike in America. They were made to sign a retraction, yet that year the freemen won a say over taxes. Chapter 19 of Conceived in Liberty.

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Adapted from Murray N. Rothbard, Conceived in Liberty (Mises Institute, 2011), CC BY 3.0.

What happened

Early in 1632 the governor and assistants of Massachusetts Bay ordered a rate of 60 pounds on the settlements to build a fort at Newtown, and sent Watertown a warrant for its share, 8 pounds. Watertown's pastor and elder called the people together and told them it was not safe to pay money laid on them that way, for fear of bringing themselves and their posterity into bondage. The charter had given the power to tax to the governor and a dozen assistants, and they had kept it to themselves. On 17 February Governor John Winthrop and the assistants summoned the Watertown men to Boston. After much debate the townsmen gave way, confessed their error and signed a retractation to be read in their own meeting the next Lord's day. Winthrop wrote that they had mistaken the council for a mayor and aldermen with no power to tax. Rothbard calls the refusal "the first tax strike in America," made on "the great old English ground that no community may be taxed without its own consent" (CiL, p. 160), and he says the government bowed to it. Before the year was out the freemen took the power to choose the governor and assistants and to make tax levies, through two deputies elected by every town. The townsmen had lost the argument in the room and won it in the colony.

Sources

  1. Murray N. Rothbard, Conceived in Liberty (Auburn, Ala.: Mises Institute, 2011 single-volume ed.), vol. I, ch. 19, pp. 155-163. CC BY 3.0. Rothbard
  2. John Winthrop, Winthrop's Journal, 'History of New England,' 1630-1649, ed. James Kendall Hosmer, vol. I (New York: Scribner's, 1908), pp. 73-75 (entry of 17 February 1632, with Savage's note on the charter). Primary source
  3. 'A view of the First Meeting House in Boston. 1632. John Wilson, Pastor', Digital Commonwealth (accessed 2026-09-29): the first meetinghouse, thatched, stood on State Street and dates from 1632. Secondary source
  4. David Hackett Fischer, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 'Massachusetts Dress Ways'. Secondary source