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Conceived in Liberty Companion · Volume I, chapter 19 · 17 February 1632

Watertown challenges a tax levy · A plain room in Boston, Massachusetts Bay

Watertown will not pay

Does a tax require the consent of the community expected to pay it?

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.
Modern AI-assisted reconstruction. 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.

Before this scene

Massachusetts Bay’s governor and assistants ordered a tax to pay for a fort at Newtown. Watertown was assigned a share, but its pastor and elder urged residents not to pay money imposed in that way. A levy is an official demand for payment. The governor and assistants held taxing power under the charter, the document defining the colony’s government. The conflict concerned who could exercise that power and whether towns needed their own representatives in the decision. Winthrop records the hearing on 17 February 1632, not the levy’s exact date. [1] [2]

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The story, from several sources

This account blends Rothbard’s chapter with the other sources listed below and has not yet been separated into Rothbard’s own account and the fuller story. Read Rothbard’s chapter 19 for his account.

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.

Why it matters

Interpretation: The outcome must be considered on more than one scale: the hearing ended in a retraction, while Rothbard connects the wider dispute with later representative control. An immediate setback and an institutional change are different kinds of result. [1] [2]

Examine and discuss

  1. What was the levy intended to fund, and what objection did Watertown raise?
  2. How do Winthrop’s account of the hearing and Rothbard’s account of later changes differ in emphasis?
  3. What evidence would distinguish consent to a tax from compliance under pressure?

About the reconstruction

This is an AI-assisted adaptive companion inspired by Murray N. Rothbard’s Conceived in Liberty. It draws on sources beyond the book and is not Rothbard’s original text or a condensation of it. Each scene identifies whether its narration combines sources or separates an account of the book from additional context.

The sources establish the event and accounts of it. The painting’s poses, expressions, lighting, and arrangement are artistic choices rather than a surviving visual record.

Suggest a correction to this companion scene. Notes about the original book are recorded separately.

Full sources and reuse information

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

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Painting and companion additions: CC BY 4.0, credit freecapitalists.org. How to credit.

Adapted from Murray N. Rothbard, Conceived in Liberty (Mises Institute, 2011), CC BY 3.0. External sources retain their own terms.

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