Taxation without voting rights exposed the founding ambiguity over Black citizenship

Evidence

In the years after the American Revolution, Paul and Jonathan Cuffe, men of African and Native descent, lived in Dartmouth, Massachusetts, where they were required to pay taxes but denied the right to vote. This, they argued, was a contradiction. If they were to be taxed like white citizens, they could not then be denied citizenship’s political rights. In a series of petitions in 1780 and 1781, the brothers demanded “to know…whether all free Negroes & mulattoes Shall have the same Privileges in this Town of Dartmouth as the white People have.” If they were equal to white men, the brothers allowed, they should pay their share of local taxes. But without the right to vote—without privileges equal to those of white taxpayers—they would not. The Cuffes eventually settled their dispute by paying a reduced tax. Still, they exposed an ambiguity in the new Massachusetts state constitution, which noted, “All men are born free and equal and have certain natural, essential, and unalienable rights.” No one could say for certain whether the Cuffes were included among “All men.” — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 693

Categorization

• SHARE: The Cuffe brothers’ tax dispute is a vivid early-instance of ‘no taxation without representation’ deployed by Black citizens — good for a historian or constitutional-law friend.
• XREF: connects to: Literacy tests and poll taxes were written to let local officials disenfranchise black voters — Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 2063