The Senator from Illinois insists that this is a capitation tax, and he reads the text of the Constitution. What is a capitation tax? The precise definition in Webster’s Dictionary--if the Senator will excuse me for going to an authority which is not a law book--is “a tax or imposition upon each head or person, a poll tax.” Such is the tax with regard to which the provision of the Constitution read by the Senator was adopted. This provision is not applicable to any other tax, but simply to this special tax.
Already I have reminded the Senator that he has voted to tax auctioneers, to tax jugglers, to tax the slaughterers of cattle, and to tax lawyers. I might add other classes. I now propose that he should tax claimants of slaves, a class offensive to reason and humanity. That is all. If you look at the census of 1850,--that of 1860 is not yet published,--you will find among the different classes of our population the following: mariners, 70,000,--I will not give the hundreds; merchants, 100,000; planters, 27,000; wheelwrights, 30,000; teachers, 29,000; tailors, 52,000; overseers, 18,000; lawyers, 23,000; farmers, 2,363,000; slaveholders, 347,000.
Now, Sir, would any one say that a tax on the business of the mariner was a capitation tax? Would any one say that a tax on the business of merchants, of whom we have one hundred thousand, was a capitation tax? Would any one say that a tax on the business of the planter was a capitation tax? that a tax on the business of the wheelwright was a capitation tax? that a tax on the business of teachers was a capitation tax? that a tax on the business of tailors was a capitation tax? that a tax on the business of overseers of plantations, who apply the lash, of whom there are eighteen thousand, was a capitation tax? that a tax on lawyers, already voted by the Senator from Illinois, was a capitation tax? that a tax on farmers, if you will, of whom, happily, we have two million three hundred and sixty-three thousand, was a capitation tax? And will any one say that a tax on slave-masters, of whom, unhappily, we have three hundred and forty-seven thousand, is a capitation tax? Senators may imagine it a capitation tax, Senators may call it a capitation tax, but no imagination and no energy of assertion can make it so. It is not a capitation tax. It is a tax on the claim of the slave-master in the bones and muscles, the labor and service of his fellow-man, and, so far as the tax can have any influence, it must discredit and discourage such claim. Therefore, Sir, I say confidently that the tax is in every respect constitutional, and it is also a tax well worthy of adoption, because, at a moment when Slavery stands revealed as the very pest of our land, it will operate to discredit and discourage it.