Property Tax is Slavery!
Related History Part 1: James Otis Jr.
James Otis Jr. was one of the earliest intellectual and legal leaders of the American resistance to British rule. Although less remembered than Samuel Adams, John Adams, or Thomas Jefferson, Otis helped formulate the constitutional arguments that eventually became the American Revolution.
Early Life and Legal Career
James Otis Jr. was born on February 5, 1725, in West Barnstable, Massachusetts. His father, James Otis Sr., was a prominent lawyer, judge, and political figure. Otis graduated from Harvard College in 1743, studied law, and established a successful practice in Boston.
He became known for his intelligence, powerful speaking ability, classical education, and willingness to challenge established authority. John Adams later described him as possessing extraordinary command over an audience.
The Writs of Assistance
Otis entered revolutionary history in 1761 through his opposition to the writs of assistance. These were broad search warrants that allowed British customs officials to enter homes, warehouses, and businesses while searching for smuggled goods. Unlike ordinary warrants, they did not require officials to identify a specific place, person, or suspected crime.
Otis had served as advocate general of the Massachusetts Vice Admiralty Court, but he resigned rather than defend the writs. He then represented Boston merchants who challenged them.
During a nearly five-hour argument before the Massachusetts Superior Court, Otis contended that the writs violated the traditional rights of Englishmen. He argued that government power was limited by fundamental principles of justice and that an act contrary to the constitution and natural law was void.
John Adams, who witnessed the argument, later wrote:
“Then and there the child Independence was born.”
The court did not immediately abolish the writs, but Otis transformed a dispute over customs enforcement into a constitutional confrontation. He argued that arbitrary searches threatened everyone, not merely suspected smugglers.
His reasoning anticipated the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable searches and seizures and its requirement that warrants particularly describe the place to be searched and the persons or things to be seized.
“Taxation Without Representation”
Otis became a leading opponent of Parliament’s effort to tax the colonies without their consent. His 1764 pamphlet, The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved, argued that colonists possessed natural rights that government could recognize but could not legitimately destroy.
Related History Part 2: John Peter Zenger (1697–1746)
A Press, A Freehold, and a Jury of Freeholders
John Peter Zenger was a German immigrant who arrived in New York as a boy in 1710 and apprenticed under the printer William Bradford. In 1733 he began publishing the New-York Weekly Journal, a paper financed by political opponents of Governor William Cosby. Its pages ran sharp criticism of Cosby’s manipulation of the courts and his removal of a chief justice who ruled against him.
In November 1734 Zenger was arrested for seditious libel and held in jail roughly eight months before trial. Under English common law of the day, truth was not a defense. A truthful attack on a governing official was considered the more dangerous offense, because it was likelier to stir the public.
At the August 1735 trial, Philadelphia attorney Andrew Hamilton conceded that Zenger had printed the material, then turned to the jury and argued they were entitled to judge the law as well as the facts, and that no man should be punished for publishing what is true. The jury acquitted.
The verdict set no binding legal precedent. New York did not formally recognize truth as a defense until 1805, and the First Amendment came in 1791. What the case established was something harder to overturn: a public expectation that jurors would not convict a printer for telling the truth about power.
That is the durable importance of it. Liberty here was not secured by statute but by ordinary citizens refusing to enforce a bad law. Sunlight on officials became a practical right before it became a written one.
But there is a second half to this story that gets left out, and it is the half that matters most to us now.
The press was property. Zenger owned a shop, type, and a physical press. Speech in 1735 was not abstract. It required capital equipment. When Cosby’s men jailed Zenger, they took his liberty, but his wife Anna kept the press running and the paper publishing through the whole eight months. Ownership of the means of printing was what made independent criticism possible at all. Bradford’s Gazette, holding the public printing contract, had no such independence. A man who prints at the pleasure of the governor prints what the governor pleases.
The jury eligibility required property ownership. Colonial jurors were freeholders. The men who acquitted Zenger were landowners with standing in the community, materially independent of the governor’s patronage. That independence is precisely why they could refuse a directed verdict. A jury of tenants and dependents would have been far easier to lean on, and Cosby’s faction knew it. That is why there was a fight over the jury panel before the trial ever began.
Colonial New York - following English practice, restricted jury service to freeholders, men who owned land outright above a set value. So the qualification to sit in judgment was itself a property test.
Why that mattered for Zenger: the men in that box were not on Cosby’s payroll and did not hold their farms at his sufferance. Their independence from the governor was material, not just moral. That is what let them return a verdict against the bench’s instruction and go home to their own land afterward.
And the underlying grievance was property. Cosby’s quarrel started over a claim to half his predecessor’s salary and escalated through his rigging of a court to hear it. The Journal‘s argument was that arbitrary power over the courts meant no man’s estate was secure.
So the case is not really about three separate things. It is about one thing seen from three angles. A free press, secure property, and an independent jury are not parallel liberties. They are the same liberty, and each depends on the other two.
Which is the lesson that carries into every fight over land, water, and power in this valley. Independent ownership, of a press, of a farm, of a livelihood, is what makes a citizen hard to intimidate. A man who owns his ground can say what he sees. A man who rents his ground from the people he would criticize learns to hold his tongue.
Concentrate ownership and you concentrate the ability to speak. Zenger’s jurors could acquit because no one held a mortgage on them.
Related History Part 3: John Locke on Property
John Locke argued that private property is a natural right that exists before government. Government does not create property rights. It is established, in large part, to protect them.
In the Second Treatise of Government, Locke wrote:
“Every man has a property in his own person: this no body has any right to but himself.”
This is the foundation of Locke’s argument. A person owns himself. Because he owns his body, he also owns his labor. When he applies that labor to something held in common by nature, he makes it his property:
“Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property.”
If a person gathers fruit, cultivates land, builds a house, or creates an object, he has added his labor to the natural material. Other people cannot rightfully seize the product without also seizing the labor that belongs to him.
Property Is Broader Than Land
Locke used “property” in both a narrow and broad sense. It could mean material possessions, but it could also include a person’s life, liberty, and estate.
He described the purpose of political society this way:
“The great and chief end, therefore, of men’s uniting into commonwealths, and putting themselves under government, is the preservation of their property.”
Elsewhere, Locke referred to people seeking protection for their:
“Lives, liberties and estates, which I call by the general name, property.”
Property therefore includes more than acreage, houses, money, or goods. It represents the protected sphere within which a person possesses himself, directs his labor, enjoys liberty, and controls the legitimate fruits of his work.
