the sums for which they were severally assessed and liable to pay into the national Treasury. In the case, however, of the levy in 1861, eleven States openly in insurrection against the Federal Government, one loyal State, and one Territory (Utah) refused or neglected to pay their assessment; whereupon a law was passed by Congress authorizing the appointment of special officials, whose duty it was to go into such States as soon as it was practicable and levy the proper assessments, seizing and selling real property whenever it became necessary to enforce payments of the amount required. And these provisions of law were enforced by threat or action to such an extent that about $2,800,100 were collected up to 1870, out of an aggregate quota of $5,153,891 due from all the States that adopted ordinances of secession; the total amount assessed on all the States having been $20,000,000.
The confusion attendant on the settlement after the war of the unpaid liabilities of the impoverished insurrectionary States to the Federal Government, on account of the direct tax of 1861, finds further illustration in the circumstance, that the Comptroller of the United States Treasury decided in 1883 that the sum of $35,555, appropriated by an act of Congress to refund to the State of Georgia money expended by it in 1777, or one hundred and six years previously, for the common defense in the War for Independence, should be paid to the Treasurer of the United States, "to the credit of Georgia on account of direct taxes charged against the State." The Supreme Court of the United States also decided in 1887 (United States vs. Louisiana, 37, 123) that the direct-tax law in 1861 did not create any liability on the part of a State to pay the tax; and that the apportionment merely designated the amount to be levied upon the property of individuals in the several States, without any liability attaching to the State in its political and corporate character. "This decision finally left the unpaid quota of the direct tax of 1861 in precisely the same position as any other tax assessed upon individuals, which the United States has been unable or has neglected to collect in full." (Dunbar, Direct Tax of 1861, Quarterly Journal of Economics, July, 1889.)
At the time when it was proposed to enforce the tax on defaulting States by the seizure and sale of land, a doubt was expressed whether the tax in question was, in its essence, "a tax on the land and all the various estates into which the fee may have been divided, or was a tax on the owner of the land and levied on the interest of the owner in it, and on no other subordinate or incorporeal interest. But no tax was ever collected or any land sold under the act of seizure and sale." (Hillard, Law of Taxation.)
But, apart from a unison of opinion as to the methods by which
