An American's View of Taxation From Paris

Finally, an American president who understands the lunacy of the Revenue Act of 1862.

“I support ENDING the double-taxation of overseas Americans!” President Donald Trump hailed in a statement last October. “Fellow Americans living abroad, your vote is more important than ever. No matter where you are, your voice can make a difference.”

Although it is too early in this column to discuss how Trump 2.0’s provocative campaign promise might burn on the pyre of transgender rights, suffice it to say that history recognizes that the first known American jailed for violating the country’s original personal income tax law was a man dressed as a women bolting to Canada.

That might cause a stink.

The estimated 9 million singular Americans and dual-nationals who today reside outside the U.S. have been since the Civil War tarred and feathered as apostates, albeit the most continuous and contentious of all Internal Revenue Service cash streams.

Yet the group remains an amorphous constituency with no political oxygen beneath the Capitol dome. Lumped together, the 9 million Americans overseas would register between Michigan and New Jersey as the 11th largest state by population.

“America is coast-to-coast paved with elected officials suspicious and insolent towards any citizen who’s checked out of the U.S.,” a senior Democratic National Committee strategist said before Trump thumped Vice President Kamala Harris in both the electoral and popular vote. “Not one Democrat or Republican senator or congressman gives a crap about American expats, because supporting them won’t win you votes.”

President Trump is clearly the first to believe otherwise. And he can blame Abraham Lincoln for making the U.S. the only one of the world’s 195 countries to criminally enforce its citizens abroad to pay income tax. Back home, jugglers and pickle-makers were also taxed, but that’s a story for another day.

The Union was desperate for cash and conscripts to combat the Confederacy. Lincoln reckoned the best way to get both was to trigger the progressive income tax contained in the 57-page Revenue Act of 1862 — which detonated into today’s 75,000-page-and-exploding tax code and the Treasury Department’s official interpretation of those regulations.

But Honest Abe was in a pickle: What’s more urgent? Money or men?

The act cultivated a bulwark for legislation to provide both. The law required citizens of the U.S. residing abroad to pay 5% levy on all income earned outside the country. Conscripts had the option to join the Grand Army of the Republic or, like President Grover Cleveland, take advantage of the Commutation Clause and pay $300 to legally dodge the draft from the comfort of your own home.

The 19th century media barons heaped opprobrium on those who left the country, scornfully baptizing them “skedaddlers.”

According to historian Peter Levine, 161,224 men — some 20% of the total 776,829 pool of Union draftees between 1863 and 1865 — fled the U.S., mostly to Canada and primarily because they didn’t have the $300.

Lincoln directed his nascent Bureau of Internal Revenue hunt down the skedaddlers. According to the Burlington Press, Horace Edgerton of Pawlet, Vermont, was nabbed on Nov. 3, 1862, while trying to “slip across the line in women’s clothes.”

Edgerton was jailed at Fort Blunder in New York. His/Her/They fate remains unknown. Yet regardless of one’s sexual preference nowadays, skedaddling remains an expensive endeavor. Shortly after 9/11, Congress obliged foreign banks under threat of prosecution to compare every expat monetary transaction against Homeland Security terrorist and fiscal crime watchlists, compelling American passport holders abroad to file a costly and cumbersome annual accounting of their assets with the IRS.

As for Horace Edgerton’s gender preference, let’s leave well enough alone and suggest that if you want to know anything more about the taxation of Civil War nonbinary soldiers and deserters, you can consult the Permanent Records of the U.S. Army & Confederate Veterans at the National Archives in Washington.  

A. Craig Copetas is an award-winning reporter, writer and author who has more than a half century covering news and politics for publications including Rolling Stone, Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal. He lives in Paris