"In the South after the Civil War, under the protection of federal troops and a radical Republican Congress, black legislators in coalition with white allies from the North and from the South’s poorer regions set to work rebuilding their states’ infrastructure and constructing a public school system. Reconstruction-era economic policies were relatively moderate, eschewing land reform, but included new forays in social spending in support of the poor and sick, as well as efforts to increase the taxes paid by landowners.

Across the South, the planter class engaged in massive resistance to the new state governments. The campaign came to be known as the “Redemption” of the South, and its participants as “Redeemers.” In South Carolina, democratic rule posed a particularly big obstacle to the opponents of Reconstruction; the majority of the state was black, and under universal male suffrage, a majority of the state legislature was black, too.

South Carolina’s white elite developed a two-part strategy of opposition. First, they focused their critique of Reconstruction on rising government debt and excessive spending, painting government by black people and poor whites as intrinsically corrupt. Adopting a new identity as concerned taxpayers helped the rich bridge the divide with small white farmers, for whom new land taxes were heavy, while avoiding explicit opposition to black male suffrage, which might smack of treason to Northerners.

While the opponents of Reconstruction were painting themselves as staid and respectable fiscal conservatives, they were simultaneously engaged in a radical plan to subvert democratic elections across the South. In principle, the Redeemers’ open campaign of voter suppression, political intimidation, and violence risked further federal intervention, but the North was losing the will to defend black political freedom. In fact, wealthy Northerners—even those who had been strongly anti-slavery—began doubting the logic of universal male suffrage as it empowered the immigrant working class in their cities. The political identity of the “taxpayer” was born in this reaction to black freedom and working-class political power, and it has existed ever since to oppose the specter of a multiracial working-class alliance.

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Most remarkably, however, the Tax-Payers also insisted that they were not motivated by racism. In his 1874 opening address, convention president Porter claimed that the problem with South Carolina’s Reconstruction government was not a matter of “race, or color,” but “simply and exclusively” that the government was run by those who did not own property.

Emphatic color-blindness was, to say the least, a recent development in the public rhetoric of South Carolina’s white elite. As recently as 1868, a number of Tax-Payers had signed a petition to the U.S. Congress, entitled a “Respectful Remonstrance on Behalf of the White People of South Carolina,” that opposed black male suffrage because “the superior race is to be made subservient to the inferior.” Porter himself had argued that black people had “traits, intellectual and moral,” and “credulous natures” that left them with an “incapacity” to rule.

At their Tax-Payers’ Conventions, however, these same men, despite sporadic remarks on the “negro character,” no longer officially identified themselves as advocates on behalf of the white race; they were simply representatives of the “over-burthened tax-payers.” This self-appointed role was ironic: as slaveholders, the Southern elite had done everything in their power to cripple the tax capacity of both their states and the federal government. Now, the South Carolina Tax-Payers called into question the right of black people and poor whites to govern because they believed these voters did not pay a substantial amount of taxes. “They who lay the taxes do not pay them, and that they who are to pay them have no voice in the laying of them,” Porter asserted, wondering if “a greater wrong or greater tyranny in republican government” could be conceived.

As W.E.B. Du Bois would later explain in Black Reconstruction in America, the “fact that poor men were ruling and taxing rich men” was the “center of the corruption charge” made by wealthy Southern whites against the Reconstruction governments. The Tax-Payers deemed all government spending under Reconstruction suspect, so they did not feel obliged to engage in subtle, or even plausible, analyses of public finance. For instance, the Tax-Payers consistently compared pre- and postwar expenses, ignoring the fact that emancipation had doubled the state’s citizen population while war had decimated its infrastructure and economy. There was no need to specify what particular spending was objectionable—which was convenient, because a number of the Tax-Payers were themselves involved in rather shady dealings involving railroads and government bonds.

The fundamental problem for the Tax-Payers was their numerical inferiority in a system of majority rule. They estimated that South Carolina had 60,000 taxpayers, and “90,000 voters who pay no taxes.” “