TAXATION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION Boston, December 12th, 1861
To Frederick U. Tracy, Treasurer, and the Assessors and other Authorities of the city of Boston, and the citizens generally, and the Legislature in particular:
An external version of the Declaration of Independence has caused our civil war. “All men are born free and equal”, rendered whites and males, through ignorance, love of power and selfhood, thereby crushing the colored race, making insane those who hold them in bondage — thus our civil war, to clear away the impediments to an understanding of the word Freedom, which knows neither sex nor color.
“Governments derive their powers from the consent of the governed.” Had this principle been recognized in its essence, sex alone could not have monopolized the right of suffrage. Males, intemperate, vicious, one shade removed from guardianship, can appear at the polls, ignoring a proper qualification of this highly important act.
Woman, in her womanhood, could never have permitted slavery, an institution which blights everything she holds sacred, through her conjugal and maternal nature. Even the expense of such a vile system would have attracted her economic eye.
Now, she is to be taxed to bear her part in a civil war which she has had nothing to do in creating; family ties have been and are still to be ruptured by deaths the most aggravating; widows and fatherless children are to be thrown upon the world. Man, through taxation, is to devise and control the means to meet these exigencies, while woman, is passively to submit to his decisions, though it reduces her property to a minimum of its former value; so “taxation without representation” assumes a deeper significance than ever before in the history of our country………………….. In this period of civil war, in this struggle for a higher perception of freedom, in this signal era of our country, when bondage after bondage is being removed, that bondage may be seen in its true light, when our national eagle is spreading her wings over those hitherto only nominally protected, woman is beginning to take courage, and is willing to bide her time, till man shall be morally strong enough to recognize her right as citizen in a republic.
This is respectfully submitted,
32 Green street HARRIOT KEZIA HUNT
(Liberator, Jan 3, 1862, pg 3)
