Item #44693 [Printed Tax Form] Revolutionary War Era State Tax Collector Statement for John Pierce, of Dorchester. American Revolution. Taxes, John How.

[Printed Tax Form] Revolutionary War Era State Tax Collector Statement for John Pierce, of Dorchester.

Dorchester, [MA]: 1780 -1781. 1 sheet. 5.5 x 3.5 inches. Browned else very good, extremities worn, one small tear, not affecting text. Item #44693

State tax collector form for the year of 1780 for John Pierce of Dorchester. Form includes manuscript calculations for Polls, Houses and Lands, and Personal Estate tax which totaled £68.18.3

Taxes were needed as the war dragged on. Massachusetts revised its tax law in 1777, 1779, and 1780 giving a fuller interpretation of income , allowing the assessors "to assess them at such rate, as they on their oaths shall judge to be just and reasonable " in 1779. In 1780, after, the new constitution passed, it commanded, that the public charges of government should be assessed "on polls and estates in the manner that has hitherto been practiced."

Of course one could appeal, as the notice at the bottom of the form attests:
"The assessors sit at the House of Mr. John Goff in Dorchester, on the two first Monday's of February, 1780, from Two to Six O'Clock Afternoon; to whom any person aggrieved may apply to Ease, as the Law directs. / Errors Excepted, {Signed in Print]John How, Collector of Dorchester".

John Pierce [III] (1742-1833), was the fifth generation of a distinguished and prolific Boston family. He was the first president of the Dorchester Temperance Society. His son (by his second wife, Sarah Blake), John Pierce (1773-1849), was a Harvard graduate and pastor of the First Church in Brookline.

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Price: $475.00