Income tax in the United States income above £200. The tax proposal was developed in 1814. Because the treaty of Ghent was signed in 1815, ending hostilities and the need for additional revenue, the tax was never imposed in the United States. In order to help pay for its war effort in the American Civil War, Congress imposed its first personal income tax in 1861. It was part of the Revenue Act of 1861 (3% of all incomes over US $800). This tax was repealed and replaced by another income tax in 1862. In 1894, Democrats in Congress passed the Wilson-Gorman tariff, which imposed the first
Legal history of income tax in the United States (1916), the 1913 Act was ruled to be constitutional. A separate excise tax was also imposed on corporations. Subsequent legal actions were concerned with what should be counted as "income" under the 1913 Act. In "Eisner v. Macomber" (1920), the Supreme Court ruled that proportionate stock dividends were not taxable as income, on the grounds that the dividend income was not "severable" from the capital holding from which it was derived. Later decisions, however, have tended to limit this view of "severability," and to uphold the federal statutes as exertions of the power of Congress to tax. The first attempt