A poll tax of $1 was levied throughout the Reconstruction period. Until 1871 it applied to all males over twenty-one years of age, thereafter to those between twenty-one and sixty years, with the usual exceptions of Indians and persons non compos mentis. The tax of 1871 and thereafter was for the benefit of the public schools. The penalty for failure to pay this tax was that the person failing should not receive any money due him from the state or the county until the tax with interest had been paid. That there was considerable evasion of the tax may be inferred from the fact that whereas the census of 1870 reported the number of males twenty-one years of age and upward at 169,258, the number assessed for the poll tax in 1869 was only 95,895.6

1 Laws of 1871, First Sess., pp. 47, 60.

2 message Of Governor Davis, April 24, 1871

3 Message of Governor Davis, November 28, 1871.

4 Act of December 1, 1871; Laws of 1871, Adj. Sess., p. 55.

5 Message of Governor Davis, January 14, 1873.

6 Census of 1870, vol. 1, p. 619. Report of the Comptroller, 1870, p. 85.