Colonial Tithables

Published by the Library of Virginia

In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Virginia, the term “tithable” referred to a person who paid (or for whom someone else paid) one of the taxes imposed by the General Assembly for the support of civil government in the colony. In colonial Virginia, a poll tax or capitation tax was assessed on free white males, African American slaves, and Native American servants (both male and female), all age sixteen or older. Owners and masters paid the taxes levied on their slaves and servants. Few tithable lists are extant. The Library of Virginia holds full or partial lists for about three dozen counties. A detailed guide to manuscript, microfilmed, and printed tithables is available in the Archives Research Room. See also the VA-NOTES entries on Colonial Taxes and on Tithables for a list of documents in the archival records in the Library of Virginia containing the names of people who paid the tax on tithables.

Tithable lists do not enumerate anyone under the age of sixteen or any adult white woman (unless she was the head of household). Laws published in Hening’s Statutes at Large may assist the researcher in understanding who was considered tithable and how tithable lists were taken. In an attempt to stop fraud concerning the “yearly importation of people into the collonie,” an act was passed in the House of Burgesses in 1649 requiring that all male servants imported into Virginia (“of what age soever”) be placed on the tithable lists. Natives of the colony and those imported free who were under the age of sixteen were exempt. (William W. Hening, ed. The Statutes at Large: Being a Collection of All the Laws of Virginia, from the First Session of the Legislature, in the Year 1619…[1809–1823], 1:361–362.)

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