n of a similar tax during the Civil War,[5]
the only other occasion preceding Amendment Sixteen in which Congress
had ventured to utilize this method of raising revenue.[6]

During the interim between the Pollock decision in 1895, and the
ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment in 1913, the Court gave evidence
of a greater awareness of the dangerous consequences to national
solvency which that holding threatened, and partially circumvented it,
either by taking refuge in redefinitions of "direct tax" or, and more
especially, by emphasizing, virtually to the exclusion of the former,
the history of excise taxation. Thus, in a series of cases, notably
Nicol v. Ames,[7] Knowlton _v._ Moore[8] and Patton _v._ Brady[9] the
Court held the following taxes to have been levied merely upon one of
the "incidents of ownership" and hence to be excises; a tax which
involved affixing revenue stamps to memoranda evidencing the sale of
merchandise on commodity exchanges, an inheritance tax, and a war
revenue tax upon tobacco on which the hitherto imposed excise tax had
already been paid and which was held by the manufacturer for resale.

Thanks to such endeavors the Court thus found it possible, in 1911,[10]
to sustain a corporate income tax as an excise "measured by income" on
the privilege of doing business in corporate form. The adoption of the
Sixteenth Amendment, however, put an end to speculation as to whether
the Court, unaided by constitutional amendment, would persist along
these lines of construction until it had reversed its holding in the
Pollock Case. Indeed, in its initial appraisal[11] of the amendment it
classified income taxes as being inherently "indirect." "The command of
the amendment that all income taxes shall not be subject to
apportionment by a consideration of the sources from which the taxed
income may be derived, forbids the application to such taxes of the rule
applied in the Pollock Case by which alone such taxes were removed from
the great class of excises, duties, and imposts subject to the rule of
uniformity and were placed under the other or direct class.[12] * * *
The Sixteenth Amendment conferred no new power of taxation but simply
prohibited the previous complete and plenary power of income taxation
possessed by Congress from the beginning from being taken out of the
category of indirect taxation to which it inherently belonged
* * *"[13]

Meaning of "Income" as Distinguished From Capital

Buildin