April 15

The Day America Pays Up

Today, some 164 million Americans face the same annual reckoning — and the story of how April 15 became the most dreaded date on the calendar goes all the way back to Abraham Lincoln and the guns of the Civil War.

Today is Tax Day — April 15, 2026 — the federal deadline by which roughly 164 million Americans must file their income tax returns with the Internal Revenue Service. For most people, it is an annual ritual of mild dread, a stack of forms and a reckoning with W-2s and receipts. But the federal income tax is one of the most consequential — and contested — creations in American history, born not in peacetime prosperity but in the fires of the Civil War, shaped by a Supreme Court reversal, enshrined in the Constitution, and still evolving 165 years after its first reluctant appearance.

From the Battlefields of Bull Run to the Form 1040

The income tax was born out of desperation. In the summer of 1861, with the Union army reeling and the cost of war spiraling far beyond what tariffs and customs duties could cover, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Revenue Act of 1861 — the first federal income tax in American history. It placed a flat 3 percent levy on all annual incomes over $800, a threshold that exempted most working Americans of the era. The following year Congress made it graduated, with higher earners paying more. It worked. The tax helped finance the war, and the Union won. Then, in 1872, Congress repealed it entirely, assuming the emergency had passed and the idea had served its purpose. They were wrong about that last part.

The income tax came back in 1894 as a 2 percent levy on incomes above $4,000 — and the Supreme Court struck it down within a year, ruling it an unconstitutional direct tax under Article I of the Constitution. It took a constitutional amendment to settle the question for good. The 16th Amendment, passed by Congress in 1909 and ratified on February 3, 1913, gave Congress the permanent power to tax incomes "from whatever source derived." That same year, the first Form 1040 was introduced — three pages long. The original filing deadline was March 1. Congress later moved it to March 15, where it stayed for decades, until the tax overhaul of 1954 pushed it to April 15, where it has remained ever since. The date that now defines a season of national groaning was, in a sense, an afterthought of the Eisenhower administration.

Historical illustration of Americans filing income tax returns, evoking the early days of the federal income tax
The Form 1040 was first introduced in 1913, the same year the 16th Amendment made the federal income tax permanent — a document that now reaches into the lives of 164 million Americans every April.

The income tax has been everything Americans have argued it to be across its long history: a wartime necessity, an instrument of fairness, a burden on the middle class, a lever of social policy, a source of endless political controversy. Top marginal rates have ranged from 1 percent at the dawn of the system in 1913 to 94 percent during World War II — a figure almost impossible to imagine today. What began as a temporary measure to arm the Union has become the financial backbone of the world's largest government, funding everything from interstate highways to aircraft carriers to the social safety net. Today, as millions of Americans click "submit" or seal an envelope before midnight, they are participating in a tradition that stretches back not to some quiet peacetime act of civic planning, but to Abraham Lincoln, a war for the nation's survival, and an $800 threshold that started it all.