The state tax rate in Alabama was increased four hundred percent, in Louisiana eight hundred percent, and in Mississippi, which could issue no bonds, fourteen hundred percent.

City and county taxes, where carpetbaggers were in control, increased in the same way.

Thousands of small proprietors could not meet their taxes, and in Mississippi alone the land sold for unpaid taxes amounted to six million acres, an area as large as Massachusetts and Rhode Island together.

Nordhoff* speaks of seeing Louisiana newspapers of which three-fourths were taken up by notices of tax sales.

In protest against extravagant and corrupt expenditures, taxpayers' conventions were held in every state, but without effect.
*Charles Nordhoff, "The Cotton States in the Spring and Summer of 1875".
Even the increased taxation, however, did not produce enough to support the new governments, which now had recourse to the sale of state and local bonds.