Historians, like other commentators, tend to focus on two questions about American tax politics: how much and how progressive (or regressive). These are important questions, but they can neglect one of the crucial determinants of tax policy. Because the U.S. political system is designed to emphasize geography more strongly than class interest or political ideology, the history of federal taxation is best understood in geographical terms. Most generally, it is a story about redistribution from the South to the Northeast through the nineteenth-century tariff and from the Northeast to the South through the twentieth-century income tax. After reviewing the familiar story of tariff struggles, this lecture will focus on the lesser-known sectional politics of the income tax.