President Lincoln was first president to pay income taxes

[David Lockmiller]

For a long time, Americans didn’t see presidential tax returns. The first president to file them at all was Abraham Lincoln, after Congress temporarily instituted federal income taxes to help pay for the Civil War. No public proclamation accompanied Lincoln’s payments — at just under $1,300 he paid more in 1864 than Trump did 152 years later, no inflation adjustment necessary — and he filed voluntarily, as it wasn’t clear that taxation of presidential salaries was constitutional. Five years after Lincoln’s death, the courts ruled that it wasn’t. The U.S. Treasury returned Lincoln’s taxes to his estate.

A Brief History of the Taxpayer in Chief