County police boards were now authorized to "order a certain [variable] rate per centum on the amount of the assessment of the State tax," and "to levy a special tax for the erection or repair of the court house, jail or other county buildings."[70] Under the territorial regime, it will be recollected, the county tax could never exceed half the territorial tax. This period of ante-bellum Statehood was also marked by a radical change in the machinery of assessment and collection. During the territorial period assessing and collecting officers were appointed by the County Courts or by the Territorial Governor; during this period they were chosen directly by the people who were directly responsible for their conduct.[71] The county sheriff was _ex-officio_ the county collector, but the assessor was a separate officer with distinct functions. Both were biennially elected, and the compensation of each was fixed at 5% on the amount of the state tax assessed and collected. This per centum remuneration could not exceed a fixed sum; the assessor's maximum being fixed at $500 per annum and the collector's at $3000. The fiscal machinery thus set in motion during the period of ante-bellum Statehood is patterned on substantially the same model today. Although this period witnessed the establishment of _some_ of the main features of the modern system of State and local taxation in Mississippi, it cannot be designated as transitional, in the sense Prof. Ely uses the term. There was no change from the taxation of specific kinds of property at varying rates to the taxation of the collective mass of property at one uniform rate. More specific kinds of property were taxed, but there was no disposition to bunch property under a common category at a uniform rate. The objects taxed were as specific and the rates as variable as ever. The period was marked by an extension of the tax system, not by its leveling-out. War demands emergency revenue, and especially was this true of the Civil War. When Mississippi formally renounced her allegiance to the Union in 1861, the Constitutional Convention which passed the Ordinance of Secession supplemented this by an "Ordinance to Raise Means for the Defence of the State."[72] This ordinance provided for the collection from each taxpayer of an additional Special State tax of 50% on the regular State tax, and also a tax from every inhabitant of 3-10 per cent. upon all money owned or controlled by such inhabitant--the moneys so collected to constitute a Military Fund.