Taney, Roger B.

By: Kevin R. Gutzman

Source:

 Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass

Taney, Roger B.

(b. 17 March 1777; d. 12 October 1864),
lawyer, politician, U.S. attorney general, and chief justice of the United States.

Roger Brooke Taney is generally considered to be both one of the great American judges and one of the leading opponents of African Americans in history. Don E. Fehrenbacher, historian of the 1857 case of Dred Scott v. Sandford, regards Taney's opinion in that case as the logical extension of the principles announced by Chief Justice John Marshall in Marbury v. Madison (1803), a case establishing that the “essence of judicial duty” is to decide which laws conform to the Constitution. One Taney biographer opines that Taney, in his opinions, presented the most coherent elaboration of Jacksonian democracy. All of these characterizations are well deserved.

Born into a prominent Maryland Catholic family, Taney early demonstrated outstanding academic ability by graduating from Dickinson College at age eighteen. Having completed the four-year course of study in three years, Taney was his class's elected valedictorian. Because his father was a Federalist supporter of primogeniture, Taney received legal training in place of the estate his older brother inherited. All three of the younger boys became professionals, which demonstrated how far the Taneys had advanced since the days of the indentured servant who established their line in Maryland.

Taney, like his father and two of his three brothers, was a Federalist member of the Maryland legislature, and his career ended when the Republican wave of 1800 swept over Maryland. (His final break with Federalism came with his support of the War of 1812.) Immersing himself in law, Taney freed ten slaves as a young adult. He rose to great eminence in the Maryland bar, attaining the office of attorney general (“the only office I ever coveted”), and argued several cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. When Andrew Jackson reshuffled his cabinet over the Peggy Eaton affair, a sex scandal involving Jackson's secretary of war, Taney found himself promoted to the federal attorney general's chair. When the illegality of the removal of the federal deposits from the Second Bank of the United States proved an insuperable barrier to two secretaries of the treasury, Jackson turned to the more pliant Taney, and the goal was achieved. As a reward, Jackson ultimately named Taney as chief justice of the United States.

Taney's tenure as chief justice saw the U.S. Supreme Court veered from Marshall's nationalism toward a more—though not a thoroughly—state's–rights–oriented jurisprudence. In addition, the Court came to sympathize with the claims of slaveholders. Briefly stated, the Court was dominated by its chief justice. Besides freeing ten slaves, Taney had served as local counsel to a Baltimore society organized to combat the problem of kidnapping of free Maryland blacks, and he subsequently served as a vice president of the American Colonization Society. He also successfully defended a minister, Jacob Gruber, who had been prosecuted for an antislavery sermon. Yet his performance as chief justice is summarized by his thoroughly proslavery posture.

President James Buchanan was seen to confer with Taney before announcing in his inaugural address that the problem of slavery in the federal territories would soon be resolved. Taney and Buchanan had both placed political pressure on Democratic members of the Court, and the Court's decision in the Dred Scott case purported to make the platform of the new Republican Party (whose first presidential nominee Buchanan had only narrowly defeated) unconstitutional. In doing so, the Court struck down the element of the Missouri Compromise (Congress's resolution to the dispute over slavery in Missouri) banning slavery from the majority of the Louisiana Purchase. In his wide-ranging opinion, Taney also found evidence in his own observations that the consensus of the founders had held that blacks had “no rights a white man was bound to respect.” For the first time since 1803, the Supreme Court had ruled an act of Congress unconstitutional, and the effect was electric.

Immediately, the Court found itself at the center of a firestorm. As the dissenting justices noted, Taney's historical claims were flawed. In addition, the nakedly political nature of the Democrats' decision inflamed northern opinion. In conjunction with the violence over slavery in the Kansas Territory (“Bleeding Kansas”) and the caning of Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner by a South Carolina Democrat on the Senate floor (“Bleeding Sumner”), the Dred Scott decision had a result exactly opposite what was intended: it made Republican victory in 1860 virtually inevitable.

Frederick Douglass, in common with other abolitionists, regarded Taney's decision in Dred Scott as “inhuman.” With the passing of slavery into history at the end of the Civil War, Douglass adopted Taney's formula that a black man had no rights that a white man was bound to respect as shorthand for the status that even free blacks in America had to endure before 1865; Douglass used that formula for the rest of his life. Of course, while he had essentially agreed with Taney about the U.S. Constitution's inherent hostility to blacks during his Garrisonian phase, Douglass became more hopeful thereafter, and he greeted the Dred Scott decision with hostility as an incorrect decision, without ever stooping to personalities in regard to Taney.

In fact, Douglass noted in his 11 May 1857 speech against the Dred Scott decision that the Missouri Compromise, the congressional ban on debate of antislavery petitions, the annexation of Texas, the war with Mexico, the Compromise of 1850 (which resolved the issue of slavery in the Mexican Cession), and the Kansas-Nebraska Act (which threw open to local decision the question of slavery in those territories, once thought to have been decided by the Missouri Compromise) had all been hailed, as the Dred Scott decision was, as resolutions of the slavery issue. The intervals between resolutions, he added, had been “strikingly on the decrease.” Americans, he said, would never stand for Taney's “demoniacal judgment.” In Douglass's view, Taney's judgment was “demoniacal” in that it attempted to undo what God had done, which was to endow all men with the right to liberty; thus, the historical portion of Taney's opinion slandered the authors of both the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence—which asserted that the Creator had endowed all men with inalienable rights. Taney's decision depriving blacks of their right to liberty, said Douglass in the same speech, was “an open rebellion against God's government.”

See also Abolitionism; American Colonization Society; Buchanan, James; Constitution, U.S.; Douglass, Frederick; Dred Scott Case; Garrison, William Lloyd; and Proslavery Thought.

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