Robert B. Taney

Roger Brooke Taney ( "tawny"; March 17, 1777 – October 12, 1864) was the eleventh United States Attorney General. He also was the fifth Chief Justice of the United States, holding that office from 1836 until his death in 1864, and was the first Roman Catholic to hold that office. He is most remembered for delivering the majority opinion in Dred Scott v. Sandford, that ruled, among others, that African Americans, being considered "of an inferior order and altogether unfit to associate with the white race" at the time the Constitution was drafted, could not be considered citizens of the United States.

Described by his and President Andrew Jackson's critics as ". . . stooped, sallow, ugly . . . [a] supple, cringing tool of Jacksonian power," as the new Chief Justice, Taney was as ideally suited for the complex and contradictory period of American history as any man could be: he was a Southerner who loved his country over his state; a believer in states' rights yet a firm believer in the Union; a slaveholder who regretted the institution and manumitted his slaves. In Maryland, he had practiced law and politics simultaneously and succeeded in both. After abandoning Federalism as a losing cause, he rose to the top of the state's Jacksonian machine. As U.S. Attorney General (1831-1833) and then Secretary of the Treasury (1833-1834), he became one of Andrew Jackson's closest advisers. "'. . . He brought to the Chief Justiceship a high intelligence and legal acumen, kindness and humility, patriotism, and a determination to be a great Chief Justice that enabled him to mold the modest raw material of the Court into an effective and prestigious institution.'"

Taney died during the final months of the American Civil War on the same day that his home state of Maryland abolished slavery.

The Taney Court, 1836–1864
Unlike Marshall, who had supported a broad role for the federal government in the area of economic regulation, Taney and the other justices appointed by Jackson more often favored the power of the states. In a series of Commerce Clause cases exemplified by Mayor of the City of New York v. Miln (1837), wherein the challenged New York statute required masters of incoming ships to report information on all passengers they brought into the country, i.e. age, health, last legal residence, etc. The question before the Taney court was whether or not the state statute undercut Congress's authority to regulate commerce; or was it a police measure, as New York claimed, fully within the authority of the state. Taney and his colleagues sought to devise a more nuanced means of accommodating competing federal and state claims of regulatory power. The Court ruled in favor of New York.

The Taney Court also presided over the case of the Spanish schooner Amistad. Fellow Justice Joseph Story wrote the Court's decision and opinion. Taney sided with Story's opinion but left no written record of his own in regard to the Amistad case.

In Prigg v. Pennsylvania (1842), the Taney Court agreed to hear yet another case regarding slavery, slaves, slave owners, and States' Rights. It held that the Constitutional prohibition against state laws that would emancipate any "person held to service or labor in [another] state" barred Pennsylvania from punishing a Maryland man who had seized a former slave and her child, then had taken them back to Maryland without seeking an order from the Pennsylvania courts permitting the abduction. In his opinion for the Court, Justice Joseph Story held not only that states were barred from interfering with enforcement of federal fugitive slave laws, but that they also were barred from assisting in enforcing those laws.

Taney was also instrumental in the case of John Merryman, a citizen of the state of Maryland who, in the early years of the American Civil War, was accused of burning bridges and destroying telegraph poles, was seized in his home at 2:00 am by military authorities and taken to Fort McHenry. He was the first victim of President Abraham Lincoln's suspension of the ancient Writ of Habeas Corpus.

Dred Scott Decision
Five years later came the Supreme Court case that destroyed Taney's historical reputation, Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), and which is considered to be one of the indirect causes of the Civil War. Despite the willingness of five members of the Court to dismiss the lawsuit by Dred Scott seeking his freedom on grounds situated in Missouri law governing who could sue and be sued, Taney wrote what became regarded as the opinion for the Court, presenting Taney's version of the origins of the United States and the Constitution as substantiation for his holdings that Congress had no authority to restrict the spread of slavery into federal territories, and that such previous attempts to restrict slavery's spread as the 1820 Missouri Compromise were unconstitutional.

The Dred Scott v. Sandford decision was widely condemned at the time by opponents of slavery as an illegitimate use of judicial power. Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party accused the Taney Court of carrying out the orders of the "slave power" and of conspiring with President James Buchanan to undo the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Current scholarship supports that second charge, as it appears that Buchanan put significant political pressure behind the scenes on Justice Robert Grier to obtain at least one vote from a justice from outside the South to support the Court's sweeping decision.

Taney's intemperate language only added to the fury of those who opposed the decision. As he explained the Court's ruling, African-Americans, free or slave, could not be citizens of any state, because the drafters of the Constitution had viewed them as "beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations, and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect." The full context of Taney's statement from the Dred Scott ruling:

It is difficult at this day to realize the state of public opinion in regard to that unfortunate race which prevailed in the civilized and enlightened portions of the world at the time of the Declaration of Independence, and when the Constitution of the United States was framed and adopted; but the public history of every European nation displays it in a manner too plain to be mistaken. They had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations, and so far unfit that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.



Author Tom Burnam, in Dictionary of Misinformation (1975), commented (pp. 257–58) that "it seems unfair to quote the remark above out of a context which includes the phrase 'that unfortunate race,' etc."

Taney's own attitudes toward slavery were more complex. Taney not only emancipated his own slaves, but gave pensions to those who were too old to work. In 1819, he defended a Methodist minister who had been indicted for inciting slave insurrections by denouncing slavery in a camp meeting. In his opening argument in that case Taney condemned slavery as "a blot on our national character."

Taney's attitudes toward slavery, however, hardened over time. By the time he wrote his opinion in Dred Scott he labeled the opposition to slavery as "northern aggression," a popular phrase among Southerners. He evidently hoped that a Supreme Court decision declaring federal restrictions on slavery in the territories unconstitutional would put the issue beyond the realm of political debate. As it turned out, he was wrong, as his decision only served to galvanize Northern opposition to slavery while splitting the Democratic Party on sectional lines.

Many abolitionists—and some supporters of slavery—believed that Taney was prepared to rule that the states likewise had no power to bar slaveholders from bringing their property into free states and that state laws providing for the emancipation of slaves brought into their territory were likewise unconstitutional. A case, Lemmon v. New York, that presented that issue was slowly making its way to the Supreme Court in the years after the Dred Scott decision. The outbreak of the American Civil War denied Taney that opportunity, as the Commonwealth of Virginia seceded and no longer recognized the Court's authority.

Lincoln Presidency
Taney personally administered the oath of office to Lincoln, his most prominent critic, on March 4, 1861. He continued to trouble Lincoln during the three years he remained Chief Justice after the beginning of the war. After President Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus in parts of Maryland, Taney ruled as Circuit Judge in Ex parte Merryman (1861) that only Congress had the power to take this action. Some scholars argue that Lincoln made an aborted attempt to arrest Taney himself in response to his habeas corpus decision, though the evidence is sparse. Lincoln ignored the court's order and continued to arrest prisoners without the privilege of the writ, though Merryman was eventually released without charges. Some Radical Republicans in Congress even considered initiating impeachment charges against Taney.

Final years
Taney, whose health had never been good, spent his final years in worsening health, near poverty, despised by both North and South, and since the Merryman ruling, having been all but ignored, for both better and for worse, by Lincoln and his cabinet. But for Taney, who had lost his Maryland estates to the Civil War, the worst was the degrading poverty:

"All my life I have felt the obligation to pay my debts . . . and my inability to do so at this time is mortifying." He explained that his rent had been raised from $4,000 to $8,000 but that he had been prevented from moving to cheaper quarters due to the failing health of his daughter Ellen, who lived with him. The miserable financial situation was maddening to him. . . . A few months later Taney wrote nostalgically ". . . about peaceful, bygone days . . . walks in the fresh country air. But my walking days are over."


 * (Note: Taney's yearly salary was approximately $10,000. In the inflationary Washington, D.C. of this time the yearly rent for his boardinghouse rooms had jumped from $4,000 to $8,000, with no increase in pay.)

On October 13, 1864 the clerk of the Supreme Court announced that "the great and good Chief Justice is no more." He had died at the age of eighty-seven the previous evening, having served for more than twenty-eight years as the fifth Chief Justice of the United States.

President Lincoln made no public statement either acknowledging Taney's death or his years as Chief Justice. Only Lincoln and three other members of his cabinet—Secretary of State William H. Seward, Attorney General Edward Bates, and Postmaster General William Dennison—agreed to attend Taney's memorial service in Washington, D.C. Of these, only Bates joined the cortège to Frederick, Maryland for Taney's funeral and burial. Taney, whose wife had pre-deceased him by nearly twenty years, left behind nothing but two daughters—the sickly Ellen, and a second, widowed, daughter with a small child—a small life insurance policy, and a bundle of worthless Virginia bonds.

Taney was punished by abolitionists in the Senate even after his death. In early 1865, the House of Representatives passed a bill to appropriate funds for a bust of Taney to be displayed in the courtroom of the Supreme Court. "Now an emancipated country should make a bust to the author of the Dred Scott decision?" exclaimed the indignant Senator Charles Sumner, "If a man has done evil in his life, he must not be complimented in marble." Instead, Sumner proposed that a vacant spot, not a bust of Taney, be left in the courtroom "to speak in warning to all who would betray liberty!"

Legacy


His home, Taney Place, located at Adelina, Calvert County, Maryland was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1972.

Another Taney home is located in Frederick, MD where Taney lived and practiced law with partner Francis Scott Key, the author of The Star Spangled Banner. The [Roger Brooke Taney House] "including the house, detached kitchen, root cellar, smokehouse and slaves quarters, interprets the life of Taney and his wife Anne Key (sister of Francis Scott Key), as well as various aspects of life in early nineteenth century Frederick County."

Taney remained a controversial figure following his death, even when merely a statuary figure. In 1865, Congress rejected the proposal to commission a bust of Taney to be displayed with those of the four Chief Justices who preceded him. As Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts said:


 * I speak what cannot be denied when I declare that the opinion of the Chief Justice in the case of Dred Scott was more thoroughly abominable than anything of the kind in the history of courts. Judicial baseness reached its lowest point on that occasion. You have not forgotten that terrible decision where a most unrighteous judgment was sustained by a falsification of history. Of course, the Constitution of the United States and every principle of Liberty was falsified, but historical truth was falsified also. . ..

Sumner had long exhibited an extreme and bitter dislike of the late Chief Justice. Upon hearing the news of Taney's passing the previous year, he wrote President Abraham Lincoln in celebration declaring that "Providence has given us a victory" in Taney's death. Even though Congress had earlier refused to commission a bust of Taney for display, it eventually did so when Taney's successor, Chief Justice Salmon Chase, died. In 1873, Congress apportioned funds for busts of both Taney and Chase to be displayed in the Capitol alongside the other chief justices.

Justice Benjamin Robbins Curtis, author of the dissent on Dred Scott, held his former colleague in high esteem despite their differences in that case. Writing in his own memoirs, Curtis described Taney:


 * He was indeed a great magistrate, and a man of singular purity of life and character. That there should have been one mistake in a judicial career so long, so exalted, and so useful is only proof of the imperfection of our nature. The reputation of Chief Justice Taney can afford to have anything known that he ever did and still leave a great fund of honor and praise to illustrate his name. If he had never done anything else that was high, heroic, and important, his noble vindication of the writ of habeas corpus, and of the dignity and authority of his office, against a rash minister of state, who, in the pride of a fancied executive power, came near to the commission of a great crime, will command the admiration and gratitude of every lover of constitutional liberty, so long as our institutions shall endure.

Modern legal scholars have tended to concur with Justice Curtis that, notwithstanding the Dred Scott decision and the furor surrounding it, which will forever be attached to his name, Taney was both an outstanding jurist and a competent judicial administrator.

His mixed legacy was wistfully noted by Justice Antonin Scalia in his dissenting opinion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey:

There comes vividly to mind a portrait by Emanuel Leutze that hangs in the Harvard Law School: Roger Brooke Taney, painted in 1859, the 82d year of his life, the 24th of his Chief Justiceship, the second after his opinion in Dred Scott. He is all in black, sitting in a shadowed red armchair, left hand resting upon a pad of paper in his lap, right hand hanging limply, almost lifelessly, beside the inner arm of the chair. He sits facing the viewer, and staring straight out. There seems to be on his face, and in his deep set eyes, an expression of profound sadness and disillusionment. Perhaps he always looked that way, even when dwelling upon the happiest of thoughts. But those of us who know how the lustre of his great Chief Justiceship came to be eclipsed by Dred Scott cannot help believing that he had that case--its already apparent consequences for the Court, and its soon to be played out consequences for the Nation--burning on his mind.

Taney County, Missouri, is named in his honor. He is still honored in his home state of Maryland, where Federal troops arrested and imprisoned the state legislature without habeas corpus by order of President Lincoln. There is a statue of Justice Taney prominently displayed on the grounds of the Maryland State House.

Chief Justice Taney was one of thirteen Catholic justices– out of 111 total through the appointment of Justice Samuel Alito, Chief Justice John Roberts, and Justice Sonia Sotomayor– in the history of the Supreme Court.

The Treasury-class US Coast Guard Cutter Taney, a long-serving American vessel notable for being the last ship afloat to have fought at Pearl Harbor is named for him, due to his prior service as Secretary of the Treasury (although the Coast Guard erroneously pronounced the name as "tain-ee" rather than "taw-nee"). The ship is now part of the Baltimore Maritime Museum.

Liberty ship Roger B. Taney also bore his name. After being commissioned on February 9, 1942, on July 2, 1943 she was torpedoed in the South Atlantic. Three crew members died. Many of the crew were involved in an epic 22 day 2,600 mile journey, including surviving a hurricane, and successfully landing in the Bahamas.