#5 - CHIEF JUSTICE ROGER B. TANEY (showing 1-8 of 8)

[Alisa, Assisting Moderator - American Exp. Lead, SCOTUS, Civil Rights comment history]

This thread is about the 5th Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court: Rober B. Taney

Biography:
Roger Brooke Taney was born and raised in Calvert County, Maryland. He was educated privately and attended Dickinson College where he graduated first in his class. He apprenticed with an Annapolis lawyer for three years and was admitted to the bar.

Taney was a representative in the Maryland House of Delegates for one term; he served as a Federalist. He backed the War of 1812 and split with his party over the issue. Taney returned to private law practice in 1821, after serving a term in the Maryland Senate. He remained active in politics, but joined with the Jacksonian Democrats when the Federalist Party expired. He led Jackon's presidential campaign in Maryland. Jackson later selected Taney as his attorney general.

In 1835, Jackson nominated Taney to replace Gabriel Duvall as associate justice. The Senate postponed the confirmation vote indefinitely. Less than a year later, Jackson sent up Taney's name to replace John Marshall as chief justice.

Taney sat on the Court until his death in 1864. Taney's wife -- Anne Key Taney -- died on September 29, 1855 from complications of a stroke. His youngest daughter, Alice, died the next day from yellow fever.

Taney made significant contributions to American constitutional law, but the case most closely associated with him inflicted enormous injury to the Court as an institution. That case was Dred Scott v. Sandford, decided on March 6, 1857.

Personal Information
Born: Monday, March 17, 1777
Died: Wednesday, October 12, 1864
Childhood Location: Maryland
Childhood Surroundings: Maryland

Position: Chief Justice
Seat: 1
Nominated By: Jackson
Commissioned on: Monday, March 14, 1836
Sworn In: Sunday, March 27, 1836
Left Office: Tuesday, October 11, 1864
Reason For Leaving: Death
Length of Service: 28 years, 6 months, 15 days
Home: Maryland



source: The Oyez Project, Justice Roger B. Taney
available at: (http://oyez.org/justices/roger_b_taney)

[Alisa, Assisting Moderator - American Exp. Lead, SCOTUS, Civil Rights comment history]

Roger Brooke Taney (pronounced /ˈtɔːni/ taw-nee; March 17, 1777 – October 12, 1864) was the fifth Chief Justice of the United States, holding that office from 1836 until his death in 1864. He was the first Roman Catholic to hold that office or sit on the Supreme Court of the United States. He was also the eleventh United States Attorney General. He is most remembered for delivering the majority opinion in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), that ruled, among other things, that African Americans, having been considered inferior at the time the Constitution was drafted, were not part of the original community of citizens and could not be considered citizens of the United States.

Taney was a Jacksonian Democrat when he became Chief Justice. Described by his and President Andrew Jackson's critics as "[a] supple, cringing tool of Jacksonian power," Taney was a believer in states' rights but also the Union; a slaveholder who regretted the institution and manumitted his slaves. From Prince Frederick, 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), Taney 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.

Early life and career
Taney was born March 17, 1777. He was the third child and the second son of seven (four sons and three daughters) born to a slaveholding family of tobacco planters in Calvert County, Maryland. He received a rudimentary education from a series of private tutors. After instructing him for a year, his last tutor David English recommended that Taney was ready for college. At the age of 15 he entered Dickinson College, graduating with honors in 1795. As a younger son with no prospect of inheriting the family plantation, Taney chose the profession of law. He read law and in 1799 was admitted to the bar. He quickly distinguished himself as one of Maryland's most promising young lawyers.

Taney married Anne Key on Jan. 7, 1806. They had seven children together.

In 1799, the same year he began practicing as an attorney, Taney was elected to the Maryland state legislature, where he served one term as a Federalist. Returning to private practice, he served as a director of the State Bank Branch in Frederick, Maryland from 1810 to 1815.

He was elected a state Senator in 1816, serving until 1821 - this time as a Democrat, since the Federalist party had dissolved. He was also a director of the Frederick County Bank from 1818 to 1823, when he returned to private practice. When the 1824 presidential election divided the Democratic Party between supporters and opponents of Andrew Jackson, Taney became a staunch Jacksonian Democrat. He was elected Attorney General of Maryland in 1827, but resigned in 1831, first to serve as acting United States Secretary of War, and then to accept President Jackson's nomination as Attorney General of the United States.

source: wikipedia

[Alisa, Assisting Moderator - American Exp. Lead, SCOTUS, Civil Rights comment history]

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 slaves who had taken over 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 Charles River Bridge v. Warren Bridge, the operators of the Charles River Bridge in Boston sued the operators of a new competing bridge, because the state had granted them a monopoly to collect tolls. Taney argued that, although the Massachusetts legislature had granted the Charles River Bridge a monopoly, the object of the government was to promote general happiness, which took precedence over the rights of monopolies.

In Prigg v. Pennsylvania (1842), the Taney Court agreed to hear a 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, and 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 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. He was seized in his home at 2:00 am by military authorities and taken to Fort McHenry. His was the first arrest under President Abraham Lincoln's suspension of the Writ of Habeas Corpus.

Dred Scott decision

In 1857 the Court heard Dred Scott v. Sandford; its decision is considered to have indirectly been a cause of the Civil War. Despite the willingness of five members of the Court to dismiss the lawsuit by Dred Scott, on grounds situated in Missouri law's governing who could sue and be sued, Taney wrote what became regarded as the opinion for the Court. His decision presented his version of the origins of the United States and the Constitution as the basis for his holding 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.

One of the two dissenters, Justice Benjamin Curtis, was so upset by the decision that he resigned from the court.

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, he noted that African Americans, free or slave, had not been considered part of the original community of people covered by the Constitution, but people of "an inferior order". Because they were originally excluded, he contended that neither the Court nor Congress could now extend rights of citizens to them.

The full text 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.”

Chief Justice Taney
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. He emancipated his own slaves and 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 appeared to harden in support. 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 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. His decision galvanized 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 had no power to bar slaveholders from bringing their property into free states, and that laws of free states providing for the emancipation of slaves brought into their territory were 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 the chance to rule on the issue, 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 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 in response to his habeas corpus decision, though the evidence is sparse. Lincoln ignored the court's order and continued to have arrests made without the privilege of the writ. Merryman was eventually released without charges. Some Radical Republicans in Congress considered initiating impeachment charges against Taney.

[Alisa, Assisting Moderator - American Exp. Lead, SCOTUS, Civil Rights comment history]

Death and legacy
Taney was buried at St. John the Evangelist Cemetery in Frederick, Maryland. 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. 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 a 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.

Notwithstanding, after Taney's successor, Chief Justice Salmon Chase, died, in 1873 Congress approved 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 one of the dissents 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, despite the Dred Scott decision, Taney was both an outstanding jurist and a competent judicial administrator. His mixed legacy was 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, though it is usually pronounced /ˈteɪni/, not /ˈtɔːni/.
A statue of Justice Taney is displayed on the grounds of the Maryland State House.
A street in Baltimore City was named for him.

Chief Justice Taney was the first of the thirteen Catholic justices – out of 112 total – who have served on the Supreme Court.
The Treasury-class US Coast Guard Cutter Taney was named for him. 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.

source: (and for preview post) wikipedia

[Alisa, Assisting Moderator - American Exp. Lead, SCOTUS, Civil Rights comment history]

Books about:
by Nicholas Murray

[Bryan, Assisting Moderator - Presidential Series, Military History Lead comment history]

This looks interesting:

R. Kent Newmyer

Product info:
In preparing the long-awaited second edition of his well-liked text, Kent Newmyer consulted the best and most relevant of the recent scholarship on the antebellum Court, prompting him to revise important points in the story of the Court’s evolution. Nevertheless, the revised edition of the text retains the basic format and the conceptual premise of the original: the unique contributions of the Marshall and Taney courts taken together laid the foundation for the modern institution. Understanding the Supreme Court during its formative period provides useful insights into its continued (and hotly debated) involvement in shaping American society. Seminal cases that came before the Court, such as Marbury v. Madison and Dred Scott v. Sanford are examined in detail. Besides touting a thoroughly revised bibliographical essay, the second edition of The Supreme Court under Marshall and Taney includes an entirely new bank of illustrations and an index of important cases, making it perfect as supplementary reading for the U.S. history survey as well as courses in U.S. legal history and the history of the Early Republic.

[Alisa, Assisting Moderator - American Exp. Lead, SCOTUS, Civil Rights comment history]

Bryan, thanks for the addition!

[Alisa, Assisting Moderator - American Exp. Lead, SCOTUS, Civil Rights comment history]

This looks intriguing:
by James F. Simon and Richard Allen
The clashes between President Abraham Lincoln and Chief Justice Roger B. Taney over slavery, secession, and Lincoln's constitutional war powers went to the heart of Lincoln's presidency.James F. Simon skillfully brings to life this compelling story of the momentous tug-of-war between the President and the Chief Justice during the worst crisis in the nation's history.