Taney, Roger Brooke (b. Calvert County, Md., 17 Mar. 1777; d. Washington, D.C., 12 Dec. 1864; interred St. John the Evangelist Cemetery, Frederick, Md.), chief justice, 1836–1864. Roger B. Taney is best known as the author of one of the most infamous opinions ever written for the Supreme Court, the majority opinion in Dred Scott v. John F. A. Sandford (1857). It is perhaps no surprise, then, that many students of American constitutional and legal history have a passionate, almost instinctive, negative reaction to the mention of Taney's name. Yet when the American Bar Association asked professors of law, history, and political science to evaluate Supreme Court justices, they ranked Taney in the “great” category along with giants John Marshall, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Louis D. Brandeis. Obviously many people associate Taney with only a narrow phase of his career—indeed, with a single case—while overlooking virtually everything else.

Roger Brooke Taney was descended from a prominent and aristocratic tobacco‐growing family. The family tradition was conservative agrarian; its politics during Taney's formative years were pro‐Constitution, pro‐Federalist, and strongly supportive of the rights of private property. Being a second son (the eldest inherited the family plantation), Roger was educated and trained for the law. He practiced briefly in Annapolis and then in Frederick, where he developed into one of Maryland's foremost attorneys. That inevitably led to election to the state legislature, first as a member of the House of Delegates and then as a state senator. In short order he became a leader in Maryland's Federalist party.

In 1806 Taney married Anne Key, daughter of wealthy farmer John Ross Key. (Her brother, Francis Scott Key, achieved everlasting fame when he authored “The Star Spangled Banner” during the dramatic bombardment of Baltimore's Fort McHenry in the War of 1812.) Taney was Roman Catholic, his wife Episcopalian. They reconciled religious differences by agreeing that sons would be raised as Catholics, daughters as Episcopalians. The Taneys had six children who survived, all girls.

Early Career

During his years in the Maryland legislature, Taney found himself often involved in matters of finance and banking. Representing a rural agrarian constituency, he viewed with misgivings the monopolistic tendencies of Baltimore banks, though he supported others that dealt more favorably with farmers. Like many of his fellow Federalists, Taney's politics were somewhat erratic. Early a supporter of the national bank (he would turn against it after becoming a staunch Jacksonian), Taney nevertheless essentially endorsed states' rights. This showed especially in his views toward slavery. He freed his own slaves (whom he inherited), but he opposed giving the federal government authority to limit the institution, holding that that power rested in the individual states. These early‐held tenets would remain with him throughout his later judicial career.

By the time Taney's term in the Maryland senate expired in 1821, the Federalist party had fallen into disarray, both nationally and in the individual states. Taney soon found a new political home: the Democratic party of Andrew Jackson. By 1826 he emerged among his state's Democratic leaders, and he was elected Maryland's attorney general, a post he held for five years. Along with a creditable legal performance, Taney's handling of patronage earned him a reputation as a loyal Jacksonian. Accordingly, when the Peggy Eaton affair forced a reorganization of President Jackson's cabinet in 1831, Taney was summoned to Washington as attorney general of the United States.

As attorney general (1831–1833), Taney rendered opinions that comported with his earlier constitutional views and that presaged his later judicial tenets. A steadfast Jacksonian, he viewed moneyed and monopoly‐protected interests as threats to economic democracy, concepts starkly expressed in Jackson's famous bank veto message, which Taney helped draft. Taney believed unwaveringly in a divided state‐federal sovereignty and in the power of the Supreme Court to decide on the locus of undetermined concurrent powers. As to slavery, however, he authored an opinion that asserted unequivocally that except where the Constitution expressly granted power to the national authority, control over slavery rested exclusively with the states.

Taney's elevation to the Supreme Court climaxed a unique scenario of partisan Jacksonian politics. Having vetoed the recharter of the Second Bank of the United States, President Jackson sought to speed the “monster's” demise by transferring federal deposits into state banks. However, statutory authority to move those funds rested in the secretary of the treasury. Two secretaries resigned rather than acquiesce in Jackson's tactics. Finally, in 1833, the president shifted a more compliant Taney from Justice to Treasury, and he removed the funds. Taney's new post was an interim appointment; when Congress convened and the president requested the appointment be made permanent, the Senate rejected it. Taney thereupon returned to private practice in Baltimore. In the next two years, however, several vacancies opened on the Supreme Court, and Jackson sought to fill them with suitable nominees. He proposed Taney to replace Associate Justice Gabriel Duvall, but Jackson's opponents in the Senate mustered enough votes to reject the nomination. When Chief Justice John Marshall died in 1835, Jackson again submitted Taney's name, this time to be chief justice, along with the nomination of Philip P. Barbour to fill Duvall's still‐vacant seat. On 15 March 1836, after an executive session in which no records were kept, the Senate confirmed both nominations. Anti‐Jacksonians lamented that the Supreme Court had been sullied with a “political hack.”

Service on the Court

Taney succeeded a remarkable jurist, John Marshall, who left an extraordinary legacy that scholars have labeled “constitutional nationalism” and “national capitalism.” Taney's philosophy differed. He was a consummate Jacksonian. Though an aristocrat who inherited conservative tidewater traditions, he believed like Jackson in the new West and its agrarianism. He was dedicated also to Jacksonian economic principles, especially to the processes of economic growth and competition. (It is worth noting that where Marshall affected knee breeches, Taney wore long trousers—“sans culottes”—symbolic of democratization.) Taney's devotion to the Union, like Marshall's, was unequivocal; yet, unlike Marshall, he saw much merit in states' rights. After all, Taney grew up after the American Revolution and was not affected by the same driving nationalism that influenced Marshall.

Taney's appointment to the Supreme Court coincided with a general turnover of the Court's personnel, and within a few years Jacksonians dominated. This development alarmed those who feared that property rights would be at the mercy of state legislatures, but Taney proved to be a skillful and shrewd tactician who knew how to exercise judicial self‐restraint. He led the Court along pathways of pragmatism and compromise, virtually devoid of dogmatism—except on the issue of slavery. In the end, Taney proved as vigilant as his predecessor in maintaining federal authority over American economic development.

The new chief justice did not have long to wait before making his mark on American jurisprudence. In Charles River Bridge Company v. Warren Bridge Company (1837), the Court faced the unremitting dilemma of American democratic capitalism: the conflict between the rights of private property and those of society. Taney asserted a basic premise of American constitutional thought: “The object and end of all government is to promote the happiness and prosperity of the community. … While the rights of private property are sacredly guarded, we must not forget that the community also have rights, and that the happiness and well‐being of every citizen depends on their faithful preservation” (p. 420).

The problem was where to draw the line. Moderating Marshall's categorical primacy of vested rights, Taney stressed process over doctrine and purposefully adapted the rule of law to the historical realities of change and progress. Later jurists (with some notable exceptions) would reason in the same vein as commercial expansion and technology transformed American society from rural agricultural to urban industrial. Building on Taney's Jacksonian tenets, they would gradually formulate a philosophy that emphasized the social responsibilities of private property.

The Court's adaptation of process in Charles River Bridge paved the way for further assessments of Marshall's nation‐centered views of the Contract and Commerce Clauses. In a series of momentous decisions—which included New York v. Miln (1837), Bank of Augusta v. Earle (1839), Swift v. Tyson (1842), the License Cases (1847), the Passenger Cases (1849), Genesee Chief v. Fitzhugh (1852), and Cooley v. Board of Wardens of the Port of Philadelphia (1852), among others—the Taney Court asserted a concurrent federal‐state relationship that warranted state supervision as long as it did not interfere with a federal statute. That freed the new technology from monopolistic restraints of established corporations and outmoded charters. Without weakening federal regulative powers, except for negating exclusivity, these cases broadened the sphere of laissez‐faire and competition and raised the status of state involvement in contract and corporate affairs, thereby allowing the burgeoning West and the new technology to lead the nation reasonably untrammeled into the future (see Commerce Power).

Contrary to considerable popular misconception, then, Taney did not reverse the Marshall trend and institute radical agrarian egalitarianism and state sovereignty. On the contrary, he preserved and refined the main lines of Marshall's constitutional law, opened economic opportunities for many Americans, and retained a strong national power redefined to accommodate a judicious dual sovereignty.

Nevertheless, Taney is remembered most for Dred Scott. Yet that decision comported with his earlier constitutional record on slavery, including opinions rendered as attorney general. In several cases preceding Dred Scott, Taney and his colleagues cautiously refrained from passing on the fundamental issue of slavery, exercising a modified judicial restraint by stressing process. In Groves v. Slaughter (1841) and in Strader v. Graham (1851), for instance, the Court evaded major substantive issues while striking a blow for state determination of the status of slavery. (Yet in Prigg v. Pennsylvania, 1842, Taney supported federal supremacy when state law interfered with Congressional fugitive‐slave legislation.)

By 1857, however, the slavery issue had reached explosive proportions. Even though he saw nothing positive about the institution of slavery itself, Taney withal was a southern gentleman imbued with southern values, and here was an opportunity to settle the issue. Furthermore, the majority of the Court was southern and proslavery. The result was Dred Scott: (1) blacks could not be citizens of the United States; (2) slaves were property protected by the Constitution; and (3) a state could decide for itself if someone formerly emancipated should revert to slavery within that state's boundaries. Coming when forces already were setting the stage for civil war, Taney's inflammatory opinion of the Court added enough fuel to the fire that it became unextinguishable.

Taney lived for seven years after Dred Scott, but the rancor engendered by that decision dogged him for the rest of his life. Even though he remained a loyal Unionist in the Civil War and sought to protect constitutional rights precariously stretched during that conflict, his effectiveness on the Court waned, just as did that of the Court itself, both casualties of Dred Scott. Taney died a weary octogenarian whose final years suffered from anger, bitterness, and frustration.

Taney brought infamy upon himself because he viewed the alleged inferiority of blacks as an axiom of both law and the Constitution, a legal discrimination that he saw sanctioned even in the Declaration of Independence. No wonder so many react negatively to his constitutionalism. Yet when scholars evaluate Taney's overall contributions to American jurisprudence, they rank him, in spite of Dred Scott, among the greats.

See also State Sovereignty and States' Rights.

Bibliography

Frank Otto Gatell , Roger B. Taney, in The Justices of the United States Supreme Court 1789–1969, edited by Leon Friedman and Fred L. Israel, vol. 1 (1969), pp. 635–655.
Walker Lewis , Without Fear or Favor: A Biography of Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney (1965).
Carl Brent Swisher , Roger B. Taney (1935).
Samuel Tyler , Memoir of Roger Brooke Taney, LL.D. (1872).

Walter Ehrlich

TANEY, ROGER BROOKE

Roger Brooke Taney served as chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1836 to 1864. During his almost thirty years on the bench, Taney sought to encourage economic growth and competition by rendering decisions that reshaped the traditional law concerning property rights and commerce. Although he served with great distinction on the Court, he is best known as the author of the infamous decision in Dred Scott's case, dred scott v. sandford, 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393, 15 L. Ed. 691 (1857). This decision fueled sectional hostility and moved the nation closer to civil war.

Taney was born on March 17, 1777, in Calvert County, Maryland. A descendant of an aristocratic tobacco-growing family, Taney graduated from Dickinson College in 1795, studied law, and was admitted to the Maryland bar in 1799. That same year he was elected to a one-year term in the Maryland House of Delegates. Taney practiced briefly in Annapolis before settling in Frederick, where he soon was recognized as a distinguished attorney.

Taney was elected to the Maryland Senate in 1816 as a member of the federalist party. Despite the party's belief in a strong national government, Taney endorsed states' rights. By the time he left the Senate in 1821, the Federalist party was on the verge of extinction. Taney switched his allegiance to the democratic party and soon became an influential figure in the Maryland state party leadership. He was elected Maryland attorney general in 1826 and served until 1831.

President andrew jackson appointed Taney U.S. attorney general in 1831. Taney supported the president's opposition to rechartering the Second Bank of the United States and helped him write the veto message. Jackson and the Democrats saw the bank as a dangerous institution that would enhance the power of the national government. Having vetoed the rechartering, in 1833 Jackson ordered Secretary of the Treasury William J. Duane to withdraw the deposits of the federal government from the bank, but Duane resigned instead. Jackson then appointed Taney secretary of the treasury so that he could carry out the order. Confirmation of Taney's appointment as treasury secretary was frustrated by members of the whig party in the U.S. Senate, but by that time Taney had succeeded in distributing the federal funds among several state banks.

Taney returned to private practice, but President Jackson wanted him on the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1835 he nominated Taney as an associate justice, but the Senate, still disgruntled about the bank deposit issue, refused to confirm the appointment. The composition of the Senate soon changed, however, and upon the death of john marshall in 1836, Taney was nominated and confirmed as chief justice.

"We must look at the institution of slavery as publicists, and not as casuists. It is a question of law, and not a case of conscience."
—Roger Brooke Taney

In his first major opinion as chief justice, in the case of charles river bridge v. proprietors of warren bridge, 36 U.S. (11 Pet.) 420, 9 L. Ed. 773 (1837), Taney wrote for the majority of a divided Court. Taney decided that a franchise to operate a toll bridge that had been granted by the state of Massachusetts in the late eighteenth century, in the absence of explicit provisions, could not be construed as granting a monopoly to the toll bridge operator. Therefore, when the Massachusetts state legislature later granted another franchise to operate a competing toll bridge nearby, the legislature did not violate Article I, Section 10, of the U.S. Constitution, which forbids states from impairing the obligation of contracts. The opinion demonstrated Taney's belief that economic development could best be promoted and the public good most expeditiously furthered by fostering competition.

Until Dred Scott Taney had demonstrated a reluctance to make the Supreme Court the arbiter of national political issues. By the mid-1850s, however, the national debate over slavery had almost reached the boiling point. Taney believed a decision by the Court would have a tempering effect on the country. He was clearly wrong.

Dred Scott was a slave owned by an army surgeon, John Emerson, who resided in Missouri. In 1836 Emerson took Scott to Fort Snelling, in what is now Minnesota, but was then a territory in which slavery had been expressly forbidden by the missouri compromise of 1820. In 1846 Scott sued for his freedom in a Missouri state court, arguing that his residence in a free territory released him from slavery. The Missouri Supreme Court rejected his argument, and Scott appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The Court heard arguments in Dred Scott in 1855 and 1856. The Court could have properly disposed of the case on narrow procedural grounds, but Taney decided that the Court needed to address the status of slavery in the territories. He wrote a tortuous opinion, arguing that because of the prevailing attitudes toward slavery and African Americans in 1787–1789, when the Constitution was drafted

and ratified, a slave was not and never could become a federal citizen. In addition, Taney ruled that the free descendants of slaves were not federal citizens and that property in slaves was entitled to such protection that Congress could not constitutionally forbid slavery in the territories.

The immediate effect of the Dred Scott decision was to convince abolitionists that the South and the Supreme Court planned to impose slavery throughout the Union. Taney was attacked as a former slave owner (though he had freed his slaves, whom he had inherited) and was called wicked, cowardly, and hypocritical. With the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, it became clear that Taney's decision had failed to achieve its essential purpose.

Taney remained loyal to the Union during the Civil War, yet his effectiveness and that of the Court had been seriously compromised by Dred Scott. Taney sought to protect constitutional rights during the Civil War, ruling that even in wartime the executive branch and the military had no power to suspend constitutional protections (Ex Parte Merryman, 17 Fed. Cas. 144 [1861]). Though Taney saw the Court as a restraining influence on the exercise of arbitrary power by other branches of government, his efforts were ineffective. The Radical Republican–controlled Congress and President abraham lincoln ignored the pronouncements of the Court. From Lincoln's emancipation proclamation and the civil rights act of 1866 (14 Stat. 27) through the passage of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution, the Republicans repeatedly repudiated Dred Scott. Nevertheless, Taney continued to hold the office of chief justice until his death on October 12, 1864, in Washington, D.C.

further readings

Siegel, Martin. 1987. The Taney Court, 1836–1864. Millwood, N.Y.: Associated Faculty Press.

Smith, Charles W. 1936. Roger B. Taney: Jacksonian Jurist. Reprint, 1973. New York: Da Capo Press.

Roger Brooke Taney

Roger Brooke Taney (1777-1864) was an American political leader and as chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court greatly contributed to constitutional law.

Roger B. Taney was born in Calvert County, Md., on March 17, 1777, into a landed, slaveholding family that proudly traced its line back five generations. He received the rudiments of a classical education from a private tutor and at the age of 15 entered Dickinson College. There he found little to upset his aristocratic prejudices, but he did gain an abiding love of learning and graduated with honors in 1795.

As a younger son with no prospect of inheriting the family estate, young Taney chose the profession of law, with his eye on politics. In 1799 he was admitted to the bar and served one term as a Federalist representative in the state legislature. In private practice he quickly distinguished himself as one of Maryland's most promising young lawyers. He married Anne Key on Jan. 7, 1806, and she and their seven children were a constant solace throughout Taney's strenuous public life.

In Jackson's Cabinet

From 1816 through 1821 Taney served as state senator. When new parties emerged from the confusion of the 1820s, Taney cast his lot with the forces of Andrew Jackson. In 1831 he resigned his office as state attorney general, which he had held since 1827, in order to accept an appointment in President Jackson's Cabinet as attorney general. Among his opinions as attorney general, two revealed his stand on slavery: one supported South Carolina's law prohibiting free Blacks from entering the state, and one argued that Blacks could not be citizens. In 1833, as secretary of the Treasury, Taney ordered an end to the deposit of Federal money in the Second Bank of the United States, an act which killed the institution.

Aware of Taney's ability and certain of his political orthodoxy, President Jackson, on Dec. 28, 1835, appointed him to the office of chief justice of the United States, left vacant by the death of John Marshall. Taney was instrumental in shaping constitutional law to fit the new age. His opinion in Charles River Bridge v. Warren Bridge (1837) set the tone of the new Court. The Massachusetts Legislature had chartered a new, prospectively toll-free bridge across the Charles River. The old bridge company contended that its original charter implied monopoly rights. Taney's opinion refused to recognize the doctrine of implied contract, thus giving the states more latitude to legislate in the public interest. Taney also argued that the refusal to grant monopoly by implication would encourage economic progress by preventing entrenched capital from thwarting new corporate development.

Taney was a moderate, standing between old nationalists on the Court and the more extreme states'-rightists. The Chief Justice also made clear that he was a firm friend of private property. Despite his suspicion of corporate power (his opinion in Bank of Augusta v. Earle, 1839), he broadened the interstate operation of corporations by holding that a corporations chartered in one state had the right to do business in another unless positively prohibited by that state.

Personal and Professional Qualities

Thin, stooped, and sallow, Taney did not fit a heroic mold; but his mind was acute, his pen lucid. His patience, tact, and ability were instrumental in overcoming personal and doctrinal divisions among the justices, and though the Court was frequently divided, it continued to administer the law effectively. Under Taney's leadership the Court showed more tolerance of legislative power than it had under Marshall, but it did not surrender its hard-won powers to decide.

The issue of slavery was the downfall of the Court and detracted permanently from the image of Taney's states-manship. In Dred Scott v. Sanford (1857) Taney wrote the majority opinion for a bitterly divided Court which unwisely confronted all the explosive political questions in the case. Blacks, he said in a racist vein that has since been irrevocably associated with his name, could not be a citizen of the United States because he was recognized as inherently unequal by the Constitution. Congress, moreover, could not prohibit slavery in the territories because the 5th Amendment to the Constitution protected citizens in the possession of their property, and slaves were property.

Reaction to Taney's opinion was vehement. Almost overnight the Court fell to a new low in the opinion of the majority of Americans, who were now antislavery in sentiment. The years following the Dred Scott case until Taney's death on Oct. 12, 1864, were sad ones for the Chief Justice. Only after the passions of the Civil War had receded was it apparent that, the Dred Scott case excepted, Taney in his own way had contributed almost as much to the development of constitutional government as his great predecessor.

Further Reading

The standard biography, Carl Swisher, Roger B. Taney (1935), relates Taney's political-economic experience to his philosophy and judicial career. Walker Lewis, Without Fear or Favor: A Biography of Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney (1965), supplements Swisher by concentrating on Taney's personal qualities. Samuel Tyler, Memoir of Roger Brooke Taney (1872), though old, still contains useful information, as does Charles W. Smith, Jr., Roger B. Taney: Jacksonian Jurist (1936). Two general accounts of the Supreme Court that include much information on Taney's legal career are Charles Warren, The Supreme Court in United States History (3 vols., 1922; rev. ed., 2 vols., 1926), and Charles G. Haines and Foster Sherwood, The Role of the Supreme Court in American Government and Politicsvol. 2: 1835-1864 (1957). A work in progress, Holmes Devisee, History of the Supreme Court, will devote one volume to the Taney Court.

Additional Sources

Siegel, Martin, The Taney court, 1836-1864, Millwood, N.Y.: Associated Faculty Press, 1987. □

Roger Brooke Taney , 1777–1864, American jurist, 5th chief justice of the United States (1836–64), b. Calvert co., Md., grad. Dickinson College, 1795.

Early Life

Taney was born of a wealthy slave-owning family of tobacco farmers. He was admitted to the bar in 1799 and as a Federalist served (1799–1800) one term in the Maryland house of delegates. He temporarily broke with the Federalist leadership over the party's opposition to the War of 1812 , but he gained control of the Federalists in Maryland and in 1816 was elected to a five-year term in the state senate. Having built up a large practice, he moved (1823) from Frederick to Baltimore.

In 1824 he permanently abandoned the Federalists to support Andrew Jackson. President Jackson appointed (1831) Taney to the post of Attorney General to assist in the struggle with the Bank of the United States . Taney wrote much of Jackson's message vetoing (1832) the act that rechartered the bank, and, when Louis McLane and William J. Duane refused to withdraw federal funds from the bank, Taney was appointed (1833) Secretary of the Treasury and effected the withdrawal.

Chief Justice

The Senate, incensed by Taney's actions as Secretary of the Treasury, refused in 1835 to ratify his nomination as an associate justice of the Supreme Court, but the following year, somewhat changed in membership, the Senate ratified his appointment as chief justice. In the Charles River Bridge Case (1837) Taney declared that a state charter of a private business conferred only privileges expressly granted and that any ambiguity must be decided in favor of the state. His opinion outraged conservatives, who were opposed to any modification of the view that charters issued by states are inviolable, a view established by Taney's predecessor, John Marshall , in the Dartmouth College Case (1819).

Taney felt that the police power of a state entitled it to make reasonable regulatory laws even if they appeared to override provisions of the U.S. Constitution; thus, he held that, although Congress alone had the power to regulate interstate commerce, a state might exclude a corporation organized elsewhere. In sustaining fugitive slave laws , however, Taney denied to free states the power of refusing obedience to federal statutes requiring the surrender of escaped slaves.

Taney's support of the slavery laws was most clearly expressed in the Dred Scott Case (1857). Here he held that slaves (and even the free descendants of slaves) were not citizens and might not sue in the federal courts, and that Congress could not forbid slavery in the territories of the United States. Opposition to the second holding was furiously expressed by the Republicans, and when Lincoln became President he considered Taney an arch foe. In the Civil War, Taney in vain ruled against Lincoln's suspension of the writ of habeas corpus (see Merryman, ex parte ). There was much antipathy to Taney at his death, but there has been a gradual increase in appreciation of his contributions to constitutional law.

Bibliography

See biographies by B. C. Steiner (1922, repr. 1970), C. B. Swisher (1935, repr. 1961), and W. Lewis (1965); R. K. Newmyer, The Supreme Court under Marshall and Taney (1969).

Taney, Roger Brooke (1777–1864) US lawyer, chief justice of the Supreme Court (1836–64). As attorney-general (1831), he aided President Jackson in a struggle with the Bank of the United States. He was appointed associate justice (1835) but was not confirmed by the Senate. The next year a Senate Democratic majority confirmed his appointment as chief justice. An advocate of states' rights, he nonetheless extended the scope and power of the Supreme Court. He was associated with Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), which refused African-Americans the right of citizenship and denied Congress power to forbid slavery in the territories.