Roger Brooke Taney (/ˈtɔːni/; March 17, 1777 – October 12, 1864) was an American lawyer and politician who served as the fifth chief justice of the United States, holding that office from 1836 until his death in 1864. Taney delivered the majority opinion in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), ruling that African Americans could not be considered U.S. citizens and that Congress could not prohibit slavery in the U.S. territories. Prior to joining the U.S. Supreme Court, Taney served as the U.S. attorney general and U.S. secretary of the treasury under President Andrew Jackson. He was the first Catholic to serve on the Supreme Court.[1]
Taney was born into a wealthy, slave-owning family in Calvert County, Maryland. He won election to the Maryland House of Delegates as a member of the Federalist Party but later broke with the party over the War of 1812. After switching to the Democratic-Republican Party, Taney was elected to the Maryland Senate in 1816. He emerged as one of the most prominent attorneys in the state and was appointed as the Attorney General of Maryland in 1827. Taney supported Andrew Jackson's presidential campaigns in 1824 and 1828, and he became a member of Jackson's Democratic Party. After a cabinet shake-up in 1831, President Jackson appointed Taney as his attorney general. Taney became one of the most important members of Jackson's cabinet and played a major role in the Bank War. Beginning in 1833, Taney served as secretary of the treasury under a recess appointment, but his nomination to that position was rejected by the United States Senate.
In 1835, after Democrats took control of the Senate, Jackson appointed Taney to succeed the late John Marshall on the Supreme Court as Chief Justice. Taney presided over a jurisprudential shift toward states' rights, but the Taney Court did not reject federal authority to the degree that many of Taney's critics had feared. By the early 1850s, he was widely respected, and some elected officials looked to the Supreme Court to settle the national debate over slavery. Despite emancipating his own slaves and giving pensions to those who were too old to work, Taney was outraged by Northern attacks on the institution, and sought to use his Dred Scott decision to permanently end the slavery debate. His broad ruling deeply angered many Northerners and strengthened the anti-slavery Republican Party; its nominee Abraham Lincoln won the 1860 presidential election.
After Lincoln's election, Taney sympathized with the seceding Southern states and blamed Lincoln for the war, but he did not resign from the Supreme Court. He strongly disagreed with President Lincoln's broader interpretation of executive power in the American Civil War. In Ex parte Merryman, Taney held that the president could not suspend the writ of habeas corpus. Lincoln retaliated to the ruling by invoking nonacquiescence. Taney later tried to hold George Cadwalader, one of Lincoln's generals, in contempt of court and the Lincoln Administration again invoked nonacquiescence in response. In 1863, Lincoln delivered the Emancipation Proclamation notwithstanding Taney's rulings on slavery. Taney finally relented, saying: "I have exercised all the power which the Constitution and laws confer on me, but that power has been resisted by a force too strong for me to overcome." Taney died in 1864, and Lincoln appointed Salmon P. Chase as his successor. At the time of Taney's death in 1864, he was widely reviled in the North, and Lincoln declined to make a public statement in response to his death. He continues to have a controversial historical reputation, and his Dred Scott ruling is widely considered to be the worst Supreme Court decision ever made.[2][3][4]
Taney was born in Calvert County, Maryland, on March 17, 1777, to Michael Taney V and Monica Brooke Taney. Taney's ancestor, Michael Taney I, had settled in Maryland from England in 1660. He and his family established themselves as prominent Catholic landowners of a flourishing tobacco plantation powered by slave labor.[5] As Taney's older brother, Michael Taney VI, was expected to inherit the family's plantation, their father encouraged Roger to study law. At the age of fifteen, Taney was sent to Dickinson College, where he studied ethics, logic, languages, mathematics, and other subjects. After graduating from Dickinson in 1796, he read law under Judge Jeremiah Townley Chase in Annapolis. Taney was admitted to the Maryland bar in 1799.[6] In 1844, Taney was elected as a member to the American Philosophical Society.[7]
Taney married Anne Phoebe Charlton Key, the sister of Francis Scott Key. They had six daughters together. Though Taney himself remained a Catholic, all of his daughters were raised as members of Anne's Episcopal Church.[8] Taney rented an apartment during his years of service with the federal government, but he and his wife maintained a permanent home in Baltimore. After Anne died in 1855, Taney and two of his unmarried daughters moved permanently to Washington, D.C.[9]
After gaining admission to the state bar, Taney established a successful legal practice in Frederick, Maryland. At his father's urging, he ran for the Maryland House of Delegates as a member of the Federalist Party. With the help of his father, Taney won election to the House of Delegates, but he lost his campaign for a second term. Taney remained a prominent member of the Federalist Party for several years until he broke with the party due to his support of the War of 1812. In 1816, He won election to a five-year term in the Maryland State Senate.[10] In 1823, Taney moved his legal practice to Baltimore, where he gained widespread notoriety as an effective litigator. In 1826, Taney and Daniel Webster represented merchant Solomon Etting in a case that appeared before the Supreme Court of the United States. In 1827, Taney was appointed as the Attorney General of Maryland.[11] Taney supported Andrew Jackson in the 1824 presidential election and the 1828 presidential election. He joined Jackson's Democratic Party and served as a leader of Jackson's 1828 campaign in Maryland.[12]
Taney considered slavery to be an evil practice.[13] He freed the slaves that he inherited from his father early in his life, and as long as they lived, he provided monthly pensions to the older ones who were unable to work.[14] He believed, however, that slavery was a problem to be resolved gradually and chiefly by the states in which it existed,[13] and, as a nationalist, blamed abolitionists for "ripping the country apart".[15] In 1819, nevertheless, Taney defended an abolitionist Methodist minister, Jacob Gruber, who had been arrested for his criticism of slavery. Gruber was charged with attempting to stir up "acts of mutiny and rebellion".[16] Taney claimed that the prosecution lacked a case against Gruber and argued that, lacking evidence of criminal intent, Gruber's freedom of conscience and freedom of speech needed to be protected.[16] Taney delivered "an impassioned defense of Gruber" and, in his opening argument, Taney condemned slavery as "a blot on our national character".[17] After listening to the defense, the jury acquitted Gruber.[16]
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As a result of the Petticoat Affair, in 1831 President Jackson asked for the resignations of most of the members of his cabinet, including Attorney General John M. Berrien.[18] Jackson turned to Taney to fill the vacancy caused by Berrien's resignation, Taney having been suggested to Jackson by a Washington physician.[19] Taney thus became the president's top legal adviser. In one advisory opinion that he wrote for the president, Taney argued that the protections of the United States Constitution did not apply to free blacks; he would revisit this issue later in his career.[20] Like his predecessors, Taney continued the private practice of law while he served as attorney general, and he served as a counsel for the city of Baltimore in the landmark Supreme Court case of Barron v. Baltimore.[21]
Taney became an important lieutenant in the "Bank War," Jackson's clash with the Second Bank of the United States (or "national bank"). Unlike other members of the cabinet, Taney argued that the national bank was unconstitutional, and that Jackson should seek to abolish it. With Taney's backing, Jackson vetoed a bill to renew the national bank's charter,[22] which was scheduled to expire in 1836.[23] The Bank War became the key issue of the 1832 presidential election, which saw Jackson defeat a challenge from national bank supporter Henry Clay. Taney's unyielding opposition to the bank, combined with Jackson's decisive victory in the election, made the attorney general one of the most prominent members of Jackson's cabinet.[24]
Jackson escalated the Bank War after winning re-election. When Secretary of the Treasury William J. Duane refused to authorize the removal of federal deposits from the national bank, Jackson fired Duane and gave Taney a recess appointment as secretary of the treasury.[25] Taney redistributed federal deposits from the national bank to favored state-chartered banks, which became known as "pet banks".[26] In June 1834, the Senate rejected Taney's nomination as secretary of the treasury, leaving Taney without a position in the cabinet.[27] Taney was the first cabinet nominee in the nation's history to be rejected by the Senate.[28]
Despite Taney's earlier rejection by the Senate, in January 1835 Jackson nominated Taney to fill the seat of retiring Supreme Court Associate Justice Gabriel Duvall. Opponents of Taney ensured that his nomination was not voted on before the end of the Senate session, thereby defeating the nomination. The Democrats picked up seats in the 1834 and 1835 Senate elections, giving the party a stronger presence in the chamber. In July 1835, Jackson nominated Taney to succeed Chief Justice John Marshall, who had died earlier in 1835. Though Jackson's opponents in the Whig Party once again attempted to defeat Taney's nomination, Taney won confirmation in March 1836.[29] He was the first Catholic to serve on the Supreme Court.[1]
Marshall had dominated the Court during his 35 years of service, and his opinion in Marbury v. Madison had helped establish the federal courts as a co-equal branch of government. To the dismay of states' rights advocates, the Marshall Court's rulings in cases such as McCulloch v. Maryland had upheld the power of federal law and institutions over state governments. Many Whigs believed that Taney was a "political hack" and worried about the direction in which he would take the Supreme Court. One of Marshall's key allies, Associate Justice Joseph Story, remained on the Court when Taney took office, but Jackson appointees made up a majority of the Court.[30] Though Taney would preside over a jurisprudential shift toward states' rights, the Taney Court did not reject broad federal authority to the degree that many Whigs initially feared.[31]
Charles River Bridge v. Warren Bridge presented one of the first major cases of the Taney Court. In 1785, the legislature of Massachusetts had chartered a company to build the Charles River Bridge on the Charles River. In 1828, the state legislature chartered a second company to build a second bridge, the Warren Bridge, just 100 yards away from the Charles River Bridge. The owners of the Charles River Bridge sued, arguing that their charter had given them a monopoly on the operation of bridges in that area of the Charles River. The attorney for the Charles River Bridge, Daniel Webster, argued that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts had violated the Commerce Clause by disregarding the monopoly that the commonwealth had granted to his client. The attorney for Massachusetts, Simon Greenleaf, challenged Webster's interpretation of the charter, noting that the charter did not explicitly grant a monopoly to the proprietors of the Charles River Bridge.[32] In his majority opinion, Taney ruled that the charter did not grant a monopoly to the Charles River Bridge. He held that, while the Contract Clause prevents state legislatures from violating the express provisions of a contract, the Court would interpret a contract provision narrowly when it conflicted with the general welfare of the state. Taney reasoned that any other interpretation would prevent advancements in infrastructure, since the owners of other state charters would demand compensation in return for relinquishing implied monopoly rights.[33]
In Mayor of the City of New York v. Miln (1837), the plaintiffs challenged a New York statute that required masters of incoming ships to report information on all passengers they brought into the country--e.g., age, health, last legal residence. 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, holding that the statute did not assume to regulate commerce between the port of New York and foreign ports and because the statute was passed in the exercise of a police power which rightfully belonged to the states.[34]
In Briscoe v. Commonwealth Bank of Kentucky (1837), the third critical ruling of Taney's debut term, the Chief Justice confronted the banking system, in particular state banking. Disgruntled creditors had demanded invalidation of the notes issued by Kentucky's Commonwealth Bank, created during the panic of 1819 to aid economic recovery. The institution had been backed by the credit of the state treasury and the value of unsold public lands, and by every usual measure, its notes were bills of credit of the sort prohibited by the federal Constitution.
Briscoe manifested this change in the field of banking and currency in the first full term of the court's new chief justice. Article I, section 10 of the Constitution prohibited states from using bills of credit, but the precise meaning of a bill of credit remained unclear. In Craig v. Missouri (1830), the Marshall Court had held, by a vote of 4 to 3, that state interest-bearing loan certificates were unconstitutional. However, in the Briscoe case, the Court upheld the issuance of circulating notes by a state-chartered bank even when the Bank's stock, funds, and profits belonged to the state, and where the officers and directors were appointed by the state legislature. The Court narrowly defined a bill of credit as a note issued by the state, on the faith of the state, and designed to circulate as money. Since the notes in question were redeemable by the bank and not by the state itself, they were not bills of credit for constitutional purposes. By validating the constitutionality of state bank notes, the Supreme Court completed the financial revolution tri