Roger B. Taney: Chief Justice and the Dred Scott Decision

Early Life and Education

In 1857, a United States Supreme Court Justice made a very drastic ruling in the case Dred Scott v. Sanford, declaring that all African Americans—enslaved or free—were not and could never become citizens of the United States. This man who led this ruling was Chief Justice Roger B. Taney.

Roger Taney was born on March 17, 1777, into a wealthy family that grew tobacco in Calvert County, Maryland. Taney's family also owned many slaves. Roger was the third child of seven but the second boy born into the family. Since he was not the first-born and would not inherit his family's wealth, he had to pursue a career that could bring him the wealth he desired. While young, Taney had various tutors come to teach him. When Taney was around fifteen, one of his tutors suggested that he was ready for college. The first couple of months at school proved difficult, but after securing a private tutor and concentrating solely on his studies, he thrived. He received an education at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania and graduated first in his class, earning the distinction of valedictorian.

Legal Career and Political Rise

Becoming valedictorian was considered distressing to Taney himself. He was awfully shy and afraid to make a speech at his graduation, but he ended up delivering the speech despite appearing frightened throughout. After graduating, Taney studied law in an apprenticeship under Judge Jeremiah Townley Chase in Annapolis, Maryland.

In the spring of 1799, Taney was admitted into the Maryland bar. At the request of his father, he settled back in his hometown and opened law offices. At the age of twenty-two, he was elected to the House of Delegates but was defeated for reelection in 1801. After this defeat, he moved to Frederick, Maryland, where he continued practicing law for several more years until 1823. While living in Frederick, Taney met a woman named Anne Phebe Charlton Key, the sister of Francis Scott Key, who wrote the lyrics to the National Anthem. Taney married Anne in 1806, and together they had seven children—six girls and one boy. Their son did not survive infancy.

Taney broke with the national leadership of the Federalist Party when it opposed the War of 1812 and the United States' declaration of war on Britain. When elected to the State Senate, he took over leadership of the Federalist Party in Maryland in 1816. A dramatic event struck Taney hard that same year when his mother passed away.

In 1816, Taney was the recognized leader of the Maryland Federalist Party, and that year he won a five-year term in the Maryland Senate. Taney was constantly struggling with controversial cases. For example, in 1819, "he defended Jacob Gruber, a Methodist preacher from Pennsylvania charged with inciting slaves to insurrection by means of a flaming antislavery sermon he had preached at a revivalist camp meeting. After a trial marked by high feeling on both sides, Gruber won acquittal before slaveholding judges and a proslavery jury."

Rise to Chief Justice

At the age of forty-six, Taney was an established lawyer and public figure who realized it was time to advance his career. He moved his family and practice to Baltimore. When Taney arrived in Baltimore, he arrived during the presidential struggle between John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson. Taney initially joined the debate as a Federalist. As the contest between candidates unfolded, Taney rejected both Federalism and the advantages of his father's social class to support Jackson and align himself with the Democratic Party. He was supporting Jackson for President in 1824, but Jackson lost that election, and Taney returned to his law practice. In 1826, he appeared as counsel for the state of Maryland before the U.S. Supreme Court. Months later, the state bar recommended him unanimously for the position of State Attorney General, which he accepted with pride. He remained energetic in national politics while serving as chair of the Jackson Central Committee of Maryland in 1828. Taney never pursued federal positions because he was uninterested in anything that did not involve law. He did not want to be drawn away from his practice and suffer the loss of income that would result from abandoning his firm.

In 1831, numerous scandals plagued the Jackson administration, including the Peggy Eaton affair. Under the stress of these scandals and the pressure to fill the position of Attorney General, Jackson took the advice of acquaintances and on June 21, 1831, offered the position to Taney, who accepted and started two days later. The job was difficult, and the annual salary a mere $4,000. Always being bothered by officials and federal officers seeking legal advice, Taney liked to consider this part-time job "the most laborious in the government." As Attorney General, Taney helped lead Jackson's war against the Second Bank of the United States and drafted Jackson's veto message when Congress renewed the Bank's charter in 1832. When Jackson's Secretary of Treasury, William J. Duane, refused to withdraw the federal government's deposits from the bank, Jackson appointed Taney in his place on September 24, 1833. Taney then helped Jackson carry out his order, which brought about the Panic of 1837. The Senate continued to punish Taney for his role in weakening the Bank by rejecting his nomination to replace Associate Justice Gabriel Duvall the following year. However, the year after that, the makeup of the Senate had changed enough to allow Taney to replace John Marshall as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.

The Dred Scott Decision

When Chief Justice Taney opened the January term of 1837, he appeared wearing long trousers, a departure from the traditional knee-length pants and a symbol of the transition from the Federalist Era to the Age of Jackson. A new generation was caught up in social reform movements and the market revolution. Taney's first session coincided with the beginning of a severe financial and commercial depression. Additionally, organized abolitionism and campaigns for political democracy emerged as powerful forces, bringing together thousands of reformers in northern and central states against the disfranchisement of so-called "dependent classes" and especially against plantation slavery. A scant five years earlier, sectional conflict had surfaced in the infamous nullification controversy, during which Attorney General Taney had supported Jackson's nationalist stance against South Carolina's defiance of federal authority.

In 1846, a man named Dred Scott, who was enslaved, sued for his freedom in an action that forces a court to grant standing. Dred Scott was born around 1800 and migrated west with his first master, Peter Blow. They traveled from Scott's home state of Virginia to Alabama, and in 1830, moved to Missouri. Two years later, Peter Blow died, and Scott was purchased by army surgeon Dr. John Emerson. In 1850, the Missouri Circuit Court granted standing and declared Scott a free man. John Emerson's widow, Scott's alleged owner, appealed to the Missouri Supreme Court, which overturned the ruling and pronounced Scott still enslaved and incapable of filing suit in a common law court. After losing, Scott gathered friends and other abolitionists and managed to get a freedom suit docketed in federal court.

Scott then took his case to the Taney Court. The arguments for Dred Scott v. Sanford began in February 1856, with a reargument in December. Taney considered avoiding intense political questions, but during Court deliberations, President James Buchanan intervened, asking the justices to settle the question of slavery for good, and Taney did exactly what was asked of him. On March 6 and 7, 1857, the Court handed down its decision in nine separate opinions. Taney's opinion comprised fifty-five pages and stated that Scott was a slave and incapable of maintaining a suit in federal court. Taney constitutionalized slavery, restating the southern Democratic defense of slaves as property, and claimed that the 1820 Missouri Compromise, which prohibited slavery north of the Mason-Dixon Line, had violated the constitutional rights of individuals to exercise property rights and expect government protection of those rights anywhere in the nation. Finally, he cast doubt on free Black people's claims to equal citizenship with white people.

Taney's decision in Dred Scott did not cause the Civil War, but it had a huge effect on the South's defense of slavery. After Dred Scott, critics piled abuse on the Chief Justice, associating the opinion less with the Court as such than with its leader. For this increasingly weak Taney, these withering personal attacks intensified his poor mental and physical health.