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Notorious Lives

Orval E. Faubus

Arthur de Gobineau

Benjamin Tillman

George C. Wallace.

Great Lives from History: Notorious Lives

Roger Brooke Taney

by Steven J. Ramold

Chief justice of the United States (1836-1864)

Cause of notoriety: Taney’s extreme racism was reflected in his legal opinions, most notably in Dred Scott v. Sandford, which ignited a firestorm of controversy and contributed to the outbreak of the Civil War.

Active: c. 1836-1860

Locale: Washington, D.C.

Early Life

Born into a privileged Maryland family, Roger Brooke Taney (TAW-nee) reaped the proceeds of slavery his entire life. The Taneys’ wealth, derived from the slave labor of the family plantation, provided for Roger’s private education at Dickinson College, training as a lawyer, and marriage into the prominent Key family of Maryland when he married Anne Key, sister to lawyer Francis Scott Key (who became famous as the author of “The Star Spangled Banner”), in 1806. Taney’s social standing led him into state politics, originally as a Federalist. To make himself more politically palatable, Taney freed his slaves, but he retained his convictions that slavery itself was legal and that slaves themselves were less than human. He disagreed with the Federalists over the War of 1812, however, and shifted his allegiance to the Democratic Party. By the 1820’s, Taney was a fixture in Maryland politics, becoming the state’s attorney general in 1827. Taney campaigned in support of Andrew Jackson for president in 1824 and 1828, and when Jackson won the latter election, he rewarded Taney for his political support by bringing him into his administration.

Political Career

In 1831, Jackson reorganized his cabinet and asked Taney to assume the job of attorney general. Taney’s first legal opinions incorporated his views on slavery and the rights of slaves. Most southern states required the captains of ships entering their ports to turn over any free blacks onboard for imprisonment for the duration of the ship’s stay. This policy was intended to prevent free blacks from inciting slaves into possible revolt. Great Britain and other European nations protested this violation of their citizens’ rights, and the secretary of state asked Taney for a constitutional clarification on the situation. Taney upheld the law, declaring that blacks were a “separate and degraded people” to whom neither the Declaration of Independence nor the Constitution granted any rights, an opinion Taney would reiterate later in his career.

His loyalty to Jackson earned Taney a promotion in 1833, when he became the secretary of treasury. Jackson had determined to dissolve the Bank of the United States, but his secretary of the treasury, William John Duane, refused to transfer federal funds out of the bank. Jackson fired him and put the loyal Taney in his place. Taney dutifully removed the funds to state banks, but an angry Congress refused to approve his nomination as treasury secretary, and Taney returned home to Maryland. In 1836, Jackson nominated Taney to replace recently deceased John Marshall as chief justice of the United States. Congress, now dominated by the Democrats, confirmed the appointment on March 28, 1836.

Taney’s long tenure as chief justice was marked by decisions that consistently favored the power of the federal government over that of the states, decisions in marked contrast to his most famous case. He also continued his legal opinions on the status of slavery, such as in Groves v. Slaughter (1841) and Prigg v. Pennsylvania (1842), even if he was often in the Court minority. In the case of Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), Dred Scott, a Missouri slave, had sued for his freedom in a Missouri court because his owner had lived in Illinois (where slavery was banned by state law) and in Minnesota (then part of the Wisconsin Territory, where slavery was banned by the 1785 Northwest Ordinance). Scott won in local court, lost in the Missouri Supreme Court, and appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Roger Brooke Taney.

ph_0111226758-Taney.jpg

(Library of Congress)

Taney used the case to determine Scott’s status as a slave and also to decide finally the slavery issue. As Taney opined in the Court’s majority decision, Scott did not have jurisdiction to bring suit in the first place, because, as a person of African descent, he was not and could not be a citizen of the United States. As a black person, Taney ruled, Scott had no “rights that a white man was bound to respect.” Second, Scott’s residence in Illinois did not make him free because Illinois’s antislavery law violated the property rights of slave owners to take their property (slaves) into Illinois. Last, Scott’s residence in Minnesota did not make him free because the Congress could not limit the property rights of slave owners, and thus the Northwest Ordinance was unconstitutional.

Impact

The Dred Scott ruling caused a firestorm of protest in the North, which ridiculed Taney’s belief that people of African descent could not possibly be citizens of the United States. The overturning of Illinois state law and the Northwest Ordinance also seemed to indicate that local political opinion did not matter, and slave owners could take their property anywhere in America, including the northern states. Taney’s extreme viewpoints in favor of slavery and the South damaged his credibility, which made it easier for President Abraham Lincoln to ignore Taney and the other pro-Southern Supreme Court justices during the Civil War.

The best example of Taney’s lost influence was the 1861 case of Ex parte Merryman, in which Lincoln suspended habeas corpus in Maryland and refused Taney’s demands to explain his actions. Rendered powerless by the outbreak of the war he helped to cause, Taney remained an ineffective figure on the Supreme Court until his death on October 12, 1864. His opinions, clearly out of political favor in the North, also greatly diminished the influence of the Supreme Court in the years during and after the Civil War.

Further Reading

1 

Fehrenbacher, Don Edward. Slavery, Law, and Politics: The Dred Scott Case in Historical Perspective. New York: Oxford University Press, 1981. A wide-ranging examination of the controversial Dred Scott case and how different eras view the issues and decisions of the case.

2 

Huebner, Timothy S. The Taney Court: Justices, Rulings, and Legacy. Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-CLIO, 2003. A full examination of the Taney court, including studies of all of the major cases and information on Taney’s fellow justices.

3 

Lewis, Walker. Without Fear or Favor: A Biography of Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965. The standard biography of Taney, this book tries to present a balanced view of the controversial chief justice.

Citation Types

MLA 9th
Ramold, Steven J. "Roger Brooke Taney." Great Lives from History: Notorious Lives, edited by Carl L. Bankston III, Salem Press, 2007. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=GLN_1570.
APA 7th
Ramold, S. J. (2007). Roger Brooke Taney. In C. L. Bankston III (Ed.), Great Lives from History: Notorious Lives. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Ramold, Steven J. "Roger Brooke Taney." Edited by Carl L. Bankston III. Great Lives from History: Notorious Lives. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2007. Accessed September 17, 2026. online.salempress.com.