Chief Justice Roger Taney
Today’s Justice of the Day is: ROGER TANEY. Chief Justice Taney was born on this day, March 17, in 1777.
Chief Justice Taney was born in Calvert County, Maryland, the state from which he would be appointed to the Supreme Court of the United States. He came from a family of wealthy, tobacco-farming slave-owners, which instilled in him a pro-slavery ideology that would come to define his time as Chief Justice of the United States (at least as far as the historical record is concerned). Chief Justice Taney graduated first in his class from Dickinson College in 1795.
Chief Justice Taney served a one year term as a Member of the Maryland House of Delegates starting in 1799, and then launched a 22 year-long career in private practice in Frederick, Maryland in 1801. During that time he was also Director of the Maryland state branch bank in Frederick (from 1810 to 1815), a Member of the Maryland Senate (from 1816 to 1821), and Director of the Frederick County Bank (from 1818 to 1823). In 1823 Chief Justice Taney began working in private practice in Baltimore, Maryland, and then he started serving as Attorney General of Maryland in 1827. He left both positions in 1831, the year he was Acting Secretary of War and began a two year-long term as Attorney General of the United States. In 1833 Chief Justice Taney took office as Secretary of the Treasury, a position he would hold until the year before his appointment to the SCUS.
Chief Justice Taney was nominated by President Andrew Jackson on December 28, 1835, to a seat vacated by Chief Justice John Marshall (after a nomination to the SCUS announced on January 15 had expired following the United States Senate’s refusal to act on it). He was confirmed by the U.S. Senate on March 15, 1836, and received his commission that day. Chief Justice Taney took the Judicial Oath to officially join the SCUS on March 28, and his service was terminated on October 12, 1864, due to his death.
Chief Justice Taney is perhaps the most well-known 19th century Member of the SCUS, owing in large part to the infamy he cultivated by authoring the Dred Scott v. Sanford (1857) decision. Writing for all but two of his colleagues, he used the opinion of the Court in that case to assert that no person who descended from enslaved Africans had ever been conferred citizenship under Article 3 of the Constitution, and furthermore that the Missouri Compromise (which Congress had passed to halt the spread of slavery in some parts of the nation’s western territories) was unconstitutional. The opinion threatened to spread slavery to every state and territory in the U.S and sought to resolve the question of slavery in favor of slave-owners once and for all, though it ultimately failed in those efforts thanks to the eventual passage of the famous Civil War Amendments.