Roger Taney

Roger Brooke Taney Roger B. Taney was a Supreme Court Justice from 1836 until his death in 1864.Chief Justice Roger Taney Taney was appointed by then-President Andrew Jackson, whom he served as Attorney General and Acting Treasury Secretary, where he was of especially helpful during Jackson's feud against the Second Bank of the United States.Roger B. Taney (1833 - 1834) Taney even largely wrote Jackson's 1832 Veto Message, where he explained why he felt a national bank was unconstitutional.Bank Veto Message (1832)
Taney was the first Catholic to ever serve on the Supreme Court.Catholics and the Supreme Court
==The thing he is known for==
Those who know the name Roger Taney in the modern era are almost certainly most aware of him due to his role in Dred Scott v. Sandford, for which he wrote the majority opinion. The ruling "is widely considered the worst decision ever rendered by the Supreme Court,"Dred Scott decision and is viewed as one of the major factors which led to the United States Civil War.How did the Dred Scott decision contribute to the American Civil War? The decision ruled that black people aren't citizens, the Missouri Compromise, which "outlawed slavery above the 36º30' latitude line in the remainder of the Louisiana Territory"Missouri Compromise (1820) was unconstitutional due to Congress not having the power to regulate slavery, and that slaves were property so the federal government was unable to take them away without just compensation.The Supreme Court Case That Led to The Civil War | Dred Scott v. Sandford
Even at the time, the ruling was incredibly controversial. "For all practical purposes, Northern courts and politicians rejected Scott v. Sandford as binding," writes one source. The decision "outraged abolitionists, who saw the Supreme Court’s ruling as a way to stop debate about slavery in the territories."Dred Scott Case One of the two Justices who dissented, Benjamin Robbins Curtis, even resigned from the Supreme Court largely because of his disgust with this very ruling.
===Why did Taney rule this way?===
Taney's position on slavery is not what most people would expect, although he owned slaves early in his life, "He had freed the slaves he had inherited before he came to the Supreme Court" and had since come to the conclusion that the practice was an evil. Taney's nomination was also opposed by John C. Calhoun, of "a positive good" infamy,John Calhoun on Slavery as a Positive Good along with "Cotton Whig" Daniel Webster and Henry Clay, who, "time after time", one source writes, "chose to main and uphold" the institution of slavery.HENRY CLAY AND SLAVERY
Essentially, those who liked slavery really didn't like Taney at first, although there was one notable exception: Andrew Jackson, who was known for his "support of slavery and participation in the slave trade."Why Andrew Jackson’s Legacy Is So Controversial It should also be noted that, even if Taney wasn't personally the biggest fan of slavery, he still "inherited the conservative tradition of the Southern aristocracy and had supported [the notion of] states’ rights" which allowed such defenses of slavery to flourish. Even if Calhoun didn't support him at first, he still managed to agree with the legal theory of "the Senate's most prominent states' rights advocate"John C. Calhoun: A Featured Biography when it mattered most.
However, regardless of what Taney thought of slavery, he was, in the words of two recent scholars "a proponent and defender of interconnected, even intersectional, racial ideologies; and second, Taney’s representativeness as an historian and as a legal realist describing law and politics as they were."Roger Taney: Intersectional Racist in an Age of Racist Differentiation Essentially, he was a racist who believed "in a broader project of defining a 'Christian white person' as part of a 'master' race,"Roger Taney: Intersectional Racist in an Age of Racist Differentiation even if he did not believe said "master race" should be enslaving others along with a believer in the notion that the words of a law are only as important as the intent of those who wrote them. As Jeannie Suk Gersen noted in a 2021 article for The New Yorker:
==Notes==
==References==
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