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Roger Brooke Taney, a graduate of Dickinson College, might well be the most controversial Supreme Court justice in American history. Taney served as Chief Justice of the United States for nearly thirty years, from 1835 to 1864.
- Roger Brooke Taney (1777-1864)
Taney grew up as a Maryland Roman Catholic with rural gentry...
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- Roger Brooke Taney (1777-1864)
Taney grew up as a Maryland Roman Catholic with rural gentry privilege, was educated privately and then entered Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania in 1792. While at Dickinson, Taney came under the tutelage of Dr. Charles Nisbet, arguably one of the greatest educators of his day.
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- Early life and career
- The Dred Scott case
Roger B. Taney, (born March 17, 1777, Calvert county, Maryland, U.S.—died October 12, 1864, Washington, D.C.), fifth chief justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, remembered principally for the Dred Scott decision (1857). He was the first Roman Catholic to serve on the Supreme Court.
Taney was the son of Michael and Monica (Brooke) Taney. Of English ancestry, Michael Taney had been educated in France and was a prosperous tobacco grower in Calvert county, Maryland. After graduation from Dickinson College in Pennsylvania, in 1795, Taney studied law with Judge Jeremiah Chase, of the Maryland General Court. He was admitted to the bar in 1799 at Annapolis and served one year in the Maryland House of Delegates before settling down in Frederick, Maryland, to practice law. In 1806 he married Anne Key, whose brother, Francis Scott Key, later wrote “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
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Taney was a member of the conservative, property-conscious Federalist Party until 1812, when the party opposed the war against England. He returned to the Maryland House of Delegates in 1816, when, as a political maverick, he was elected to the state senate. Two years after his term expired in 1821, he moved his family to Baltimore, where he was soon recognized as an excellent lawyer. Juries were impressed with his sense of fair play and his courtesy toward opposing attorneys. In 1827 he was appointed attorney general of Maryland. By this time he had aligned himself with Andrew Jackson, the leader of the Democratic Party, and when Jackson, elected president in 1828, reorganized his Cabinet in 1831, he appointed Taney attorney general of the United States.
Fight against the Bank of the United States. Throughout his tenure in Washington, Taney had been an outspoken leader in the Democrats’ fight against the central bank, the Bank of the United States, which was widely regarded as a tool of Eastern financial interests. Taney believed it had abused its powers, and he strongly advised the president to veto the congressional bill that would renew the bank’s charter and wrote much of the veto message; he also recommended that government funds be withdrawn from the bank and be deposited in a number of state banks.
As a result of his role in the fight over the Bank of the United States, Taney had become a national figure, and in 1833 President Jackson appointed him secretary of the treasury. But opposition to Taney and his financial program was so strong that the Senate rejected him in June 1834, marking the first time that Congress had refused to confirm a presidential nominee for a Cabinet post.
The majority opinion that Taney delivered on March 6, 1857, in Dred Scott v. Sanford is the one for which he is best known. In essence, the decision argued that Scott was a slave and as such was not a citizen and could not sue in a federal court. Taney’s further opinion that Congress had no power to exclude slavery from the territories and that Negroes could not become citizens was bitterly attacked in the Northern press. The Dred Scott decision probably created more disagreement than any other legal opinion in U.S. history; it became a violently divisive issue in national politics and dangerously undermined the prestige of the Supreme Court.
Whenever state authorities threatened or interfered with the execution of federal power, however, Taney upheld federal supremacy. His opinion in Ableman v. Booth (1858), denying state power (in this case the courts of the state of Wisconsin) to obstruct the processes of the federal courts, remains a magnificent statement of constitutional federalism. Under Taney’s leadership federal judicial power was expanded over corporations, the federal government was held to have paramount and exclusive authority over foreign relations, and congressional authority over U.S. property and territory was vigorously upheld. His conflict with President Lincoln over the president’s suspension of a citizen’s petition for a writ of habeas corpus in time of war made him an object of bitter criticism, although, eventually, many jurists came to agree with Taney’s defense of an individual’s constitutional rights.
At the time of Taney’s birth Catholics in America represented a distinct religious minority. Until Taney was 15 years old, his education consisted of private schools and tutors, and then he entered Dickinson College, obtaining his bachelor’s degree in 1795 as his class valedictorian.
Taney grew up as a Maryland Roman Catholic with rural gentry privilege, was educated privately and then entered Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania in 1792. While at Dickinson, Taney came under the tutelage of Dr. Charles Nisbet, arguably one of the greatest educators of his day.
Dec 19, 2021 · Dickinson’s surprisingly large impact comes in the fact that Chief Justice Roger Taney (Class of 1796) and Justice Robert Grier (Class of 1812) both ruled with the 7-2 majority. Also, then-newly elected 15th President of the United States, James Buchanan, was an alum of the Class of 1809 and despite being a northerner, was very sympathetic to ...
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Taney grew up as a Maryland Roman Catholic with rural gentry privilege, was educated privately and then entered Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania in 1792. While at Dickinson, Taney came under the tutelage of Dr. Charles Nisbet, arguably one of the greatest educators of his day.
