American lawyer, politician, racist, and the second-worst Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court (1777-1864). Taney was born in Calvert County, Maryland to a wealthy family of slavers running a tobacco plantation. His older brother was going to inherit the family plantation, and his father encouraged him to study law. He was sent to Dickinson College at the age of 15; after graduating in 1796, he studied law under Judge Jeremiah Townley Chase in Annapolis and was admitted to the Maryland bar in 1799.
Taney established a legal practice in Frederick, Maryland, and ran for the Maryland House of Delegates as a Federalist. He won the seat, but lost when he ran for re-election. He stuck with the Federalist Party but broke with them because he supported the War of 1812. He was elected to a five-year term in the Maryland State Senate in 1816 and moved to Baltimore in 1823. In 1826, he and Daniel Webster represented a merchant in a case that appeared before the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1827, he was appointed Attorney General of Maryland.
In 1831, in the aftermath of the absolutely ridiculous Petticoat Affair scandal, President Andrew Jackson booted out almost every member of his cabinet, including A.G. John M. Berrien. Taney had been a Jackson supporter in the last couple of elections, so he was brought in as the new Attorney General.
One of Jackson's weird bugaboos was how much he hated the national bank, which at this time was the Second Bank of the United States. Taney got on Jackson's good side when he argued that the national bank was unconstitutional and should be abolished. This led to Jackson vetoing a bill to renew the bank's charter, and it became a big issue in the 1832 election, where Jackson was opposed by Henry Clay, who was a supporter of the national bank. Jackson won the election, and escalated the so-called "Bank War" in his next term in office.
Treasury Secretary William J. Duane wouldn't authorize removing federal deposits from the national bank, so Jackson fired him and gave Taney a recess appointment as the new Secretary of the Treasury. Taney redistributed the federal deposits to state-chartered banks, which became known as pet banks. This all made Jackson happy, but it pissed off the Senate, and since recess appointments eventually had to be approved by the Senate, they rejected him.
Jackson still thought Taney was peachy-keen, though, so he nominated him to the Supreme Court, to fill the seat of retiring Associate Justice Gabriel Duvall. The problem for Taney was that the Senate was still on a "Fuck Roger B. Taney" kick, and they blocked the vote 'til the end of the Senate term. Jackson's Democrats picked up more seats in the next Senate elections, though, so when Jackson nominated Taney to fill Chief Justice John Marshall's seat, Taney was confirmed and became the first Catholic on the Court.
Taney served as the Chief Justice for over 28 years, the second longest tenure of any Chief Justice, and he administered the oath of office for seven Presidents. But despite almost three decades on the Supreme Court and hearing thousands of cases, Taney is now remembered for only one case: Dred Scott v. Sandford.
So putting the facts of the case briefly, Dred Scott was born a slave in Virginia. In 1830, his owner, a U.S. Army surgeon, took him to Illinois, a free state, and in 1836 to the Wisconsin Territory, where slavery was also prohibited. In 1837, the Army transferred his owner to a new post, and he left Scott in Wisconsin and leased him out for profit, essentially bringing slavery into a free state, a direct violation of a number of federal laws.
Scott had previously tried unsuccessfully to purchase his freedom, and in 1846, he and his wife sued in Missouri for their freedom. This was not an uncommon strategy, and it was successful pretty often. The Scotts looked like they had a pretty good case -- the Missouri Supreme Court had ruled a couple decades before that a slaveowner who took a slave to a territory where slavery was prohibited forfeited their ownership.
But the case wasn't easy at all. The first case ended with a giant contradiction that held that Scott was a slave because he'd been unable to prove he was a slave. After that, there were appeals galore, slowed by continuances, the St. Louis Fire, a cholera epidemic, the deaths of multiple lawyers, and more. At some point, this stopped being a simple suit for freedom and became a serious POLITICAL ISSUE instead. President-elect James Buchanan, who was pro-slavery, weighed in on it, and apparently pressured the Supreme Court to settle the question of slavery once and for all.
So Dred Scott v. Sandford was decided 7-2 against Scott, and Taney's majority opinion went well beyond deciding whether or not Scott was free. Taney's opinion decreed that Scott didn't have standing to sue because he wasn't a citizen of the United States, and that no Black person could ever become a federal or state citizen, and that citizenship was solely reserved for white people.
Justices Benjamin Robbins Curtis and John McLean both authored dissenting opinions, noting that, among other things, there wasn't jack shit in the Constitution saying Black people couldn't be citizens -- when the Constitution was adopted, Black men could vote in five of the original 13 states, so they certainly qualified for citizenship then.
(There's a fairly big chunk of irony here, as Taney hated slavery. He freed the slaves he'd inherited from his father, and he provided monthly pensions for the ones who were too old to work. He earlier defended an abolitionist minister who'd been arrested for criticizing slavery and won his acquittal. But Taney believed that slavery should be decided by the states, and that it was a problem to be solved gradually. He didn't like abolitionists because they were making slavery an urgent and angry issue that caused national strife.)
Well, it definitely didn't settle the slavery question for good. The South loved it, obviously, and insisted they could now bring slaves anywhere. The North was outright enraged, and the popularity of the anti-slavery Republicans skyrocketed.
The opinion of history hasn't favored Taney either. It's generally agreed that his contempt for Black people, his belief in white supremacy, and his desire to appeal to his fellow Southerners overrode his legal principles and caused him to write an opinion that wasn't just legally shoddy but morally pathetic.
Taney died on October 12, 1864. President Abraham Lincoln, who clashed with Taney many times, made no public statement concerning his passing. Lincoln attended his memorial service in Washington, D.C., along with Secretary of State William Henry Seward, Attorney General Edward Bates, and Postmaster General William Dennison. Only Bates traveled to Frederick, Maryland for Taney's funeral. After Lincoln was re-elected, he appointed the anti-slavery Republican Salmon P. Chase to be the new Chief Justice.
Taney has long been considered the worst Chief Justice in the nation's history, almost entirely because of his opinion in Dred Scott. That's changed in the last few years. Roger Taney may have been a bone-deep racist, but at least he wasn't a bone-deep racist who ruled that fascist-adjacent Republican presidents were above the law.