One of our counties is named for a man who was the nation’s fifth Chief Justice of the United States. Before that, he was the 12th man to be Secretary of the Treasury. Before that, he was the 11th United States Attorney General.
We pronounce the name of the county “Tainey.” But his name was really pronounced “Tawney.” Roger Brooke Taney represents the dual nature of history and the fame and the infamy that comes from it, a duality that we cannot escape and from which we must not hide.
This man who is best remembered for delivering a historic anti-freedom decision in 1857 was part of the court that ruled on a historic pro-freedom case in 1841.
The Amistad case involved Africans who broke free and seized their ship, eventually landing at Long Island. The owners of the ship sued for recovery of their property—the ship and its cargo. Former President John Quincy Adams argued for the slaves and the court ruled 6-1 with Taney in the majority that the slaves belonged to no one and were therefore free because, “in no sense could they possibly intend to import themselves here, as slaves, or for sale as slaves.”
The point of slave law ruled upon by the Taney court sixteen years later was entirely different. Taney is best remembered for delivering the decision that denied freedom to Missouri slave Dred Scott.
Missouri courts had handled hundreds of “freedom suits” filed by slaves who claimed they had gained their freedom because their owners had taken them to free states before coming to slaveholding Missouri. Some 300 of those cases were filed in St. Louis where a monument now stands honoring those slaves. Many of the suits succeeded but they ended with the Scott case.
The case was heard twice by the U. S. Supreme Court, a second hearing held because, as Taney wrote in the final decision, “differences of opinion were found to exist among the members of the court; and as the questions in controversy are of the highest importance…it was deemed advisable to continue the case, and direct a re-argument on some of the points, in order that we might have an opportunity of giving to the whole subject a more deliberate consideration.”
You can read the entire decision at Dred Scott v. Sandford Full Text – Text of the Case – Owl Eyes
The court voted 7-2 that Scott, as a slave, had no constitutional right to sue for his freedom. It is a long, long decision written by Taney and announced on March 6, 1857.
“The question is simply this: Can a negro, whose ancestors were imported into this country, and sold as slaves, become a member of the political community formed and brought into existence by the Constitution of the United States, and as such become entitled to all the rights, and privileges, and immunities, guarantied by that instrument to the citizen? One of which rights is the privilege of suing in a court of the United States in the cases specified in the Constitution,” Taney wrote the long opinion that includes:
The words ‘people of the United States’ and ‘citizens’ are synonymous terms, and mean the same thing..,The question before us is, whether the class of persons described in the plea in abatement compose a portion of this people, and are constituent members of this sovereignty? We think they are not, and that they are not included, and were not intended to be included, under the word ‘citizens’ in the Constitution, and can therefore claim none of the rights and privileges which that instrument provides for and secures to citizens of the United States. On the contrary, they were at that time considered as a subordinate and inferior class of beings, who had been subjugated by the dominant race, and, whether emancipated or not, yet remained subject to their authority, and had no rights or privileges but such as those who held the power and the Government might choose to grant them.”
…The legislation of the States therefore shows, in a manner not to be mistaken, the inferior and subject condition of that race at the time the Constitution was adopted, and long afterwards, throughout the thirteen States by which that instrument was framed; and it is hardly consistent with the respect due to these States, to suppose that they regarded at that time, as fellow-citizens and members of the sovereignty, a class of beings whom they had thus stigmatized; whom, as we are bound, out of respect to the State sovereignties, to assume they had deemed it just and necessary thus to stigmatize, and upon whom they had impressed such deep and enduring marks of inferiority and degradation; or, that when they met in convention to form the Constitution, they looked upon them as a portion of their constituents, or designed to include them in the provisions so carefully inserted for the security and protection of the liberties and rights of their citizens…
Upon the whole, therefore, it is the judgment of this court, that it appears by the record before us that the plaintiff in error is not a citizen of Missouri, in the sense in which that word is used in the Constitution; and that the Circuit Court of the United States, for that reason, had no jurisdiction in the case, and could give no judgment in it. Its judgment for the defendant must, consequently, be reversed, and a mandate issued, directing the suit to be dismissed for want of jurisdiction.
The opinion fueled fears of those who felt the slave economy eventually would collapse that the opposite would happen if the institution were to spread into new territories to the west. The 1821 Missouri Compromise forbade that but Taney’s ruling threw out that compromise:
“Every citizen has a right to take with him into the Territory any article of property which the Constitution of the United States recognises as property.”
It has been called the worst Supreme Court ruling in our history and a direct contributor to the Civil War.
Illinois Senator Stephen A. Douglas, who had eyes on a presidential run in 1860, told a crowd at the Illinois Capitol that those who disagreed with the ruling were “enemies of the constitution. One of his listeners was Springfield lawyer Abraham Lincoln, who had his eyes on Douglas’ seat in the Senate. One of Lincoln’s newest biographers, Steve Inskeep, wrote that Lincoln responded two weeks later that Douglas “dreads the slightest restraints on the spread of slavery” and asserted that the decision did not “establish a settled doctrine for the country.” Inskeep says Lincoln felt the Scott case was more than a bad ruling; “It was part of a conspiracy to spread slavery everywhere.”
The next June, Lincoln told another meeting in the statehouse, the conflict over slavery had not been resolved.
“A house divided against itself, cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved – I do not expect the house to fall – but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become lawful in all the States, old as well as new – North as well as South.”
The Lincoln-Douglas debates that came afterward elevated Lincoln to the national spotlight and in 1860 into the presidency.
Lincoln’s inauguration on March 4, 1861, just two days short of the fourth anniversary of the Scott case, showed how rapidly the decision had changed the nation. It began with a dramatic moment when the tall, young abolitionist president-elect, in his first public appearance with a beard, filed in “arm in arm” with the Chief Justice who would swear him in. Roger Taney, days short of his 84th birthday, “looked very agitated and his hands shook very perceptively with emotion,” as one reporter put it, as Lincoln placed his large hand on the Bible and took an oath to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.
We do not know if the walk “arm in arm” or Taney’s shaking hands were matters of emotion or of the infirmities of age. He died a little more than three years later, having witnessed the imposition of the Emancipation Proclamation that declared slaves in southern states were free, and, six months before his death, the passage by the United States Senate of what would become the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery and involuntary servitude.
On March 6, 2017, the sixtieth anniversary of the decision, descendants of the Taneys and the Scotts met at the Maryland State Capitol, where a statue of Taney stood, for a ceremony of reconciliation. Charlie Taney, great-great-great grand nephew of the judge, acknowledged, “I’m sure he wouldn’t be happy with this,” but continued, “There’s totally something about seeing the Scotts and the Taneys side by side working together on reconciliation that strikes a real chord in people.”
Another descendant, Kate Taney Billingsley, said, there had been mixed feelings in the family about Taney: “A lot of people, it was like, they were proud of the name because it was a Chief Justice of the Supreme Court for other rulings he had made that was not the Dred Scott decision, and yet everybody agreed that it was a complete smear on our name and it was a terrible, terrible decision.”
On the other side was Lynn Jackson, the great-great-granddaughter of Dred Scott, who runs the Dred Scott Foundation of St. Louis, who hoped the event could foster something bigger. “It’s an open door for us to say if the Scotts and the Taneys can reconcile, can’t you?” she asked. “If you look at relationships in our nation, these are supposed to be the two who are really supposed to hate each other. But it’s not about hatred, it’s about understanding, and then relationship building and trust.”
There had been discussions about removing Taney’s statue from the Maryland Capitol grounds at the time but the families opposed it. They suggested it would be more appropriate to put up a statue of Scott and one of Frederick Douglass, who escaped from slavery in Maryland and became a national abolitionist leader.
It wasn’t to be. The state removed Taney’s statue in 2017, two days after Baltimore Mayor Catherine Pugh ordered removal of a replica of the statue from city property.
In December of 2022, the United States House of Representatives completed the process of ordering the removal of a bust of Taney from the old House Chamber that was used by the Supreme Court until its own building was constructed. Maryland Congressman Stenny Hoyer, who noted that every day he served in a chamber that had been built by slaves, said, “While we cannot remove the stones and bricks that were placed here in bondage, we can ensure that the moveable pieces of art we display here celebrate freedom, not slavery, not sedition, not segregation….”His narrow-minded originalist philosophy failed to acknowledge America’s capacity for moral growth and for progress. Indeed, the genius of our Constitution is that it did have moral growth, it did have expanded vision, it did have greater wisdom. Taney’s ruling denied Black Americans citizenship, upheld slavery, and contributed, frankly, to the outbreak of the Civil War.”
The bust was removed on February 9, 2023 and replaced by a bust of Thurgood Marshall, a civil rights attorney who played a key role in the 1954 Supreme Court ruling that ended segregated schools in America, and later the first black member of the U. S. Supreme Court.
Taney County, Missouri was carved out of Wayne County by the state legislature in 1835, the year that Andrew Jackson appointed Taney to succeed Chief Justice John Marshall, who had died earlier that year. Taney’s nomination was confirmed in 1836, making him the first Catholic to serve on the court. Taney County was formally recognized as an organized county in 1837, almost twenty years before the ruling that became the deciding “smear” on his record and on his descendants’ name.
In advocating for the removal of the Taney bust from the national capital, Congressman Stenny Hoyer noted the duality of history when he said, “We ought to know who Roger Brooke Taney was, a man who was greatly admired in his time in the state of Maryland. But he was wrong. Over 3 million people visit our Capitol each year. The people we choose to honor in our halls signal to those visitors which principles we cherish as a nation.”
There are no known statues of Taney in Taney County and there has been no overt move to change the name of the county. The name honors the distinguished public servant that he was, not the jurist who wrote one opinion that overshadows everything else he wrote or was.
Taney, the man, is a reminder of something else said by the man he swore in as President of the United States when he delivered his annual message to Congress late in 1862:
“The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise — with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.
Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation.”
Sometimes words cross all barriers of time. Taney’s words. Lincoln’s words. Words of yesterday become words of today. It is up to us to decide what to do with them.
(Photo credits: National Judicial College, Library of Congress)