Roger Brooke Taney
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Taney was Chief Justice of the United States from 1836 until his death in 1864. He wrote the majority opinion in Dred Scott, and that opinion has, reasonably, overwhelmed everything else about him.
Before the Court
| Born | 1777, Calvert County, Maryland, into a slaveholding tobacco family |
| Practice | Frederick and then Baltimore; prominent at the Maryland bar |
| Attorney General | Under Jackson, from 1831 |
| Treasury | Recess appointment; removed federal deposits from the Second Bank |
| Chief Justice | Confirmed 1836, after the Senate had earlier rejected him for associate justice |
The complication people find uncomfortable
Taney manumitted the people he had inherited as slaves, and in 1819 defended a Methodist minister prosecuted for anti-slavery preaching, calling slavery "a blot on our national character." Four decades later he wrote the opinion in Dred Scott.
Historians read the change differently. Some see a man hardening with age and with the sectional crisis; some see the early positions as narrower than they look; some see no contradiction at all between private manumission and a constitutional theory that denied Black citizenship. The honest answer is that the evidence supports more than one reading, and a site like this one should say so rather than pick.
The rest of the tenure
Twenty-eight years as Chief Justice produced a body of commerce clause and corporate law that mattered a great deal at the time — Charles River Bridge, above all. In wartime he issued the opinion in Ex parte Merryman challenging the suspension of habeas corpus, which Lincoln ignored. None of it is remembered outside specialist work, and there is no realistic prospect that it will be.
Memorials and their removal
Statues of Taney stood in Baltimore, Annapolis and Frederick, and a bust sat in the Old Supreme Court Chamber in the Capitol. Most have been removed since 2017; the Capitol bust was replaced by one of Thurgood Marshall under legislation passed in 2022. Whether removal is the right response to a figure like this is a live public argument, and this site does not take a position on it.