Roger B. Taney

Taney grew up on a Calvert County tobacco plantation worked by enslaved people, went to Dickinson College at fifteen, and read law under a judge in Annapolis before opening a practice in Frederick. He married Anne Phoebe Charlton Key, sister of the man who wrote the national anthem, in 1806. Sometime in his twenties he freed the people he had inherited and paid pensions to the ones too old to work. In 1819 he defended a Methodist preacher tried for denouncing slavery from the pulpit, calling the institution itself a blot on the national character, and won an acquittal. He broke with the Federalists over the War of 1812, became a Jackson Democrat, and by 1831 was Attorney General of the United States.

The Senate rejected Taney's nomination as Treasury Secretary in 1834, the first cabinet rejection in American history, before confirming him as Chief Justice two years later. He led the Court for 28 years, longer than any successor and second only to Marshall, building a body of federalism and commerce law that held up long after he was gone. Then came the single opinion that undid all of it. BriefHistory covers Dred Scott and everything it set in motion in full — the citizenship ruling, Ex parte Merryman, the statues taken down a century and a half later. What follows here is the rest of the man.

The lawyer who freed his own slaves and called slavery a blot on the nation spent his career defending a legal order built on owning people, and the two positions never resolved into one. He believed slavery should end gradually, state by state, and blamed the abolitionists — not the institution — for tearing the country apart. By the time he died his private finances had followed the Confederacy down: his estate held a small life insurance policy and a stack of Virginia bonds that were by then worthless paper. He left six daughters, all of them raised in the Episcopal Church he never joined himself, and a public reputation already collapsing around the opinion he could not undo.

Taney died on October 12, 1864, the same day Maryland's new constitution abolished slavery in the state. Lincoln made no public statement; only his attorney general joined the funeral procession. For more than a century the verdict on Taney stood almost entirely on Dred Scott, with a minority of legal historians, Bernard Schwartz among them, arguing he ranked second only to Marshall in building American constitutional law. The argument has kept losing ground to the record. Maryland stripped his name from a public school in 1993, and in February 2023 the U.S. Capitol removed his bust from the old Supreme Court chamber and replaced it with one of Thurgood Marshall.

Roger B. Taney's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Charles River Bridge v. Warren Bridge case
  His first major opinion, favoring public development over vested contract rights 1837
• Bank of Augusta v. Earle case
  Let out-of-state corporations do business across state lines 1839
• Luther v. Borden case
  Established the political question doctrine 1849
• Genesee Chief v. Fitzhugh case
  Extended federal admiralty jurisdiction to the Great Lakes 1852
• Dred Scott v. Sandford case
  The opinion BriefHistory covers in full 1857

• 1796 aged ~19 Graduates Dickinson College at nineteen
• 1799 aged ~22 Admitted to the Maryland bar
• 1806 aged ~29 Marries Anne Phoebe Charlton Key Her brother Francis Scott Key wrote the national anthem seven years later.
• 1819 aged ~42 Defends Jacob Gruber and calls slavery a blot on the nation Gruber, a Methodist preacher, had been tried for a sermon denouncing slavery. Taney won his acquittal.
• 1831 aged ~54 Becomes U.S. Attorney General under Andrew Jackson
• June 1834 aged 57 The Senate rejects his nomination as Treasury Secretary The first cabinet nomination the Senate had ever voted down.
• March 1836 aged 58 Confirmed as Chief Justice, the first Catholic on the Court
• 1857 aged ~80 Delivers the Dred Scott opinion BriefHistory covers the ruling and its consequences in full.
• October 12, 1864 aged 87 Dies in Washington on the day Maryland abolishes slavery

• Dred Scott 1800–1858
  Enslaved man whose lawsuit produced the Supreme Court ruling that Black Americans could not be citizens. wrote the opinion denying him citizenship
• Andrew Jackson 1767–1845
  Seventh President whose populist policies and Indian Removal Act left a deeply contested legacy. appointed him Chief Justice
• Abraham Lincoln 1809–1865
  16th President who preserved the Union during the Civil War and issued the Emancipation Proclamation. administered the oath to, then was defied by
• Thurgood Marshall 1908–1993
  First African American Supreme Court Justice and lead attorney in Brown v. Board of Education. Capitol bust replaced with his in 2023