Confederate "Heritage" Month 2022, April 13: More about Roger Taney

I’ve written several times in earlier years’ version of the Confederate “Heritage” Month posts, about Roger Taney, the Chief Justice who wrote the opinion in the Dred Scott case and who therefore has deservedly gone down as one of the most destructive figures in American history.

Earlier posts include: Roger Taney and antislavery 04/30/2013; Confederate "Heritage" Month 2012, April 28: A surprising anti-slavery Jacksonian, Part 1 04/27/2012 and Part 2 04/28/2012.

As those post titles may suggest, Taney was a very contradictory character who in his decades in politics took a strange personal path through the tangles of 19th century US politics.

He was married to the sister of Francis Scott Key, author the lyrics of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” The younger Taney and his wife were active in "a circle of young, reform-minded Marylanders who sought to protect free blacks from kidnapping and alleviate the harshness of slavery." Though legal cases involving slaves " never constituted a significant portion of his practice and the fragmentary nature of the evidence reveals little about his motives, it is clear that Taney occasionally worked to secure for African Americans the limited benefits that Maryland law afforded them." (Timothy Huebner, Roger B. Taney and the Slavery Issue: Looking beyond — and before - Dred Scott Journal of American History June 2010).

He aligned himself politically with the Jacksonian Democrats. President Andrew Jackson brought him into his Cabinet in 1831 as Attorney General, where Taney became a leading figure in Jackson's successful successful fight against the Bank of the United States, which the Jacksonians with good reasons regarded as a major facilitator of concentration of wealth.

In the proto-populist rhetoric of the Jackson movement, the Bank of the US was taken as symbol and key institution of the “Money Power.” The terms “left” and “right” hadn’t come into vogue yet in American politics. But the anti-Bank position that Taney represented was definitely a left position at the time.

Jackson appointed him Secretary of the Treasury in 1834, but he became the first Presidential Cabinet nominee Congress from whom Congress withheld its approval. Conservatives like Daniel Webster considered him too radical a foe of the Money Power to take that post. But Jackson appointed him as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and the Senate approved him; he began his long service as Chief Justice in 1836.

One Lost Cause spin on Taney is that he was always an opponent of slavery who ruled the way he did in Dred Scott, thereby wrecking the Constitution and the Union, because of his commitment to pure Constitutional egal principle. That version done stand up to scrutiny.

Over his career, he came to view the Abolitionist cause as an undesirable one. He was neither dumb nor incompetent and he knew he was making a radical pro-slavery ruling in Dred Scott. An indication of how much he had moved from his earlier political positions in indicated by the fact that other leading Jacksonians were very opposed to Taney’s Dred Scott position, including former Missouri Sen. Thomas Hart Benton and the influential editor Francis Preston Blair, who helped found the Republican Party in 1856.

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. wrote (The Age of Jackson 1945):

This decision was profoundly disturbing to most old Jacksonians, as it was to neo-Jacksonians like [Abolitionist Massachusetts Sen. Charles] Sumner. Few of Taney's supporters in his [earlier] indictment of the overweening ambitions of the [John] Marshall [Supreme Court] bench were prepared to accompany [Taney] in his own exercises in judicial imperialism - even under Taney's own hope that he was thereby removing a critical issue from politics. Montgomery Blair [later a member of Lincoln’s Cabinet], as Dred Scott's chief counsel, argued the case in the tense, silent courtroom, while his father [Francis Preston Blair] sat proudly in the audience. George Bancroft called it "a most latitudinarian [unprincipled, arbitrary] construction of the constitution" … Other men through the North raised in the Jeffersonian school had similar misgivings; and the two who, along with Blair, had been perhaps the closest politically to Jackson [he apparently means Benton and former President Martin Van Buren, Jackson’s Democratic successor as President], and who, unlike Blair, had refused to break with Jackson's party in 1856, could no longer suppress their contempt for the new doctrines of the so-called Democracy [the Democratic Party]. (my emphasis)

The contradiction between a form of government established as a democratic republic and the institution of slavery was rapidly growing in intensity when the Dred Scott decision added fuel to the fire in 1857.

I would add that if Taney really thought that the Dred Scott decision was "removing a critical issue from politics," he had become seriously out of touch with practical political realities.