Roger B. Taney

 Roger Brooke Taney (March 17, 1777 – October 12, 1864) is the fifth Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, holding that office from 1836 until his death in 1864.

He delivers the majority opinion in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), that rules, among other things, that African-Americans, having been considered inferior at the time the United States Constitution was drafted, are not part of the original community of citizens and, whether free or slave, cannot be considered citizens of the United States, which creates an uproar among abolitionists and the free states of the northern U.S.

He is the first Roman Catholic (and first non-Protestant) appointed both to a presidential cabinet, as Attorney General under President Andrew Jackson, as well as to the Court.

Taney, a Jacksonian Democrat, is made Chief Justice by Jackson.

He believes that power and liberty are extremely important and if power becomes too concentrated, then it poses a grave threat to individual liberty.

He opposes attempts by the national government to regulate or control matters that would restrict the rights of individuals, particularly the right of individuals to own slaves.

From Prince Frederick, Maryland, he practices law and politics simultaneously and succeeds in both.

After abandoning the Federalist Party as a losing cause, he rises to the top of the state's Jacksonian machine.

As Attorney General (1831–1833), then Secretary of the Treasury (1833–1834), and as a prominent member of the Kitchen Cabinet, Taney becomes one of Jackson's closest advisers, assisting Jackson in his populist crusade against the powerful Bank of the United States.

By the time he becomes Chief Justice, Taney has become a staunch supporter of slavery, even though he has manumitted eleven slaves he inherited as a young man and had made anti-slavery statements when serving as defense attorney for an abolitionist preacher.

In Dred Scott v. Sandford, a slave named Dred Scott had appealed to the Supreme Court in hopes of being granted his freedom based on his having been brought by his masters to live in free territories.

The Taney Court ruled that persons of African descent cannot be, nor were ever intended to be, citizens under the U.S. Constitution, and that the plaintiff (Scott) is without legal standing to file a suit.

The framers of the Constitution, Taney wrote, believed that blacks "had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit. He was bought and sold and treated as an ordinary article of merchandise and traffic, whenever profit could be made by it."

The court also declares the Missouri Compromise (1820) unconstitutional, thus permitting slavery in all of the country's territories.

Taney dies during the final months of the American Civil War on the same day that his home state of Maryland abolishes slavery.

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