Chief Justice Roger B. Taney

We have occasionally been incensed when the United States Supreme Court has intervened in matters we think don’t belong to it; many were bothered when the high court intervened in the 2000 elections when Al Gore was repudiating the vote count in Florida, and more recently, people were mad when the high court sought to intervene in the Terri Schiavo case.

Sometimes there is a fine line separating the interpretation of the U.S. Constitution, as the Court is mandated to do, and the making of laws, as it has sometimes been accused of doing. I’m not quite sure what Chief Justice Roger B. Taney did – make a new law, negate an existing law, or make a mockery of the Constitution, but it is clear that his ruling in the historic Dred Scott case caused the Court a stain which can never be erased.

Roger Brooke Taney (pronounced “tawney”) was born March 17, 1777, to a family of wealthy, slave-holding tobacco farmers. He was involved in public office for a great part of his life. He was the nation’s 12th Attorney General, the 12th U.S. Treasury Secretary, and the 5th Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court.

Taney was known, on the Court, for upholding the rights of states to make and enforce their own laws, over the right of the federal government to impose its will. Taney at times deflected from that position, however, when it came to slavery. He wrote several decisions where he said that any state law which “interrupts, impedes, limits, embarrasses, delays or postpones the rights of (slave) owners to (having) immediate possession of his slaves, is unconstitutional.” He was ruling against states which sought to protect fugitive slaves from their owners, under the protection of state law. He also said that restrictions imposed by the United States Congress to impede the spread of slavery into territories were unconstitutional, referring to restrictions which were found in the Missouri Compromise.

By far his most noted ruling came in the Dred Scott case. Dred Scott, a slave who lived in a free state and who later moved back to the slave-holding state of Missouri from which he had come, appealed to the United States Supreme Court, against a Missouri law which still recognized him as a slave, for his freedom.

On March 6, 1857, Chief Justice Taney ruled against Mr. Scott, writing that blacks “… are not included and were therefore not intended to be included under the word “citizens” in the Constitution.” Therefore, Taney ruled, Mr. Scott “has no standing in federal court.” He wrote further, “Neither the Declaration of Independence nor the Constitution had been intended to apply to blacks” and he said Blacks were “so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” Specifically, he wrote, “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.” On a roll, Taney referred to the Missouri Compromise, which sought to keep slavery out of new territories, saying that “Congress had exceeded its authority when it forbade slavery in the territories … because slaves were private property protected by the Constitution. “ The Missouri Compromise, he said, was unconstitutional.

Chief Justice Taney’s ruling left the country in an uproar. Supreme Court Justice Felix Franfurter said that the decision was “one of the Court’s great self-inflicted wounds.” The New York Tribune, one of the nation’s top newspapers of the day, wrote that the Supreme Court had “forfeited its stature as an impartial judicial body.” Finally, Frederick Douglass said, “Chief Justice Taney can do many things, but he cannot… change the essential nature of things, making evil good and good, evil.”

Chief Justice Taney died in 1864, as the Civil War was drawing to a close, but the damage he inflicted on the nation has sent shockwaves through to the present day.

(Information taken from the internet, and from Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin)