Confederate "Heritage" Union, April 30: Roger Taney and antislavery

Roger Taney (1777-1864) is infamous as the Supreme Court Justice who wrote the Dred Scott decision of 1857 that made the Civil War inevitable. (Taney's last name was pronounced like "Toney.")

Chief Justice Roger Taney (1777-1864)

Taney's decision not only allowed slaveowners to bring their human property into a free state and retain possession of it. He also declared that the Constitution adopted the following view of Americans of African descent, both slave and free:

They had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they 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. .. This opinion was at that time fixed and universal in the civilized portion of the white race. [my emphasis]

As Timothy Heubner notes in the article cited below, "More significant in the context of the debate over the extension of slavery, Taney held that Congress had no power to prohibit slavery in federal territories, thus putting the Court squarely on the side of slaveholders."

Taney was a successful attorney who became active in Maryland politics, becoming state attorney general in 1827. He aligned himself with the Jacksonian Democrats. President Andrew Jackson brought him into his Cabinet in 1831 as national Attorney General, where Taney became a leading figure in Jackson's successful fight against the Bank of the United States, which the Jacksonians with good reasons regarded as a major facilitator of concentration of wealth. 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.

Timothy Huebner takes a look at a far less familiar aspect of Taney's career in "Roger B. Taney and the Slavery Issue: Looking beyond — and before — Dred Scott" The Journal of American History (June 2010).

Huebner explains that post-Civil War defenders of Justice Taney used statements from his antislavery period to argue that he had always been opposed to slavery. And that his infamous opinion in Dred Scott "represented a strictly legal decision that went against his own beliefs." Huebner shows in his article how "Taney's beliefs about slavery changed substantially over the decades [and] that he changed from a moderately antislavery lawyer into a zealous proslavery judge."

Taney's reputation as a critic of slavery rested especially on a 1819 case that Huebner describes this way:

While establishing his career as a lawyer and serving as a Federalist political leader, Taney had defended Rev. Jacob Gruber, who had been indicted for preaching a sermon that allegedly disturbed the peace and promoted rebellion. During that 1819 trial, Taney made impassioned statements against the peculiar institution that stand in stark contrast to those penned by the “angry southern gentleman” in the Dred Scott decision. In a speech to the jury, Taney described slavery as "a blot on our national character" and insisted that "every real lover of freedom confidently hopes that it will be effectually, though it must be gradually, wiped away."

But this was not an isolated incident, an attorney merely making a zealous case for his client. Taney married Anne Phoebe Charlton Key, the sister of Francis Scott Key, in 1806 and they were active for years in "a circle of young, reform-minded Marylanders who sought to protect free blacks from kidnapping and alleviate the harshness of slavery." Huebner writes, "Although slave cases 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."

I've discussed the colonization movement and its contradictory nature in two posts this year. Huebner writes, "Taney also actively supported the colonization of African Americans, a cause that he viewed as a step toward emancipation." (my emphasis) He and Francis Scott Key organized a Maryland chapter of the American Colonization Society. Taney also took antislavery positions in his political career, including antislavery votes in his time as a Maryland state senator - a minority position within the state legislature. While his fondness for colonization wasn't inconsistent with hostility toward blacks and even support, his other positions on slavery in that period show that Taney's public view was antislavery.

But even as early as 1821, he also began arguing cases on behalf of slaveowners arguing against the freedom of their human property. And Huebner relates:

... as Maryland attorney general he defended a notorious slave trader before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1827. As U.S. attorney general under President Andrew Jackson, Taney provided glimpses of the stance he would take in the Dred Scott decision, particularly regarding the question of whether African Americans had been included in the political community at the writing of the Constitution. In 1832, he authored an official opinion on the constitutionality of a South Carolina statute that provided that black seamen who arrived in Charleston were subject to arrest and confinement while their ship remained in port. Written for the secretary of state, Taney’s opinion referred to African Americans as members of a "degraded class." Whatever limited rights African Americans possessed, Taney argued, came from the states, who legitimately conferred or withdrew those privileges based on “the sufferance of the white population." Maintaining white control over black liberties also helped prevent "the evils of insurrection and rebellion."

But Huebner also notes:

Notably, Taney continued his personal activities on behalf of African Americans at this time and retained a reputation as a friend to enslaved blacks seeking to buy their freedom. As late as 1839, the abolitionist James G. Birney relayed to one of his colleagues what had been told to him by a slave whom Taney had assisted in this manner: Taney "was considered by the colored people of Baltimore as one of their steadiest and surest friends—and that his temper toward them never failed to manifest itself on all proper occasions where money was to be raised for their assistance or improvement."

In the end, Huebner winds up explaining Taney's shift from a seemingly dedicated antislavery position in young adulthood to a hardline, reactionary defender of slavery in the later years of his life as a matter of intellectual history:

Roger Taney's odyssey from antislavery lawyer to proslavery justice mirrored larger currents in American political and constitutional development. Having come of age during the founding era, Taney possessed an early nineteenth-century brand of antislavery that began to evaporate during the 1830s. The rise of the immediatist abolitionist movement, with its emphasis on moral purity and revolutionary change, significantly altered the nature of the political debate over slavery. During the early nineteenth century, an amalgam of antislavery societies existed throughout the upper South and border states, and national political leaders vigorously and openly discussed ways to restrict the growth of the peculiar institution. Abolitionists' uncompromising rhetoric forced antislavery opinion from the mainstream to the margins, as more moderate antislavery advocates — particularly in slaveholding states — felt forced to defend themselves against charges of extremism. This development silenced some of slavery’s opponents and nudged others toward a more proslavery stance, thus circumscribing the national political debate on the subject.

But his description of the process doesn't clearly lead to such a conclusion.

Ronald Reagan like to pitch himself to Democratic voters by using some version of the line, "I didn't leave the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party left me." In fact, Reagan's political positions just became more conservative over his lifetime, not entirely coincidentally with his acquisition of wealth via his relationships with the owners and executives of the Hollywood film industry. But that line was a recognition that there were not only people who had voted for the Democratic Party out of habit whose views had changed along the lines of his own evolution. It also recognized that Southern segregationists to whom he and the Republican Party were actively courting had developed a long-standing affiliation to the Democratic Party, which in the Deep South was for decades a segregationist party.

Huebner's conclusion just quoted could be summarized as, Taney didn't leave the antislavery movement, the antislavery movement left him.

The Jacksonian Democratic Party of the 19th century underwent a major evolution on race- and slavery-related issues. One trend, the Jacksonian trend with which this blog identifies, developed the democratic and egalitarian side of the Jacksonian political heritage, including antislavery. The other side of the Democratic Party that was the favored party of slaveholders developed in the direction of John Calhoun, the Democratic nullifier and seditionist who Jackson himself regarded from the time of the Nullification Controversy to his death as a traitor to America and an enemy of democratic government. That latter trend, which emphasized the defense of slavery at all costs, was the one with which Taney came to identify.

And Huebner's explanation of Taney's choices in that process earlier in the article seems to describe it better than his actual conclusion:

At this time [1828], Taney embraced the party of Andrew Jackson, a slave-owning Tennessean who built a southern-dominated political party that focused on the rights of slaveholders and the prerogative of states. Over the next several years the Democratic party supported slavery and white supremacy in a variety of ways — from its Indian removal policy to its eventual stance in favor of the annexation of Texas. As an official of the Jackson administration, Taney ceased to think of slavery solely from the perspective of a small-town Maryland lawyer and instead began to reason and act as a representative of the president and his party. Nat Turner’s rebellion in 1831 gave Taney further cause to reconsider his views on slavery and black rights. The revolt prompted a nearly universal response of fear and dread on the part of white southerners, who became more mindful of the threat of uprising and increasingly vigilant about maintaining racial control.

In the process, Taney decided that defending slavery was more important to him than defending democracy. This is the opposite of what Jackson himself decided when confronted with the Nullification Crisis. He decided to defend American democracy and national unity against the South Carolina slaveholders, when his personal and class interest at the moment would have pressured him to pander to the pro-slavery position that was fundamental to South Carolina's defiance. Taney made a different series of choices. It worth noting here what Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. wrote in his 1945 classic, The Age of Jackson. Taney was Jackson's Attorney General at the time of the Nullification Controversy in 1832-3. Jackson's December, 1832 Proclamation to the People of South Carolina defended the supremacy of the federal governnment against South Carolina's and John Calhoun's "states rights" claims. It also defended the notion of American patriotism as allegiance to the country and to democracy. Schlesinger writes, "Many years later, after guns had boomed over Sumter, Taney declared that he had not seem the proclamation until it was in print and that he disapproved some of its principles." Yes, even before 1861 Taney had clearly come to disapprove of the principle in Jackson's Proclamation that American patriots could never put the defense of slavery above the Constitution and national unity.

Starting with the 1940s, Huebner writes, "No record of personal activities by Taney on behalf of slaves exists for this period, and the legal evidence indicates a purely proslavery position." In his Supreme Court decisions leading up to Dred Scott, "Taney went beyond his colleagues in compiling a solidly proslavery record. In each instance Taney preserved slaveholders' rights by ensuring that states maintained control of slavery." Huebner quotes from an 1857 letter Taney wrote to illustrate that by that time, the Chief Justice had embraced "full-blown extremism" on slavery and race. Taney wrote in that letter, "In the greater number of cases that have come under my observation, freedom has been a serious misfortune to the manumitted slave; and he has most commonly brought upon himself privations and sufferings which he would not have been called on to endure in a state of slavery." He had abandoned his belief that a person of African descent had any right to freedom at all.

That's why I find it surprising that, after citing all this evidence, Huebner concludes, "Taney’s changing views show that he was both a product and a proponent of this shifting discourse about slavery." That formulation is vague enough to be plausible by not saying much. The more straighforward interpretation would seem to be that Taney decided to start defending the interests of slaveowners and actively opposing the interests of slaves and even of democracy as it existed among American whites.

Note: I also discussed this article in two posts in the 2012 series for April 27 and April 28.

Tags: confederate heritage month 2013, dred scott decision, roger taney, slavery

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2012, April 28: A surprising anti-slavery Jacksonian (2)

We looked in the last post at the antislavery politics of Roger Taney, infamous as the Chief Justice of the Dred Scott decision, in his younger days, relying on Timothy Huebner's "Roger B. Taney and the Slavery Issue: Looking beyond - and before - Dred Scott" The Journal of American History June 2010.

Chief Justice Roger Taney (1777-1864): a Justice in the legal tradition of  Pontius Pilate and Antonin Scalia

Taney's most famous antislavery pronouncement came in 1819, when he was defending antislavery Methodist minister Jacob Gruber who was being charged in Maryland for inciting insurrection in an sermon which condemned slavery in colorful terms. Huebner explains that Taney's successful defense of Gruber was primarily based on Gruber's right to free speech.

But Taney did much more than defend Gruber’s legal right to speak freely. "I might ... safely rest the defence on this ground," Taney noted to the jury. Instead, he pressed further and attempted to justify the arguments that Gruber had outlined in the offending sermon. In doing so, Taney echoed Gruber’s sentiments but used his own words. "He [Gruber] did rebuke those masters, who, in the exercise of power, are deaf to calls of humanity; and he warned them of the evils they might bring upon themselves," Taney announced. "He did speak with abhorrence of those reptiles, who live by trading in human flesh, and enrich themselves by tearing the husband from the wife — the infant from the bosom of the mother." Taney continued: "Shall I content myself ... with saying he had a right to say this? that there is no law to punish him? So far is he from being the object of punishment in any form of proceeding, that we are prepared to maintain the same principles, and to use, if necessary, the same language here in the temple of justice." Taney was seeking not simply to win an acquittal for his client by defending him from the charges against him. He went a step further, reaffirming and validating the substance of Gruber's sermon. [my emphasis]

Why, lawyer Taney got downright "uncivil" in trashing the slavedowners and their traffic in human flesh!

The most famous passage in his speech was this:

A hard necessity, indeed, compels us to endure the evil of slavery for a time. It was imposed upon us by another nation, while we were yet in a state of colonial vassalage. It cannot be easily, or suddenly removed. Yet while it continues, it is a blot on our national character, and every real lover of freedom, confidently hopes that it will be effectually, though it must be gradually, wiped away; and earnestly looks for the means, by which this necessary object may be best attained. And until it shall be accomplished: until the time shall come when we can point without a blush, to the language held in the [D]eclaration of [I]ndependence, every friend of humanity will seek to lighten the galling chain of slavery, and better, to the utmost of his power, the wretched condition of the slave. [my emphasis]

But Huebner explains that Taney's posthumous, post-Civil War defenders who tried to integrate him into the Lost Cause narrative as an antislavery figure who decided Dred Scott on pure Constitutional principles are just blowing smoke.

Huebner notes that Taney in subsequent years is not known to have made any such further explicit statement against the institution of slavery, though he did take antislavery stands in his terms as Maryland state senator from 1816 to 1821, as described in the previous post. Taney became a Jacksonian Democrat and served under President Jackson as Secretary of War, Attorney General and Treasury Secretary. During the Jackson Administration he achieved a reputation as a radical - of the left rather than the rightwing sort - based on his opposition to the Bank of the United States and the power of concentrated wealth it embodied and represented. It was President Jackson the slaveholder who appointed the formerly outspoken antislavery lawyer to Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.

The immediate issue in the 1857 Dred Scott decision was whether a slaveowner could bring his human property into a free territory and still retain legal possession of them. Taney notoriously ruled on behalf of the Court majority that they could. This decision was consistent with the strategy of the Slave Power (as antislavery advocates referred to the Southern slaveowners) in the 1850s to use federal power to override any state or territorial laws that might interfere with the Peculiar Institution of slavery. In this case, they got Taney's Court to rule against the long-established federal power to regulate slavery in the territories. The conflict over slavery in "Bleeding Kansas" was one of the major political events of the 1850s for the United States. Dred Scott would have multiplied such conflicts in the territories had the Civil War not intervened with an even greater armed conflict. In more recent terms, we could say that Taney had decided that the country needed "two, three, many Kansases".

Huebner quotes in infamous racism in Taney's decision:

Reading the opinion of the Court with trembling hands and fading voice, Taney spoke the words for which he became known. "The legislation and histories of the times, and the language used in the Declaration of Independence show that neither the class of persons who had been imported as slaves, nor their descendants, whether they had become free or not, were then acknowledged as a part of the people, nor intended to be included in the general words in that memorable instrument," he wrote. "They had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they 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. ... This opinion was at that time fixed and universal in the civilized portion of the white race." More significant in the context of the debate over the extension of slavery, Taney held that Congress had no power to prohibit slavery in federal territories, thus putting the Court squarely on the side of slaveholders. Northern critics immediately raised their voices in a chorus of dissent, protesting the Court’s adoption of an extreme pro-southern interpretation of the Constitution. [my emphasis]

Huebner argues convincingly that the Lost Cause claim of Taney as an antislavery man who had ruled on pure Constitutional principles in Dred Scott doesn't hold water. He explains that that Taney had clearly rejected his earlier antislavery stance. During his time as Attorney General in the Jackson Administration:

As U.S. attorney general under President Andrew Jackson, Taney provided glimpses of the stance he would take in the Dred Scott decision, particularly regarding the question of whether African Americans had been included in the political community at the writing of the Constitution. In 1832, he authored an official opinion on the constitutionality of a South Carolina statute that provided that black seamen who arrived in Charleston were subject to arrest and confinement while their ship remained in port. Written for the secretary of state, Taney’s opinion referred to African Americans as members of a "degraded class." Whatever limited rights African Americans possessed, Taney argued, came from the states, who legitimately conferred or withdrew those privileges based on "the sufferance of the white population." Maintaining white control over black liberties also helped prevent "the evils of insurrection and rebellion."

This was still a long way away from his Dred Scott ruling that African-Americans, free or slave, "had no rights which the white man was bound to respect". But he was clearly moving in that direction in that official opinion.

In a concurring Supreme Court opinion in 1842 (Prigg v. Pennsylvania), he argued, in Huebner's summary, "that the Constitution prohibited states only from interfering with a slaveholder’s right to recover his property, not from supporting or enforcing the rights of slaveholders. States could regulate slavery, he concluded, so long as they did not threaten the constitutional guarantees of slaveholders." By that time, he was clearly on the road to Dred Scott, taking an outlook in which the Constitution protected the rights of slaveowners to their human property above all other rights, even of white male citizens.

Huebner suggests that Taney's evolution - or degeneration - on the issue of slavery had heavy components of Party conformity and fear:

At this time [1828], Taney embraced the party of Andrew Jackson, a slave-owning Tennessean who built a southern-dominated political party that focused on the rights of slaveholders and the prerogative of states. Over the next several years the Democratic party supported slavery and white supremacy in a variety of ways—from its Indian removal policy to its eventual stance in favor of the annexation of Texas. As an official of the Jackson administration, Taney ceased to think of slavery solely from the perspective of a small-town Maryland lawyer and instead began to reason and act as a representative of the president and his party. Nat Turner’s rebellion in 1831 gave Taney further cause to reconsider his views on slavery and black rights. The revolt prompted a nearly universal response of fear and dread on the part of white southerners, who became more mindful of the threat of uprising and increasingly vigilant about maintaining racial control. [my emphasis]

The Jacksonian Party, the Democratic Party, and the Jacksonian movement developed in two major directions: one a rigidly proslavery Party and sentiment, the other a more democratic one, the latter being more genuinely "Jacksonian" in my view. John Calhoun and other advocates for slavery became skilled at using the exaggerated but not completely unrealistic fear of slave revolts to scare even Northern whites into being more sympathetic to slavery.

Taney's thinking in Dred Scott wasn't some convoluted purist reasoning made in sorrow by a man who in his heart disliked and rejected slavery. He had become a true believer:

By the time of Dred Scott, Taney’s thinking had evolved into full-blown extremism. The best evidence that Taney’s notorious judicial opinion reflected his personal beliefs came in a rare private letter on slavery, penned in August 1857, just after he wrote the Dred Scott decision. In the letter, Taney affirmed his adamant disapproval of emancipation. "Every intelligent person whose life has been passed in a slaveholding State, and who has carefully observed the character and capacity of the African race, will see that a general and sudden emancipation would be absolute ruin to the negroes, as well as to the white population," he wrote. "In the greater number of cases that have come under my observation, freedom has been a serious misfortune to the manumitted slave; and he has most commonly brought upon himself privations and sufferings which he would not have been called on to endure in a state of slavery." Apart from the strictly legal holding in Dred Scott, moreover, the rhetoric of Taney’s opinion—the idea that an African American could "justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit" - reveals his acceptance of the claim of southern paternalists that slavery benefitted [sic] blacks. By the 1860 presidential election Taney had joined the vast majority of his fellow white southerners in conflating free soil and abolition, as well as in dreading the possibility of a Lincoln presidency and a massive insurrection. "I am old enough to remember the horrors of St. Domingo," he confided to a friend on the eve of the election, “and a few days will determine whether anything like it is to be visited upon any portion of our own southern countrymen. I can only pray that it may be averted and that my fears may prove to be nothing more than the timidity of an old man.”

The Roger Taney of the Dred Scott decision wasn't the tragic figure of Lost Cause pseudohistory. He was a 19th century Antonin Scalia. The author of an anonymous 1865 pamphlet called The Unjust Judge which Huebner quotes was on the right track saying that Taney was "next to Pontius Pilate, perhaps the worst that ever occupied the seat of judgment among men."

Tags: andrew jackson, confederate heritage month 2012, roger taney, slavery, white racism

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2012, April 27: A surprising anti-slavery Jacksonian (1)

One member of President Andrew Jackson's Cabinet had an antislavery background: Roger Taney. Yes, that Roger Taney, now infamous as the Chief Justice of the Dred Scott decision (1857) that opened the way to undermining even state restrictions on slavery and, by rendering legal resolution of the slavery controversy effectively impossible, made the Civil War inevitable.

Roger Taney (1777-1864)

Of course, things that look inevitable in retrospect often look very different while they are happening in real time. In the Dred Scott instance, it was clear at the time that it would dramatically escalated the slavery conflict by expanding the power of slaveholders over free states. But what looks like Taney's fate in retrospect to become the pro-slavery Chief Justice who stands as one of the great villains of American history must have seemed an unlikely destination to those who knew him in his younger days.

Timothy Huebner looks at Taney's changing relationship to slavery in "Roger B. Taney and the Slavery Issue: Looking beyond - and before - Dred Scott" The Journal of American History June 2010. Taney defended a white Methodist minister named Jacob Gruber who had been indicted on the charge that he "did feloniously consult, conspire, ... to raise and insurrection and rebellion in the state", based on a sermon he gave in Taney's home state of Maryland in 1818 to a mixed white and African-American crowd. Gruber had posed the rhetorical question, "Is it not a reproach to a man to hold articles of liberty and independence in one hand and a bloody whip in the other, while a negro stands and trembles before him, with his back cut and bleeding?"

After Taney's death, Taney's defense of Gruber became, oddly enough, integrated into the Lost Cause narrative that denied that slavery caused the Civil War. Pointing to the anti-slavery views that Taney had expressed in his defense of Gruber in particular, the neo-Confederate narrative produced an argument that Huebner summarizes as follows, "In this framework Taney became doubly virtuous; he personally held antislavery beliefs yet scrupulously exercised his judicial duties. The Dred Scott decision - rather than being an example of proslavery extremism, as Republicans had described it - thus became a reasonable, accurate interpretation of the Constitution."

Taney, in the Lost Cause portrayal, is re-imagined as an opponent of slavery who wrecked the Constitution and the Union out of pristine legal principle.

The reality was different. And part of the problem of just making up history to suit some ideology of the moment is that it can produce endless narrative tangles. The antiabortion movement today, which heavily overlaps with those attracted to neo-Confederate ideas and Lost Cause history, holds up the Dred Scott decision as an example of a terribly unjust Supreme Court decision, which they see as analogous to Roe v. Wade, which recognized women's Constitutionally protected right to abortion. In the sometimes genuinely weird world of extremist tribalism, "Dred Scott" becomes and over-determined substitute for legal abortion, calling for measures up to and including violence to prevent it. So defending the Lost Cause version of Taney's Dred Scott decision as Huebner describes it could be problematic for advocates of the Lost Cause today. Not that it would necessarily stop them from making the argument. Screaming contradictions in logical thought are less of a problem for the authoritarian-minded than for most other people.

But Huebner makes clear that Taney's early opposition to slavery wasn't isolated to the Gruber case. Taney in 1806 became the brother-in-law of Francis Scott Key, who would later write what is now our national anthem; Taney married his sister, Anne Phoebe Charlton Key. "Both Taney and Francis Scott Key jointed an antikidnapping society and developed reputations for their willingness to argue cases for the benefit of slaves and free blacks."

Without fully describing how Taney came into possession of his own slaves, Huebner relates that Taney freed 11 of the 13 of which he had possession. The two exceptions were two elderly ones, who he said were "too old, when they became my property, to provide for themselves." This is notable in that one of the arguments of proslavery apologists was that masters often freed slaves who had served the faithfully all their lives as a reward for the loyal service. What that usually meant in practice was that once slaves became so old and decrepit that they couldn't work anymore, the masters would free them to fend for themselves in their remaining time on earth. Not that a lot of slaves became elderly. Between overwork, abuse, inadequate nutrition and poor medical care, many of them died before reaching their 50s. Taney took the opposite approach in those two cases, it seems.

Huebner also recounts Taney's early stands as a politician on slavery-related issues:

Consistent with his other actions at this time, Taney voted in favor of limiting the growth of slavery as a member of the Maryland Senate between 1816 and 1821. Restricting slavery emerged as a question of national importance in 1819 when New York congressman James Tallmadge proposed gradual abolition as a condition of admitting Missouri as a state. Tallmadge’s plan, a tentative move against slavery, would have freed slaves born after statehood when they reached the age of twenty-five. Such a plan partially conformed to Taney’s ideas and practices regarding liberating slaves — he freed his female slaves at age twenty-five and typically freed his male slaves at age thirty. Congress spent months debating the status of slavery in Missouri, and the matter aroused deep passions in Taney’s home state. William Pinkney, a U.S. senator from Maryland and the state’s leading lawyer, took a particularly vocal stance against any restrictions on slavery in Missouri. As in many states, legislators in Maryland extensively discussed the matter. In 1820 a resolution came before the state senate providing that Missouri should be allowed to enter the Union without any restrictions regarding slavery. Taney defied proslavery leaders — including a senior member of the bar — by voting against the resolution. (It passed 9–5, despite Taney’s efforts.) The following year, when a resolution to repeal all Maryland laws "as prohibit the importation of slaves into this state" came before senators, Taney again stood with the minority (7–5) in opposing it. As a state senator at a time of fervent debate on the subject, Taney thus supported federal and state restrictions on the expansion of slavery. [my emphasis]

(Continued in Part 2)

Tags: andrew jackson, confederate heritage month 2012, roger taney, slavery, white racism

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2004, April 9: Roger Taney and the Dred Scott decision

The April 9 quote from Edward Sebesta's Web site is once again from Jefferson Davis.; This one concerns the notorious Dred Scott decision, which was a major factor in bringing on the Civil War. Chief Justice Roger Taney wrote what was probably the most disastrous Supreme Court decision in the history of the United States. (Bush v. Gore would be a major contender, but we don't know the final consequences of that one yet.)  I won't quote Davis' statement here, which blamed the abolitionists for all the trouble the decision caused. Instead, I'll talk about the decision itself.

Taney (whose name was pronounced like "Toney") had been US Attorney General under President Andrew Jackson, and later became Secretary of the Treasury. Ironically, though history rightly remembers him as worst of the worst reactionaries in US history for the Dred Scott decision, he achieved a reputation during the Jackson Administration as an economic radical (i.e., of the left-wing variety) during the fight with the Bank of the United States. It was Old Hickory himself who nominated him to be Chief Justice in 1835.

But Taney stands as a reminder and embodiment of the contradictions of Jacksonian democracy.  There was the side of the movement that fought for an expansion of democracy and an empowerment of the majority, which Taney represented in the battle over the Bank. And there was the side that represented Southern whites in their slaveholding interests, which Taney represented in the most destructive way in the Dred Scott decision of 1857.

Taney was a Catholic, and he reportedly believed that slavery was wrong. He manumitted slaves that he had inherited. But in the Dred Scott case, he threw the weight of the Court behind the Slave Power.

The case involved a slave suing for his freedom, contending that because his master had brought him to live in a territory in which slavery was not legal, he was made legally free by that residence. The decision denied Scott's appeal on the grounds that he was not a citizen of the United States and therefore had no grounds on which to appeal to the federal courts. "A free negro of the African race, whose ancestors were brought to this country and sold as slaves, is not a 'citizen' within the meaning of the Constitution of the United States." That was bad enough. But the language of the decision went far beyond that:

The act of Congress, therefore, prohibiting a citizen of the United States from taking with him his slaves when he removes to the Territory in question to reside, is an exercise of authority over private property which is not warranted by the Constitution and the removal of the plaintiff, by his owner, to that Territory, gave him no title to freedom.

Regulating slavery in the territories had been an accepted power of the national government even in the days of the Articles of Confederation. It had formed the basis of the various compromises in Congress which had until then prevented the slavery controversy from breaking out into secession and war. The Dred Scott decision destroyed the legal basis for further compromises of that kind.

In the context of Lost Cause dogma, this decision is also important because it was an exercise of national power on behalf of slavery. During the 1850s especially, when the Slave Power controlled the Presidency, the federal judiciary and much of the Congress, they were happy to use federal power to overrule "states rights" in defense of slavery. Given the choice between defending slavery and the abstract principle of "states rights," the slaveowners always chose defending slavery.

Abraham Lincoln, in a speech of June 26, 1857, attacking the Dred Scott decision, cited Andy Jackson in criticizing the decision. In that speech, Lincoln denounces the parts of Justice Taney's decision that argue that the Declaration of Independence never meant to include black people as even theoretically equal to whites:

In those days [of the Revolution], our Declaration of Independence was held sacred by all, and thought to include all; but now, to aid in making the bondage of the negro universal and eternal, it is assailed, and sneered at, and construed, and hawked at, and torn, till, if its framers could rise from their graves, they could not at all recognize it. All the powers of earth seem rapidly combining against him [the negro]. Mammon is after him; ambition follows, and philosophy follows, and the Theology of the day is fast joining the cry. They have him in his prison house; they have searched his person, and left no prying instrument with him. One after another they have closed the heavy iron doors upon him, and now they have him, as it were, bolted in with a lock of a hundred keys, which can never be unlocked without the concurrence of every key; the keys in the hands of a hundred different men, and they scattered to a hundred dfferent and distant places; and they stand musing as to what invention, in all the dominions of mind and matter, can be produced to make the impossibility of his escape more complete than it is.

Tags: abraham lincoln, andrew jackson, confederate heritage month 2004, dred scott, lost cause, roger taney, old hickory