Roger Taney’s Contemporaries Hated Him As Much As You Probably Do
Ordinarily, members of Congress do not publicly suggest that recently deceased Supreme Court justices are burning in hell. But Roger Taney was no ordinary Supreme Court justice.
If asked to name the very worst Supreme Court justice of all time, most people would put Roger Taney, who served as chief justice between 1836 and his death in 1864, at or near the top of their shortlists. This is mostly because Taney wrote the majority opinion in Dred Scott v. Sandford, the 1857 case in which the Court held that Black people were not and never could be “citizens” of the United States. In his opinion, Taney variously described Black people as “beings of an inferior order” and “altogether unfit to associate with the white race either in social or political relations,” and as having “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”
Of course, plenty of Supreme Court justices have espoused sentiments like these in private, but few have been quite so cavalier about expressing them in an honest-to-God Supreme Court opinion. Northern states were furious about Dred Scott; one editorial board opined that “if the people obey this decision, they disobey God.” To this day, Dred Scott is often considered the Court’s most infamous decision, not only for its gutter racism but also because of the real-world events it helped precipitate: Generally speaking, if the Wikipedia section following the one about your most significant professional accomplishment is titled “American Civil War,” you fucked up in spectacular fashion.
Perhaps you will be charmed, then, to learn that most of Taney’s contemporaries loathed him as much as you probably do. “Better late than never,” wrote the diarist George Templeton Strong after Taney passed away at age 87, shortly before the Civil War’s conclusion; Strong went on to joke that the chief justice had “earned the gratitude of his country by dying at last.” A Philadelphia newspaper asserted that the nation should feel “little regret” about Taney’s departure from the bench and/or this mortal plane; in a letter to President Abraham Lincoln, the abolitionist senator Charles Sumner celebrated Taney’s death as a “victory for liberty and the Constitution.” Lincoln, with whom Taney clashed repeatedly throughout the war, did not publicly acknowledge Taney’s passing, and only three Cabinet members joined Lincoln at the funeral.
A few months later, Congress was considering a bill to appropriate $1,000 for a marble bust of Taney, to add to the collection of busts of previous chief justices on display in the Supreme Court’s chambers. But lawmakers objected strenuously to the idea of lifting even a finger to honor a man who, in the words of one, had spent his life fighting to place the entire country “under the iron rule of the slave-masters.” Sumner, evidently a world-class hater, predicted that Taney’s name would be “hooted down upon the page of history,” which would “fasten upon him the stigma he deserves.” Ohio Senator Benjamin Wade framed the question of whether to commission the Taney bust as a simple matter of fiscal responsibility, warning that his constituents would “pay $2,000 to hang this man in effigy rather than $1,000 to commemorate his merits.”
For my money, the most vicious one-liner came courtesy of Pennsylvania Congressman Thaddeus Stevens, who during an 1865 floor debate about the Reconstruction Amendments went out of his way to suggest to his colleagues that at that moment, Taney was most likely burning in hell. The notion of a “white man’s government,” Stevens said, “is as atrocious as the infamous sentiment that damned the late chief justice to everlasting fame—and, I fear, to everlasting fire.”
In a fun twist, when Taney died on October 12, 1864, his home state of Maryland was in the process of voting on a referendum to abolish slavery. It passed, which prompted one Union general to wryly conclude that “the elections carried him off.”
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We are blessed to live under a court that provides Taney with three of his stiffest competitors: Roberts, Thomas, and Alito.
Thank you for giving perspective and hope. What we are seeing is an infuriating regression, but in my view the US has been much worse as well as much better. Things change over time.
We must continue supporting the right path (fair voting, no jerrymandered districts) without using overblown, inaccurate language and careless accusations of racism. This over wrought language just turns off people who might otherwise be sympathetic and prevents discussion and compromise.