Path to the Supreme Court
Roger Brooke Taney was born in 1777 to a slaveholding tobacco family in Calvert County, Maryland — a Catholic in a Protestant country, which sharpened his outsider's ambition. He read law, rose through Maryland politics from Federalist to Jacksonian Democrat, and became Andrew Jackson's attorney general and then Treasury secretary, where he helped Jackson destroy the Second Bank of the United States by removing its federal deposits. The Senate refused to forgive it, rejecting him first for the Cabinet and then for the Court. Jackson persisted, and in 1836 Taney succeeded John Marshall (§13) as the fifth Chief Justice of the United States — the first Catholic to hold the office.
On the Supreme Court
For nearly three decades Taney led a Court that softened Marshall's nationalism in favor of state power and 'the rights of the community,' beginning with Charles River Bridge, which held that corporate charters must be read narrowly against monopoly. A capable and consequential jurist on commerce and contract, he is remembered for none of it — because in 1857 he wrote Dred Scott v. Sandford, declaring that Black Americans were not and could never be citizens and that Congress could not bar slavery from the territories. Meant to settle the slavery question, it inflamed it, helped bring on the Civil War, and destroyed his reputation. In his last years he clashed with Lincoln over wartime habeas corpus in Ex parte Merryman. He died in 1864, his name a byword for the Court's gravest failure.
The Voting Record
How Taney voted in the 1,608 cases the Supreme Court Database records from the 1837 term through the 1865 term, using that database’s classification of each vote as liberal or conservative. The gold tick on each bar is the rate for the other justices sitting on those same cases.
Where Taney sat among the colleagues on the same bench — and whether that Court divided clearly enough for the question to have an answer — is laid out Court by Court. See this Court →
Source · The Supreme Court Database (Spaeth, Epstein, Nelson, Martin, et al.) · how these figures are made
Key Decisions
Charles River Bridge v. Warren Bridge
1837Holding · A legislative charter grants only what it expressly states; ambiguous grants are construed against private monopoly and in favor of the public interest.
Role · Taney wrote for the Court in his first major opinion as Chief Justice.
A decisive turn away from Marshall's protection of vested corporate rights toward public power and economic competition — a foundational case in American property and corporate law.
Read the opinion →Dred Scott v. Sandford
1857 · 7–2Holding · Americans of African descent, enslaved or free, were not citizens under the Constitution and could not sue in federal court; and Congress had no power to prohibit slavery in the territories, voiding the Missouri Compromise.
Role · Taney wrote the principal opinion.
The most infamous decision in the Court's history — a judicial attempt to settle slavery that instead helped ignite the Civil War, and the case against which the Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee of birthright citizenship was written.
Read the opinion →Ableman v. Booth
1859Holding · State courts have no power to interfere with the federal courts or to free, on habeas corpus, a prisoner held under federal authority — here an abolitionist jailed under the Fugitive Slave Act.
Role · Taney wrote for a unanimous Court.
A forceful assertion of federal judicial supremacy over the states — ironically deployed to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act.
Read the opinion →Go Deeper
Roger B. Taney (Macmillan, 1935) by Carl Brent Swisher — ninety years old and still the standard scholarly life, a fact that says something about how radioactive the subject became. Written at the height of the rehabilitation era and more sympathetic than a modern reader will be — which is precisely why it must be read alongside the modern reckoning: Huebner's 2010 reassessment, Fehrenbacher's Pulitzer-winning Dred Scott history, and Finkelman's prosecution.
The Bookshelf
The whole man: the Calvert County Catholic gentry, the Frederick practice, the Jackson years at the Attorney Generalship and the Treasury, twenty-eight years in the center chair, and the catastrophe of 1857. As narrative biography, nothing has replaced it — read it with the modern reckoning open beside it. Macmillan.
The other full biography — warmer, faster, written for general readers by a Maryland lawyer who spent years in the family materials. Like Swisher it predates the modern reckoning and forgives too much; read it for the man — the devoted marriage, the chronic poverty, the iron courtesy — and keep Fehrenbacher and Finkelman open beside it. Houghton Mifflin.
The essential modern article and the engine of any fair verdict. Huebner takes seriously the facts the prosecution skips — the 1819 Gruber defense ("a blot on our national character"), the manumission of the enslaved people Taney inherited — and the facts the rehabilitation skipped, and asks how the same man produced both. The most persuasive account we have of the road to Dred Scott. Start the slavery question here.
The Pulitzer-winning history's third appearance on this site — on the pages of the dissenter (McLean), the broadener (Wayne), and now the author. The definitive prosecution-with-full-due-process: the opinion reconstructed line by line, its history bad, its law worse, its consequences catastrophic. Read the opinion itself alongside — free online, and no summary conveys it. Oxford University Press.
The trio completed: Marshall, Story, and — the longest and hardest chapter — Taney. Finkelman will have none of the tragic-figure framing: the manumissions were selective, the paternalism was ideology, and Dred Scott was not a misstep but the destination. The necessary counterweight to both biographies. Harvard University Press.
Taney's strange last act: a Maryland secessionist lieutenant arrested in May 1861, a dying Chief Justice riding to Baltimore to order the army to produce him, and a president who declined to obey. McGinty untangles what Merryman actually held and why it became every generation's favorite constitutional parable — with Taney cast, uncomfortably for his critics, as the defender of civil liberty. James F. Simon's Lincoln and Chief Justice Taney (2006) covers the same war in a broader narrative frame. Harvard University Press.
Published within months of his death: a pamphlet-length assassination of the late Chief Justice's character, so venomous that identifying its author became a scholarly parlor game — Walker Lewis's "The Unjust Judge: Who Wrote It?" (ABA Journal, 1964) runs the suspects. No other justice was memorialized this way; it opens the longest afterlife-war in Court history. Public domain.
The authorized answer to The Unjust Judge, built around Taney's own autobiographical fragment — the only sustained account of his early life in his own voice, with the Gruber defense preserved in full. Filial and useless as a verdict, but indispensable as a source; every biography leans on it. Public domain.
Two sitting Chief Justices formally rehabilitating a predecessor — Hughes at the pendulum's far swing, Warren, of all people, renewing the absolution the year after Brown. Read with the 1930s law-review wave the FJC's bibliography catalogs (Armstrong's "The Rehabilitation of Roger B. Taney," 1936, is the representative title). The file matters less for its verdicts than as evidence that each era needs its own Taney.
Swisher's second appearance in the section — the thousand-page institutional history covering the Court his biography's subject led for twenty-eight years. The corrective to reading Taney only through 1857: the workaday tribunal of Charles River Bridge, the License and Passenger Cases, admiralty and corporations and the political-question doctrine — a competent, consequential Court that its Chief's one opinion buried. Macmillan.
The standard dual study of the great collision — Dred Scott, Merryman, and the war powers, told through the two men who embodied the argument. Simon's companion to his Marshall–Jefferson volume, and the most-read Taney book of the last twenty years. Simon & Schuster.
The major revisionist study — Graber's unsettling case that Taney's opinion was a plausible reading of a Constitution that really did protect slavery, which makes the evil constitutional rather than judicial. The third canonical Dred Scott book alongside Fehrenbacher and Finkelman on this shelf, and the one that will start the argument. Cambridge University Press.
The standard modern biographical encyclopedia of the Court: a signed essay on each of the 110 justices from Jay to Alito, alphabetically arranged, by a named scholar or journalist. Length tracks reputation — two pages for Thomas Johnson, three for Woods, eleven for Holmes — which is itself a rough map of who the literature has bothered with. It is not a substitute for a biography, and for the justices who have never had one it is often the most careful short account in print. Borrow it free at the Internet Archive.
The one-volume reference on the Court: more than a thousand signed entries on cases, doctrines, institutions and the justices, current to 2005. Cases and people share one alphabet, so a citation can be followed without changing volumes, and the biographical entries are short, written by specialists, and better than a longer sketch at carrying the historiography — what the argument about a justice currently is. Borrow it free at the Internet Archive.
The Reading Path
A researched route through the literature — in order.
- 1.Swisher — for the standard life — sympathetic, and meant to be argued with
- 2.Huebner — for the fair-verdict engine: Gruber, the manumissions, and the road to 1857
- 3.Fehrenbacher, then Dred Scott itself — for the catastrophe entire — no summary conveys the opinion
- 4.Finkelman — for the prosecution that refuses the tragic framing
- 5.McGinty, then Merryman itself — for the last act that complicates everything again
- 6.The Unjust Judge, Tyler, and the Rehabilitation File — for the afterlife war, 1865 to now
- 7.Lewis and Swisher's Taney Period — for the man at home and the Court beyond 1857
Where the Papers Are Kept
The largest Taney collection (~3 linear feet, ca. 1795–1864) at his alma mater — legal papers from the Frederick office, letters and opinions. Further holdings at the Library of Congress (110 items), Johns Hopkins (66 items), the Gilder Lehrman Collection, UVA Law School, the Historical Society of Frederick County, and the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library, as the FJC lists them. Visit →
Online Resources
Ideas for Further Research
- The Duvall symmetry closes: Duvall resigned in 1835 on the assurance that Taney would get his seat; the Senate balked, Marshall died, and the twice-rejected man took the center chair instead — first cabinet nominee ever rejected by the Senate, then blocked for associate justice, then Chief Justice of the United States within two years.
- The hardest fair-verdict problem on the site: the lawyer who called slavery "a blot on our national character" defending an abolitionist preacher in 1819, and who freed the people he inherited, wrote in 1857 that Black Americans had "no rights which the white man was bound to respect." Huebner's article is the best account of the road between the two sentences; Finkelman denies there was ever a fork in it.
- The longest memory war in Court history, and a strong candidate for a standalone site essay: the anonymous Unjust Judge pamphlet (1865), the profession's rehabilitation wave (1930s, sealed by two Chief Justices' tributes), and the modern reversal — Maryland removed his State House statue in 2017, and Congress voted in 2022 to replace his Capitol bust with Thurgood Marshall's: one Maryland Chief Justice's memory yielding to the Marylander who argued Brown.