Monument of Roger B. Taney

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Monument of Roger B. Taney

The Roger B. Taney Monument is a sculpture of Roger B. Taney, in Annapolis, Maryland, on the State House grounds, he was the fifth Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. [1] This sculpture is an 1887 copy of the 1872 original that was made by William Henry Rinehart. Rinehart was one of the main well-fame artists in Baltimore, and the Rinehart School of Sculpture was built after his death. The Special Commission to Review Baltimore’s Public Confederate Monuments suggested eliminating the Taney Monument alongside the Lee-Jackson Statue at Wyman Park Dell in 2016. After the homicide of a counter-protestor during a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia on August 12, 2017, Baltimore City reacted to restored calls to bring down Confederate landmarks by eliminating the Taney Monument. [2]

Background

Taney was the son of Michael and Monica (Brooke) Taney. Of English line, Michael Taney had been educated in France and was a prosperous tobacco cultivator in Calvert province, Maryland. In 1975, After graduation from Dickinson College in Pennsylvania, Taney learned law with Judge Jeremiah Chase, of the Maryland General Court. In 19799, he was accepted to the bar at Annapolis and served one year in the Maryland House of Delegates before staying in Frederick, Maryland, to practice law. [3] He moved two years later to Frederick, Maryland, then to Baltimore in 1823. In 1831, he was appointed as U.S. attorney general by President Andrew Jackson, then Taney supported the president in his opposition to rechartering the Second Bank of the United States, which was one of the significant issues of the day. Consequently, Jackson appointed Taney secretary of the treasury in 1833 during a congressional recess. Taney proceeded to withdraw federal funds from the Second Bank and establish a system of government depositories, drawing fire from the bank's supporters. Meeting in 1834, the Whig-dominated U.S. Senate failed to confirm Taney as secretary of the treasury. The following year he was nominated for an associate justiceship and again rejected by the Senate. At the end of 1835, however, with the Senate back under Democratic control, he was nominated by the president for chief justice and was subsequently confirmed in 1836 despite strong Whig opposition. [4]

Controversy

Dred Scott decision

The Dred Scott case, also known as Dred Scott v. Sandford, was a decade-long fight for freedom by a Black enslaved man named Dred Scott. The case persisted through several courts and ultimately reached the U.S. Supreme Court, whose decision incensed abolitionists, gave momentum to the anti-slavery movement and served as a stepping stone to the Civil War. Roger B. Taney was the United States Supreme Court Chief Justice for this case, he became best known for writing the final majority opinion in Dred Scott v. Sandford, which said that all people of African descent, free or enslaved, were not United States citizens and therefore had no right to sue in federal court. In addition, he wrote that the Fifth Amendment protected slave owner rights because enslaved workers were their legal property. [5] Taney wrote that the Founders' words in the Declaration of Independence, “all men were created equal,” were never intended to apply to blacks. Blacks could not vote, travel, or even fall in love and marry of their own free will — rights granted, according to the Declaration, by God to all. [6] Taney told the president that blacks in the United States had only those rights which they were able to “enjoy” at the “sufferance” and “mercy” of whites, and that blacks, “even when free,” were a “degraded class” whose “privileges” were “accorded to them as a matter of kindness and benevolence rather than right.” Later, during the Civil War, Taney did all he could to obstruct Lincoln’s attempts to hold the Union together, and even drafted an opinion in anticipation of an opportunity to strike down the Emancipation Proclamation. Taney was a lifelong slaveowner, and the former was personally involved in buying and selling significant numbers of human beings. [7]

References

  1. Roger B. Taney Monument (Annapolis, Maryland). Wikipedia. Retrieved January 31 2021.
  2. Roger Brooke Taney Monument. Baltimore Heritage. Retrieved January 31 2021.
  3. Schumacher, Alvin J. Roger B. Taney. Britannica. Retrieved January 31 2021.
  4. Roger B. Taney. US Senate. Retrieved January 31 2021.
  5. https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/dred-scott-case
  6. The Human Factor of History: Dred Scott and Roger B. Taney. National Museum of African American History of Culture. Retrieved January 31 2021.
  7. Roger B. Taney, Slavery’s Great Chief Justice. Harvard Press. Retrieved January 31 2021.