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 delegated Taney secretary of the treasury in 1833 during a legislative break. Taney continued to pull out administrative assets from the Second Bank and build up an arrangement of government stores, drawing fire from the bank's allies. Meeting in 1834, the Whig-dominated U.S. Senate neglected to affirm Taney as secretary of the treasury. The next year he was selected for an associate justiceship and again dismissed by the Senate. Toward the finish of 1835, in any case, with the Senate back under Democratic control, he was designated by the president for chief justice and was subsequently confirmed in 1836 in spite of solid Whig resistance. [4]

Controversy

Dred Scott decision

The Dred Scott case, also known as Dred Scott v. Sandford, was a long-term battle for freedom by a Black enslaved man named Dred Scott. The case endured through several courts and eventually arrived at the U.S. Supreme Court, whose decision anger abolitionists, served as a stepping stone to the Civil War, and gave momentum to the anti-slavery movement. 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 individuals of African descent, free or enslaved, were not United States citizens and therefore reserved no option to sue in federal court. In addition, he wrote that the Fifth Amendment secured slave proprietor rights on the grounds that oppressed laborers were their legitimate property. [5] Taney wrote that the Founders' words in the Declaration of Independence, “all men were created equal,” were never mean to include the blacks. Blacks could not travel, vote, 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. Furthermore, 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 block Lincoln’s endeavors to hold the Union together and even drafted an opinion fully expecting a chance 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.