Roger Brooke Taney (/ˈtɔːni/ TAW-nee; March 17, 1777 – October 12, 1864) was an American lawyer and politician who served as the fifth chief justice of the United States, holding that office from 1836 until his death in 1864.

Taney delivered the majority opinion in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), ruling that African Americans could not be considered U.S. citizens and that Congress could not prohibit slavery in the U.S. territories.

Despite emancipating his own slaves and giving pensions to those who were too old to work, Taney was outraged by Northern attacks on the institution, and sought to use his Dred Scott decision to permanently end the slavery debate.

His broad ruling deeply angered many Northerners and strengthened the anti-slavery Republican Party; its nominee Abraham Lincoln won the 1860 presidential election.

He continues to have a controversial historical reputation, and his Dred Scott ruling is widely considered to be the worst Supreme Court decision ever made.

[13] He freed the slaves that he inherited from his father early in his life, and as long as they lived, he provided monthly pensions to the older ones who were unable to work.

[14] He believed, however, that slavery was a problem to be resolved gradually and chiefly by the states in which it existed,[13] and, as a nationalist, blamed abolitionists for "ripping the country apart".

In one advisory opinion that he wrote for the president, Taney argued that the protections of the United States Constitution did not apply to free blacks; he would revisit this issue later in his career.

Taney reasoned that any other interpretation would prevent advancements in infrastructure, since the owners of other state charters would demand compensation in return for relinquishing implied monopoly rights.

Disgruntled creditors had demanded invalidation of the notes issued by Kentucky's Commonwealth Bank, created during the panic of 1819 to aid economic recovery.

In the 1839 case of Bank of Augusta v. Earle, Taney joined with seven other justices in voting to reverse a lower court decision that had barred out-of-state corporations from conducting business operations in the state of Alabama.

Suing under the 1845 act that extended admiralty jurisdiction to the Great Lakes, the owners of the Cuba alleged that the negligence of the Genesee Chief's crew caused the accident.

In the United States, the vast expanse of the Great Lakes and stretches of the continental rivers, extending for hundreds of miles, were not tidal; yet upon these waters large vessels could move, with burdens of passengers and cargo.

[42] As Congress was unable to settle the debate over slavery, some leaders from both the North and the South came to believe that only the Supreme Court could bring an end to the controversy.

[44] In 1846, Dred Scott, an enslaved African American man living in the slave state of Missouri, had filed suit against his master for his own freedom.

Scott argued that he had legally gained freedom in the 1830s, when he had resided with a previous master in both the free state of Illinois and a portion of the Louisiana Territory that banned slavery under the Missouri Compromise.

[45] In February 1857, a majority of the judges on the Court voted to deny Scott freedom simply because he had returned to Missouri, thereby reaffirming the precedent set in Strader.

[46] Along with newly elected President James Buchanan, who was aware of the broad outlines of the upcoming decision, Taney and his allies on the Court hoped that the Dred Scott case would permanently remove slavery as a subject of national debate.

[47] To avoid the appearance of sectional favoritism, Taney and his Southern colleagues sought to win the support of at least one Northern justice to the Court's decision.

Republicans like Abraham Lincoln rejected Taney's legal reasoning and argued that the Declaration of Independence showed that the Founding Fathers favored the protection of individual rights for all free men, regardless of race.

Union officials allowed Merryman access to his lawyers, who delivered a petition of habeas corpus to the federal circuit court for Maryland.

He later argued that the Constitution did in fact give the president the power to suspend the writ of habeas corpus saying “Now it is insisted that Congress, and not the Executive, is vested with this power; but the Constitution itself is silent as to which or who is to exercise the power; and as the provision was plainly made for a dangerous emergency, it can not be believed the framers of the instrument intended that in every case the danger should run its course until Congress could be called together, the very assembling of which might be prevented, as was intended in this case, by the rebellion.” Nonetheless, when Lincoln suspended habeas corpus at a far larger scale, he did so only after requesting that Congress authorize him to suspend the writ, which they did by passing the Habeas Corpus Suspension Act of 1863.

[61] An adverse Supreme Court decision would strike a major blow against Lincoln's prosecution of the war, since the blockade cut off the crucial Confederate cotton trade with European countries.

[62] The Court's majority opinion, written by Associate Justice Grier, upheld the seizures and ruled that the president had the authority to impose a blockade without a congressional declaration of war.

Taney joined a dissenting opinion written by Associate Justice Samuel Nelson, who argued that Lincoln had overstepped his authority by ordering a blockade without the express consent of Congress.

Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles spoke for many Northerners when he stated that the Dred Scott decision "forfeited respect for [Taney] as a man or a judge".

[72] In early 1865, the House of Representatives passed a bill to appropriate funds for a bust of Chief Justice Taney to be displayed in the Supreme Court alongside those of his four predecessors.

[73] In response, Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts said: I speak what cannot be denied when I declare that the opinion of the Chief Justice in the case of Dred Scott was more thoroughly abominable than anything of the kind in the history of courts.

If he had never done anything else that was high, heroic, and important, his noble vindication of the writ of habeas corpus, and of the dignity and authority of his office, against a rash minister of state, who, in the pride of a fancied executive power, came near to the commission of a great crime, will command the admiration and gratitude of every lover of constitutional liberty, so long as our institutions shall endure.

[79] Historian Daniel Walker Howe writes that "Taney's blend of state sovereignty, white racism, sympathy with commerce, and concern for social order was typical of Jacksonian jurisprudence.