“The Unjust Judge”: Roger B. Taney, the Slave Power, and the Meaning of Emancipation TIMOTHY S. HUEBNER On October 12, 1864, Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney died in his rented home in Washington, D.C. The death of the eighty-seven-year-old Maryland native, after he had served for twenty-eight years as Chief Justice of the nation’s highest court, prompted little grief or mourning on the part of the people of the Northern states. While some Northern Democratic news papers offered words of condolence and respect, Taney’s Republican opponents, who were much more numerous, were quick to portray his death as a cause for celebration. As soon as word came to Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner, he dashed off a letter to President Abraham Lincoln in which he noted, “Providence has given us a victory in the death of Chief Justice Taney. It is a victory for liberty and the Constitution.” In the days following, a Philadelphia newspaper noted, “The nation can feel little regret at his removal from an office which, in his hands, has been so promiscuously used.” Five months later, in a thorough article on the Chief Justice’s legacy, the Atlantic Monthly concluded that Taney was “essentially a partisan judge” and around the same time, in early 1865, an anonymous sixty-eight-page pamphlet was published, The Unjust Judge, that made the same point.1 As the nation was concluding a long and bloody civil war, Taney’s death in 1864 symbolized a constitutional revolution. The author of the Supreme Court’s infamous pro slavery decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), Taney embodied the so-called “Slave Power,” the concentrated political interest that had dominated Southern politics for a decade and led the Confederate states to attempt to secede. To mostNortherners, who had increas ingly come to accept emancipation as a Union war aim, the ChiefJustice’s death represented the passing of the antebellum pro-slavery Constitution, the coming defeat ofthe Confed eracy, and the possibility of the creation of a new post-warconstitutional order. As northern 250 JOURNAL OF SUPREME COURT HISTORY Republicans—particularly those of a radical bent—vilified Taney and what he represented, they looked forward not only to ending slavery but also to establishing new rights for African Americans. In doing so, white Republicans responded to the ongoing cause of Northern African-American activists, who, before and during the war, had criticized Taney for advocating the rights of slaveholders in Dred Scott and had instead sought to advance the rights of enslaved and newly freed African Americans. Taney’s post-war image as one of the greatvillains ofAmerican history thus took shape in the midst ofa revolutionary transfor mation in the American understanding of rights.2 Taney’s poor reputation at the time ofhis passing stood in stark contrast to his own reputation just ten years before, during the mid-1850s. Although he had been a contro versial nominee to the Court in 1836, viewed as someone likely to carry out the political agenda of his mentor and nominator, Presi dent Andrew Jackson, Taney soon earned a reputation as a moderate, fair, and “non doctrinaire” ChiefJustice.3 Under his leader ship, between the late 1830s and mid-1850s the Court issued a series of landmark decisions in the areas of contracts, admiralty law, and commerce. His opinion in Charles River Bridge v. Warren Bridge (1837) rejected the notion that a state-issued corpo rate charter contained an implied monopoly, thus spurring technological progress and economic development throughout the coun try. His decision in Genesee Chiefv. Fitzhugh (1851) established that all public navigable waters came within the admiralty and mari time jurisdiction of the federal courts, thus expanding the reach of the federal courts at a time when steamboat traffic surged. His Court’s decisions on the Commerce Clause reflected a pragmatic approach, embodied in the decision in Cooley v. Board of Wardens (1852) that areas requiring national uniformi ty would be the exclusive domain of Congress, while other matters of commercial regulations would be the purview of the states. In each of these opinions, Taney displayed a keen understanding of the larger circumstances surrounding the legal issues, as...