Roger B. Taney

Roger Brooke Taney was born on March 17, 1777, into a wealthy, slaveholding Maryland family, and died on October 12, 1864, having served as the fifth chief justice of the United States from 1836 until his death. Before joining the Court, as a Jacksonian Democrat he served as attorney general of Maryland, then as United States attorney general and briefly as secretary of the treasury under President Andrew Jackson, becoming the first Catholic to sit on the Supreme Court when Jackson elevated him to succeed the late John Marshall. He is remembered above all for the Courts 1857 ruling in Dred Scott v. Sandford, in which he wrote that African Americans could not be United States citizens and that Congress could not prohibit slavery in the territories, a decision that inflamed sectional tensions, strengthened the antislavery Republican Party and is widely regarded as the worst in the Supreme Courts history. During the Civil War he clashed with President Lincoln, ruling in Ex parte Merryman that the president could not unilaterally suspend the writ of habeas corpus, a ruling Lincolns administration declined to follow.