A CREW came for Roger Taney in the dark on the morning of August 18th, lifting his statue off its pedestal on the lawn of Maryland’s state house and moving it to a location that has not yet been revealed. Taney was the second son of a slave-holding tobacco planter from Calvert County, Maryland. He read law, “twelve hours in the twenty-four”, he said. He got in to politics and, nominated by Andrew Jackson, became chief justice of the United States in 1836. His wasn’t quite like the other statues around the South. Taney did not defect to the Confederacy. He stayed on the Supreme Court, a staunch opponent to Abraham Lincoln, until his death in 1864. Maryland’s legislature approved the statue in 1872, before the Confederate memorials that arrived with Jim Crow and the civil rights eras. Your blogger, too, comes from Maryland and before this year, he did not believe that the Taney monument should come down. He was wrong.
Roger Taney did one terrible thing. In 1857 he not only sided with but wrote the majority opinion on the...Continue reading
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