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Updated: May 26, 2025
The suppression of the Great Rebellion brought an enormous increase in the national power and in the popular will to national power. State rights did not loom large in the popular or the legislative mind in reconstruction days. Taney was dead.
The popular acquiescence being thus invoked by the Presidential voice and example, the court announced its decision two days afterwards March 6, 1857. The essential character of the transaction impressed itself upon the very form of the judgment, if indeed it may be called at all by that name. Chief-Justice Taney read the opinion of the court.
The Dred Scott judgment would thus appear to show the penetrating power at that time of an altogether fantastic opinion. The hope, which Taney is known to have entertained, that his judgment would compose excited public opinion, was by no means fulfilled. It raised fierce excitement.
The presidential election of 1836 had fulfilled his wish that Van Buren should be his successor. In January, 1837, the resolution of censure was solemnly expunged from the records of the Senate. That body being now controlled by his friends, and his enemy, John Marshall, being dead, he named Taney Chief Justice, and the nomination was confirmed.
On the return trip Taney became communicative, and told the story of the eighth of May, that terrible day in Wall Street when billions melted away like butter, when thousands of persons were tossed about in the whirlpool of the Stock Exchange, when the very foundations of economic life seemed to be slipping away.
So distinctly were his words heard that he was cheered at the closing of every sentiment, particularly where he said that he would carry out the pledge that he had made, that under no circumstances would he run for another term. Just before the close of the inaugural he turned to Chief Justice Taney, who held the Bible, and in a clear and distinct voice repeated the oath required.
The South defended the decision with heat, the North protested against it with indignation, and the controversy was greatly intensified by a phrase in the opinion of Chief Justice Taney, that at the time of the Declaration of Independence negroes were considered by general public opinion to be so far inferior "that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect."
Before Marshall died slavery had become a burning issue, and the slave-owners controlled the appointing power. General Jackson appointed Taney to sustain the expansion of slavery, and when the anti-slavery party carried the country with Lincoln, Lincoln supplanted Taney with Chase, in order that Chase might stand by him in his struggle to destroy slavery. And as it has been, so must it always be.
If a State court may do this, on a question involving the liberty of a human being, what protection do the laws afford? "Life of Taney," pp. 383-4.
The sudden death of Chief-Justice Taney, too, happening, by a strange coincidence, simultaneously with the triumph of the Union Party of Maryland in carrying the new Constitution of that State, which prohibited Slavery within her borders, seemed to have a significance* not without its effect upon the public mind, now fast settling down to the belief that Slavery everywhere upon the soil of the United States must die.
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