As Maryland remembers the sesquicentennial of the Dred Scott decision Tuesday, historians recall several local connections to the landmark Supreme Court case that pushed the nation to the brink of Civil War.
Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney, who delivered his infamous pro-slavery opinion March 6, 1857, was related to Raphael Taney, a landowner and the namesake of Taneytown, a city of 5,400 in northwest Carroll County.
“Many people think that the town was named after Taney, the chief justice who issued the Dred Scott decision,” Carroll County Genealogical Society President Mimi Ashcraft said. “But it was his relative, Raphael.”
Taney, who was born in Calvert County and owned slaves, decided that slaves should not be considered citizens.
“A free negro of the African race, whose ancestors were brought to this country and sold as slaves, is not a ?citizen? within the meaning of the Constitution of the United States,” reads the opinion. “The only two clauses in the Constitution which point to this race treat them as persons whom it was morally lawful to deal in as articles of property and to hold as slaves ? The change in public opinion and feeling in relation to the African race, which has taken place since the adoption of the Constitution, cannot change its construction and meaning.”
Dred Scott was a slave who lived on free soil for a long time, according to The History Place, an online publication.
After his master?s death, Scott sued for his freedom in court, but seven of the nine Supreme Court Justices decided no slaves or their descendants could earn citizenship, “reversing the clock” on the fight for racial equality for the nation?s four million slaves. The court also ignored “the fact that black men in five of the original [13] states had been full voting citizens dating back to the Declaration of Independence in 1776,” according to The History Place.
As for Roger Brooke Taney, he died the day that Maryland abolished slavery.
