James F. Simon - Lincoln and Chief Justice Taney: Slavery, Secession, and the President’s War Powers

P resident Abraham Lincoln and Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney bitterly disagreed on three fundamental issuesslavery, secession, and Lincolns constitutional authority during the Civil War. But had they known each other in less perilous times, they might have been friends, or at least respectful adversaries. In fact, they had much in common.

Lincoln and Taney were homely physical specimenstall, gaunt, slightly cadaverous figures, usually attired in drab, ill-fitting clothes. Each man believed in a divine design that guided him, though Lincoln shirked organized religion while Taney was a devout Catholic. Both men were known for their personal integrity, fairness, and compassion for those less fortunate than themselves. Self-effacing in public, they possessed an unrelenting will to succeed.

In their prime, Taney and Lincoln were among the best litigators in their respective states of Maryland and Illinois. Without flourish, Taney demonstrated the extraordinary ability to lay the facts and law of a case bare before a judge or jury. Lincoln often embroidered his major legal points with folksy stories, but he never lost sight of the argument that would win the case for his client.

Both men disapproved of the institution of slavery. As a young lawyer, Taney freed his slaves and pronounced slavery immoral in a Frederick, Maryland, courtroom. Since childhood, Lincoln had considered slavery wrong and never wavered in his conviction. Taney and Lincoln were actively involved in colonization societies whose purpose was to remove free blacks (including, they hoped, an increasing number of emancipated slaves) from the United States to be resettled in a self-governing colony in Africa. But as lawyers, they defended the property rights of slaveowners under state laws that protected slavery.

Taney and Lincoln agreed on the need for a strong Union. Each was active in state politics and was considered a moderate, though they followed national leaders with very different philosophies. Taney campaigned vigorously for the populist Democrat Andrew Jackson in 1828. Like Jackson, Taney was suspicious of vested corporate interests. After Jackson was elected president, he appointed Taney to be his Attorney General and, later, Secretary of the Treasury. Together, Jackson and Taney fought the Second Bank of the United States, which they believed symbolized autocratic corporate power. When Chief Justice John Marshall died, Taney was Jacksons choice to replace him.

Lincolns political hero, Kentuckys Henry Clay, challenged Jackson in his reelection bid for the presidency in 1832. The twenty-three-year-old Lincoln (who was a generation younger than Taney) supported Clays American System, which defended the Bank of the United States as essential to the economic prosperity of the country. After Clay lost the 1832 election, Lincoln served four terms in the Illinois legislature and became a successful Springfield lawyer. Throughout those years, he remained loyal to Clay, supporting him in two more losing efforts to win the presidency.

The issue of slavery did not dominate the national political debate during the 1840s, as it would the next decade. Taney and Lincoln took cautious public positions on slavery in the forties. As Chief Justice, Taney carefully steered the Court away from expansive decisions when slavery was an issue, insisting that the relevant state law governed. In his single term in the House of Representatives in the late forties, Lincoln did not take a leadership role on the slavery issue. His only initiative on the subject was to propose a referendum for the District of Columbia that abolished slavery, but enforced the Fugitive Slave Law and compensated slaveowners who freed their slaves. His compromise proposal did not satisfy either abolitionists or pro-slavery members of Congress and was never formally introduced.

During the 1850s, Taney and Lincoln moved to center stage in the increasingly rancorous national debate over slavery. In his Dred Scott opinion, Taney declared that the U.S. Constitution did not grant the black man any rights that the white man was bound to honor. Taney also held that Congress could not prohibit the spread of slavery in the western territories. Shortly after Taney announced the Courts Dred Scott decision in 1857, Lincoln attacked it as a warped judicial interpretation of the framers intent. Lincoln made his opposition to the Courts decision a major theme in his campaign for the Senate in 1858. In the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates, Lincoln denounced the Dred Scott decision and accused Douglas and Taney of being members of a pro-slavery national conspiracy.

In his presidential inaugural address in 1861, Lincoln insisted that the South had no legal right to secede. Chief Justice Taney disagreed. He not only believed that secession was legal, but also that a peaceful separation of North and South, with each section forming an independent republic, was preferable to civil war. Once eleven states in the South had seceded, Lincoln broadly interpreted his constitutional powers as commander in chief to prosecute the war. Chief Justice Taney vociferously dissented, accusing Lincoln of assuming dictatorial powers in violation of the Constitution.

This book will trace the long, sometimes tortuous journeys that brought Lincoln and Taney to their final judgments, and actions, on the issues that threatened the survival of the United States.

R oger Brooke Taney was born on St. Patricks Day, 1777, in a three-story white clapboard house set on the crest of a gentle hill overlooking the Patuxent River in southern Maryland. Taneys birthplace had served as home to five generations of Taneys, beginning with the first Michael Taney, who had immigrated from England in 1660. Michael I, as he was known in Taney family lore, initially worked the land as an indentured servant. After paying off his debt, he acquired a small plot of land and gradually expanded his holdings to several thousand acres. The land was fertile and particularly conducive to the growth of tobacco, which found an eager market in Great Britain. Michael I prospered, befriended other leaders in the colony, including Lord Baltimore, and was pleased to be referred to as Michael Taney, Gentleman.