Posted on 10/16/2014 9:05:49 PM PDT by iowamark
On Oct. 12, 1864, President Abraham Lincoln must have breathed a bit easier.
Not because the war was over — it would last another six months. Not because he had been re-elected — the election remained nearly a month away. And not because Gen. William T. Sherman had begun his decisive march through Georgia — the general was still holding Atlanta. While much remained unsettled, Lincoln’s achievements as president seemed more secure that autumn day because the president learned that his old nemesis Roger B. Taney, the Maryland-born chief justice of the Supreme Court, had died.
Ever since Taney had handed down the Supreme Court’s decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford in 1857, he and Lincoln had been bitter rivals. Taney was a well-known defender of slavery, a bias he showed most famously in that case, when the court attempted to resolve, once and for all, the contentious issue of slavery in federal territories. Taney and six other justices had done so by ruling squarely on the side of slaveholders; according to Taney, slaveholding was a constitutional right, one with which neither Congress nor a territorial legislature could interfere.
Lincoln, who by then had served in Congress but was now back in Illinois, working as a politically active lawyer, disagreed strongly with the decision, and his opposition to Dred Scott fueled his political rise in the North. When he ran for Congress the next year, he debated the matter fiercely with his Democratic opponent, Stephen Douglas. Lincoln strongly implied that Taney, Douglas and other leaders had conspired to spread slavery throughout the land. And in 1860, Lincoln ran on a Republican Party platform that denounced the Dred Scott ruling as “a dangerous political heresy.”...
(Excerpt) Read more at opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com ...
Oh, and Justice Taney was memorialized in Frederick. The foreigners from DC put up a stink and tried to get the bust removed.
Of course, most of them are damn liberals, not to mention invaders taking over a great area and fundamentally changing it.
I would say it is more Lan kisster.
Just as lots of us do not like Lincoln. Must have missed those threads.
Thanks
There’s more emphasis on the k than on the n around here. But.....different strokes...
The 2 cities are CONTINENTS APART.
Lank-uster around here.
There used to be a USCGC called the Taney.
My husband is from cental PA and gets after me all the time. Been around there my share, and that’s the way I hear it, including last year when we actually had a mini vaca there and can hear the locals....(basically, I’d also say the first syllable is emphasized, whereas everyone else like myself emphasizes the first 2)
That is in the Baltimore harbor.
Still commissioned? Retired?
NY is not across the Atlantic. ;-)
It’s part of the maritime museum, so I guess retired!
True. You threw Lancaster, England into the mix...and the Night Bomber.
But Lancaster, NY and Lancaster, CA both pronounce it wrong.
Bye.
Yeah, especially since Taney himself pronounced it Taw-nee.
Interesting on how every single one of Taney's biographers managed to miss that incident in all their books about the Chief Justice.
“Tawny” in a mid-Atlantic accent (TAH-nee) might sound an awful lot like “tiny” to a fair number of native southerners (TAH-nee as well), so it could all be a matter of perception of the same pronunciation.
Because Taney was Andrew Jackson's Secretary of the Treasury 1833-34.
“No Chief Justice to date has come anywhere close to unseating John Marshall (1755-1835) as the greatest and most influential CJ ever on SCOTUS “
John Marshall’s cousin was Thomas Jefferson and they hated each other with a passion.
It us also reasonable to note that in the Dred Scott opinion Taney distorted history and flat-out lied about a number of things. As was pointed out in the dissents.
The DS decision had a great deal in common with the Roe v Wade decision.
In both cases, the Supremes decided to impose their own moral values on the nation to shortcut a political process that wasn’t reaching the results they thought it should. So they just invented stuff as being in the Constitution that simply isn’t there.
The Constitution says nothing whatsoever about color. But Taney saw penumbras and emanations in it that meant people of color were not and could never become citizens of the United States.
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