Ferebacher barf alert. Chief Justice Taney's jurisprudence needs no rehabilitation. His decision was the correct one. Personally, Justice Taney considered slavery wrong, and had freed his slaves by 1827. Taney was also the first justice to wear long pants under his robe.
And this is what Chief Justice Rhequist had to say about Chief Justice Taney,
Today, when historians and legal scholars speak of the greatest Justices ever to have served on the Supreme Court of the United States, Chief Justice Taney usually makes the list. I think I would have to agree with that assessment.
Don E. Fehrenbacher
"Chief Justice Taney's jurisprudence needs no rehabilitation. His decision was the correct one."
I was wrong. Dred Scott hasn't been universally condemned. 4ConservativeJustices has spoken.
"Personally, Justice Taney considered slavery wrong, and had freed his slaves by 1827."
"The strong feeling that governed [Taney] were no doubt a mixture. Love for the South and pride in his own southern heritage mingled with emotions of a negative sort. One finds, to be sure, no evidence of the suppressed moral anxiety that some scholars have discovered as the eruptive source of mounting southern hysteria. The study of Taney's character and behavior con tributes nothing to the "guilt thesis." On the other hand, his private letters do lend support to recent emphasis on southern fears, especially the fear of slave uprisings. Indeed, by the late 1850's Taney had plainly been caught up in a pattern of reciprocating apprehension that C. Vann Woodward calls "paranoia" and "counterparanoia."
"Besides fear, the was indignation. The counterpart of Taney's love for the South was his growing hostility to its northern critic. He liked to single out Massachusetts, once home of African slave traders, but now the center of abolitionism, as the epitome of northern selfishness and hypocrisy. Taney, above all in the late 1850's, was fiercely anti-antislavery. We must not be misled by his physical weakness or gentle mien. Wrath, says an ancient Greek poet, is the last thing in a man to grown old. The Dred Scott opinion, defensive in substance, but aggressive in temper, was the work of an angry southern gentleman.
"From a study of Taney's private emotional responses to the sectional controversy, one can learn something about the coming of the Civil War. Like the chief Justice, a majority of southerners had no significant economic stake in the institution of slavery, but they did have a vital stake in preservation of the southern social order and of southern self-respect. In the end, it may have been the assault on their self-respect - the very language of the antislavery crusade - that drove many southerns over the edge.... With increasing frequency and bitterness in the years that followed, southerner protested that they were being degraded by northern sanctimony. Taney's Dred Scott decision ... is a document of great revelatory value. In the very unreasonableness of its arguments one finds a measure of southern desperation." (Pg 560-561, deleting comments concerning Justice Daniel)
"At the same time, one must put aside the curious notion that Taney was at heart an antislavery man - a notion that has a long history and retains surprising vitality. The Cincinnati Enquirer in 1857, condemning abusive attacks on the Chief Justice [for his "dreadful" decision], declared, "Mr. Taney, personally, is opposed to slavery in principle and practice.' Frank H. Hodder agreed in 1929. 'Taney,' he wrote, 'was opposed to slavery .... The position he took in the Dred Scott case was the result of a mistaken sense of duty and not of any partiality for slavery.' Charles W. Smith, Jr., asserted in 1936 that Taney, like Jefferson, 'believed slavery wrong and favored gradual emancipation.' According to Walker lewis, in his 1965 biography, 'Slavery violated his conscience. His opposition to abolition was not because he wished to perpetuate slavery but because he believed the abolitionist misguided.' In 1971, Robert M. Spector said of Taney: 'From the standpoint of morality he hated slavery as much as any abolitionist.' This legend of the antislavery Taney rest almost entirely upon two actions taken nearly forty years before the Dred Scott decision. In 1818, he served as a defense attorney for an abolitionist minister and in the process denounced slavery as an evil that must be 'gradually wiped away.' Beginning the same year, Taney emancipated his own slaves to the number of at least weight. Whatever moral conviction may have encouraged these actions, it does not appear again in his public record or his private correspondence. His attitude on the bench was consistently and solicitously proslavery. By 1857 he had become as fanatical in his determination to protect the institution [of slavery] as Garrison was in his determination to destroy it."
Fehrenbacher, The Dred Scott Case, pg 560