Free Republic

President Biden signed a bill on Tuesday that removes the bust of former Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney, who authored the court’s Dred Scott decision, from the Capitol Building. The bill, which passed the House and Senate by voice vote earlier this month, also directs the bust to be replaced with one of Thurgood Marshall, the first Black Supreme Court justice who was known for his civil rights work. Democrats had pushed for the removal for multiple years. The House previously passed a bill to remove Taney’s bust in a 285-120 vote in June 2021, but the Senate did...

As a work of presidential prose, James Buchanan’s inaugural address on March 4, 1857, is widely considered one of the most forgettable ever given by an American leader. As The New York Times put it dryly at the time: “Little if any impression has been made by the inaugural.” Still, it would not take long for Buchanan’s unimpressive inauguration to become one of the most significant in history. For one thing, it was the first to be photographed. It was also the first inaugural given after the creation of the Republican Party, the last before secession and ultimately the last...

Under the cover of night, a work crew removed the statue of former Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger B. Taney — author of the infamous Dred Scott decision — from the grounds of the State House, ending the monument’s 145-year prominent perch in Annapolis. At 12:20 a.m. Friday, flatbed trucks with equipment including a large crane pulled onto the street encircling the State House. Workers cordoned off the front lawn of the historic building and placed straps around the statue, the latest monument linked to the Confederate era to be removed from a public square. Just before 2 a.m., the...

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...

It is little wonder that early Democrats garnered such popular support and would demand Andrew Jackson end America’s experiment with central banking. Jackson called it “dangerous to the liberty of the American people because it represented a fantastic centralization of economic and political power under private control.” It’s hard to believe that guy who said that is now on the $20 bill. Jackson also warned that the Bank of the United States was “a vast electioneering engine” that could “control the Government and change its character.” These sentiments were echoed by Roger Taney, Jackson’s Treasury Secretary, who talked of the...

The framers of the United States Constitution believed that people of African descent “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect,” and that “the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit…. [to be] bought and sold and treated as an ordinary article of merchandise and traffic, whenever profit could be made by it.” With reference to the words “all men are created equal” in the Declaration of Independence: “It is too clear for dispute that the enslaved African race was not intended to be included, and formed no part of the people...

INDULGE me in a momentary historical fantasy. Suppose that Roger Brooke Taney had not gone down in American history as the principal author of what is now almost universally acknowledged as the worst decision in the history of American jurisprudence, Dred Scott vs. Sandford in 1857. Suppose the country had been shaped in the image of Chief Justice Taney's decision, which decreed that slaves could be carried anywhere in the union, and that Negroes could not be citizens under the Constitution, for they were ""regarded as being of an inferior order and altogether unfit to associate with the white race...