Taney’s racist jurisprudence protected slaveholder property interests above all

Evidence

Chief Justice Roger B. Taney issued the stingingly controversial majority opinion. A steadfast Jacksonian Democrat from Maryland who had emancipated his captives long ago, he had made a career out of defending the property rights of slaveholders, his right to emancipate, and his friends’ rights to enslave. About to turn eighty years old, Taney refused to bury slavery (as it turned out, Taney died the day Maryland abolished slavery in 1864). When he finished his fifty-five-page majority opinion, Taney hoped that Blacks, Free Soilers, and abolitionists would have no constitutional life to fortify their freedom fights against slaveholders. Since Black people had been excluded from the American political community when the nation was founded, the United States could not now extend them rights, Taney reasoned. “They had for more than a century been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations, and so far unfit that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 542

Categorization

• XREF: Taney’s reasoning prefigures the Segregationist stance Kendi associates with southern slaveholding; his selective use of original intent matches the ideology-justifies-self-interest pattern.