Marshall had dominated the Court during his 35 years of service, and his opinion in
Marbury v. Madison had helped establish the federal courts as a co-equal branch of government. To the dismay of
states' rights advocates, the
Marshall Court's rulings in cases such as
McCulloch v. Maryland had upheld the power of federal law and institutions over state governments. Many Whigs believed that Taney was a "political hack" and worried about the direction in which he would take the Supreme Court. One of Marshall's key allies, Associate Justice
Joseph Story, remained on the Court when Taney took office, but Jackson appointees made up a majority of the Court. Though Taney would preside over a jurisprudential shift toward states' rights, the Taney Court did not reject broad federal authority to the degree that many Whigs initially feared.
1836–1844 Charles River Bridge v. Warren Bridge presented one of the first major cases of the Taney Court. In 1785, the legislature of Massachusetts had chartered a company to build the Charles River Bridge on the
Charles River. In 1828, the state legislature chartered a second company to build a second bridge, the Warren Bridge, just 100 yards away from the Charles River Bridge. The owners of the Charles River Bridge sued, arguing that their charter had given them a monopoly on the operation of bridges in that area of the Charles River. The attorney for the Charles River Bridge, Daniel Webster, argued that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts had violated the
Commerce Clause by disregarding the monopoly that the commonwealth had granted to his client. The attorney for Massachusetts,
Simon Greenleaf, challenged Webster's interpretation of the charter, noting that the charter did not explicitly grant a monopoly to the proprietors of the Charles River Bridge. In his majority opinion, Taney ruled that the charter did not grant a monopoly to the Charles River Bridge. He held that, while the Contract Clause prevents state legislatures from violating the express provisions of a contract, the Court would interpret a contract provision narrowly when it conflicted with the general welfare of the state. Taney reasoned that any other interpretation would prevent advancements in infrastructure, since the owners of other state charters would demand compensation in return for relinquishing implied monopoly rights. In
Mayor of the City of New York v. Miln (1837), the plaintiffs challenged a New York statute that required masters of incoming ships to report information on all passengers they brought into the country--
e.g., age, health, last legal residence. The question before the Taney court was whether or not the state statute undercut Congress's authority to regulate commerce; or was it a police measure, as New York claimed, fully within the authority of the state. Taney and his colleagues sought to devise a more nuanced means of accommodating competing federal and state claims of regulatory power. The Court ruled in favor of New York, holding that the statute did not assume to regulate commerce between the port of New York and foreign ports and because the statute was passed in the exercise of a police power which rightfully belonged to the states. In
Briscoe v. Commonwealth Bank of Kentucky (1837), the third critical ruling of Taney's debut term, the Chief Justice confronted the banking system, in particular state banking. Disgruntled creditors had demanded invalidation of the notes issued by Kentucky's Commonwealth Bank, created during the panic of 1819 to aid economic recovery. The institution had been backed by the credit of the state treasury and the value of unsold public lands, and by every usual measure, its notes were bills of credit of the sort prohibited by the federal Constitution.
Briscoe manifested this change in the field of banking and currency in the first full term of the court's new chief justice. Article I, section 10 of the Constitution prohibited states from using bills of credit, but the precise meaning of a bill of credit remained unclear. In
Craig v. Missouri (1830), the
Marshall Court had held, by a vote of 4 to 3, that state interest-bearing loan certificates were unconstitutional. However, in the
Briscoe case, the Court upheld the issuance of circulating notes by a state-chartered bank even when the Bank's stock, funds, and profits belonged to the state, and where the officers and directors were appointed by the state legislature. The Court narrowly defined a bill of credit as a note issued by the state, on the faith of the state, and designed to circulate as money. Since the notes in question were redeemable by the bank and not by the state itself, they were not bills of credit for constitutional purposes. By validating the constitutionality of state bank notes, the Supreme Court completed the financial revolution triggered by
President Andrew Jackson's refusal to recharter the
Second Bank of the United States and opened the door to greater state control of banking and currency in the antebellum period. In the 1839 case of
Bank of Augusta v. Earle, Taney joined with seven other justices in voting to reverse a lower court decision that had barred out-of-state corporations from conducting business operations in the state of Alabama. Taney's majority opinion held that out-of-state corporations could do business in Alabama (or any other state) so long as the state legislature did not pass a law explicitly prohibiting such operations. In
Prigg v. Pennsylvania (1842), the Taney Court agreed to hear a case regarding slavery, slaves, slave owners, and states' rights. It held that the Constitutional prohibition against state laws that would emancipate any "person held to service or labor in [another] state" barred Pennsylvania from punishing a Maryland man who had seized a former slave and her child and had taken them back to Maryland without seeking an order from the Pennsylvania courts permitting the abduction. In his opinion for the Court, Justice
Joseph Story held not only that states were barred from interfering with enforcement of federal fugitive slave laws, but that they also were barred from assisting in enforcing those laws.
1845–1856 In the 1847
License Cases, Taney developed the concept of
police power. He wrote that "whether a state passes a quarantine law, or a law to punish offenses, or to establish courts of justice ... in every case it exercises the same power; that is to say, the power of sovereignty, the power to govern men and things within the limits of its dominion." This broad conception of state power helped to provide a constitutional justification for state governments to take on new responsibilities, such as the construction of
internal improvements and the establishment of public schools. Taney's majority opinion in
Luther v. Borden (1849) provided an important rationale for limiting federal judicial power. The Court considered its own authority to issue rulings on matters deemed to be political in nature. Martin Luther, a
Dorrite shoemaker, brought suit against Luther Borden, a state militiaman because Luther's house had been ransacked. Luther based his case on the claim that the Dorr government was the legitimate government of Rhode Island, and that Borden's violation of his home constituted a private act lacking legal authority. The circuit court, rejecting this contention, held that no trespass had been committed, and the Supreme Court, in 1849, affirmed. The decision provides the distinction between political questions and justiciable ones. The majority opinion interpreted the
Guarantee Clause of the Constitution, Article IV, Section 4. Taney held that under this article Congress is able to decide what government is established in each state. This decision was important as an example of judicial self-restraint. Many Democrats had hoped that the justices would legitimize the actions of the Rhode Island reformers.
Genesee Chief v. Fitzhugh (1852) dealt with the issue of admiralty jurisdiction. This case concerned an 1847 maritime collision on
Lake Ontario in which the ''Genesee Chief's
propeller struck and sank the schooner Cuba
. Suing under the 1845 act that extended admiralty jurisdiction to the Great Lakes, the owners of the Cuba
alleged that the negligence of the Genesee Chief's
crew caused the accident. Counsel for the Genesee Chief
blamed the Cuba'' and contended that the incident occurred within New York's waters, outside the reach of federal jurisdiction. The key constitutional question was whether the case properly belonged in the federal courts—specifically, whether
admiralty jurisdiction extended to the great freshwater lakes. In England, only tidal rivers had been navigable; hence, in English Law, the Admiralty Courts, which had been given jurisdiction over navigable waters, found their jurisdiction limited to places which felt the effect of the tides of the sea. In the United States, the vast expanse of the Great Lakes and stretches of the continental rivers, extending for hundreds of miles, were not tidal; yet upon these waters large vessels could move, with burdens of passengers and cargo. Taney ruled that the admiralty jurisdiction of the US Courts extends to waters which are actually navigable, without regard to the flow of the ocean tides. Taney's majority opinion established a broad new definition of federal admiralty jurisdiction. According to Taney, the 1845 act fell within Congress's power to control the jurisdiction of the federal courts. "If this law, therefore, is constitutional, it must be supported on the ground that the lakes and navigable waters connecting them are within the scope of admiralty and maritime jurisdiction, as known and understood in the United States when the Constitution was adopted." The United States increasingly polarized along sectional lines during the 1850s, with slavery acting as the central source of sectional tension. Taney wrote the majority opinion in the 1851 case of
Strader v. Graham, in which the Court held that slaves from Kentucky who had conducted a musical performance in the free state of Ohio remained slaves because they had voluntarily returned to Kentucky. Taney's narrowly constructed opinion was joined by both pro-slavery and anti-slavery justices on the Court. While the Court avoided splitting over the issue of slavery, debates over the status of slavery in the
territories, as well as the
Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, continued to roil the nation.
Dred Scott decision As Congress was unable to settle the debate over slavery, some leaders from both the North and the South came to believe that only the Supreme Court could bring an end to the controversy. The
Compromise of 1850 contained provisions to expedite appeals regarding slavery in the territories to the Supreme Court, but no suitable case arose until
Dred Scott v. Sandford reached the Supreme Court in 1856. In 1846,
Dred Scott, an enslaved African American man living in the slave state of Missouri, had filed suit against his master for his own freedom. Scott argued that he had legally gained freedom in the 1830s, when he had resided with a previous master in both the free state of Illinois and a portion of the
Louisiana Territory that banned slavery under the
Missouri Compromise. Scott prevailed in a state trial court, but that ruling was reversed by the Missouri Supreme Court. After a series of legal maneuvers, the case finally made its way to the Supreme Court in 1856. Although the case concerned the explosive issue of slavery, it initially received relatively little attention from the press and from the justices themselves. In February 1857, a majority of the judges on the Court voted to deny Scott freedom simply because he had returned to Missouri, thereby reaffirming the precedent set in
Strader. However, after two of the Northern justices objected to the decision, Taney and his four Southern colleagues decided to write a much broader decision that would bar federal regulation of slavery in the territories. Like the other Southerners on the Court, Taney was outraged over what he saw as "Northern aggression" towards slavery, an institution that he believed was critical to "Southern life and values". The Court's majority opinion, written by Taney, was given on March 6, 1857. He first held that no African American, free or enslaved, had ever enjoyed the rights of a citizen under the Constitution. He argued that, for more than a century leading up to the ratification of the Constitution, blacks had been "regarded as beings of an inferior order, altogether unfit to associate with the white race ... and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect". To bolster the argument that blacks were widely regarded as legally inferior when the Constitution was adopted, Taney pointed to various state laws, but ignored the fact that five states had allowed blacks to vote in 1788. He next declared that the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional, and that the Constitution did not grant Congress the power to bar slavery in the territories. Taney argued that the federal government served as a "trustee" to the people of the territory and could not deprive the right of slaveowners to take slaves into the territories. Only the states, Taney asserted, could bar slavery. Finally, he held that Scott remained a slave. The
Dred Scott opinion received strong criticism in the North, and Associate Justice
Benjamin Robbins Curtis resigned in protest. Rather than removing slavery as an issue, it bolstered the popularity of the anti-slavery
Republican Party. Republicans like
Abraham Lincoln rejected Taney's legal reasoning and argued that the
Declaration of Independence showed that the
Founding Fathers favored the protection of individual rights for all free men, regardless of race. Many Republicans accused Taney of being part of a conspiracy to legalize slavery throughout the United States.
American Civil War Republican nominee Abraham Lincoln won the
1860 presidential election, defeating Taney's preferred candidate,
John C. Breckinridge. Several Southern states seceded in response to Lincoln's election and formed the
Confederate States of America; the
American Civil War began in April 1861 with the
Battle of Fort Sumter. Unlike Associate Justice
John Archibald Campbell, Taney (whose home state of Maryland remained in the Union) did not resign from the Court to join the Confederacy, but he believed that the Southern states had the constitutional right to secede, and he blamed Lincoln for starting the war. From his position on the Court, Taney challenged Lincoln's more expansive view of presidential and federal power during the Civil War. He did not get the opportunity to rule against the constitutionality of the
Emancipation Proclamation, the
Legal Tender Act, or the
Enrollment Act, but he did preside over two important Civil War cases. After secessionists destroyed important bridges and telegraph lines in the
border state of Maryland, Lincoln suspended the writ of
habeas corpus in much of the state. That suspension allowed military officials to arrest and imprison suspected secessionists for an indefinite period and without a judicial hearing. After the
Baltimore riot of 1861, Union officials arrested state legislator
John Merryman, whom they suspected of having destroyed Union infrastructure. Union officials allowed Merryman access to his lawyers, who delivered a petition of habeas corpus to the federal
circuit court for Maryland. In his role as the head of that circuit court, Taney presided over the case of
Ex parte Merryman. Taney held that only Congress had the power to suspend the writ of habeas corpus, and, according to legal scholar James F. Simon, he ordered the release of Merryman. Ultimately however, Taney's final order in
Merryman never actually ordered Cadwalader (the actual defendant), the Army, Lincoln or his administration, or anyone else to release John Merryman. Lincoln invoked
nonacquiescence in response to Taney's order as well as subsequent Taney orders. On July 4, 1861, in a message to Congress, he argued that the Constitution did in fact give the president the power to suspend the writ of habeas corpus, saying, "Now it is insisted that Congress, and not the Executive, is vested with this power. But the Constitution itself, is silent as to which, or who, is to exercise the power; and as the provision was plainly made for a dangerous emergency, it cannot be believed the framers of the instrument intended, that in every case, the danger should run its course, until Congress could be called together; the very assembling of which might be prevented, as was intended in this case, by the rebellion." Nonetheless, when Lincoln suspended habeas corpus on a far larger scale, he did so only after requesting that Congress authorize him to suspend the writ, which it did by passing the
Habeas Corpus Suspension Act of 1863. In 1863, the Supreme Court heard the
Prize Cases, which arose after Union ships
blockading the Confederacy seized ships that conducted trade with Confederate ports. An adverse Supreme Court decision would strike a major blow against Lincoln's prosecution of the war, since the blockade cut off the crucial Confederate cotton trade with European countries. The Court's majority opinion, written by Associate Justice Grier, upheld the seizures and ruled that the president had the authority to impose a blockade without a congressional declaration of war. Taney joined a dissenting opinion written by Associate Justice
Samuel Nelson, who argued that Lincoln had overstepped his authority by ordering a blockade without the express consent of Congress. ==Death==