Got this from an ATM this morning. Two months after the Supreme Court ruled in the infamous "Dred Scott v. Sanford" case, Mr Scott was emancipated by his original owners, the Blow family, on May 26, 1857. Cool date IMO
Nice.. And.. President Andrew Jackson appointed Roger B. Taney (pronounced Tawney). During his tenure as Chief Justice, Taney upheld strong national power, but with some modifications. Taney endorsed what is known as “dual sovereignty,” which implies that State and federal governments are “foreign” to each other; each is sovereign in its own right. By 1857, Taney presided over a Court that had expanded to nine justices and was divided—four Northerners and five Southerners, including Taney, sat on the bench.
Taney was a southerner of course, but from Maryland - a border state. Maryland was a very very divided state during the Civil War.
I grew up in Rockville, Maryland which is a mere 15 miles northwest of Washington, DC. In the early 1970's I still remember seeing the remains of the slave quarters that were part of two of the four major plantations surrounding the town. Some families had divided loyalties between the North and the South. Chris
Here is an interesting, 'what if' and R.B. Taney. In early 1861, before the fighting broke out there were all kinds of legal and political maneuverings to keep the Union intact. There was talk of submitting to the Supreme Court the matter of legal secession, that is might a state legally secede from the Union. Events moved too fast for the court to weigh in on the matter but given Taney's position on federal versus state power and the wording of the Tenth Amendment a Taney dominated court might have rendered the opinion that secession was lawful with the result that all that Confederate currency being collected today might be as valuable as the US currency from that time period. By the way I have a Charleston, SC bank note dated 4/13/1861. I have always wondered if the president and cashier who signed that note could hear the booming, feel the tremors of Southern artillery as it unloaded on Sumter out in the harbor that very day.
There were a lot of divisions there, of course the support that JW Booth got after Lincoln's assassination and his travels through the Waldorf-Brandywine area are testament to that.
