Showdown by Wil Haygood

Author:Wil Haygood [Haygood, Wil]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-385-35316-8
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2015-09-15T04:00:00+00:00

IT WAS NOT LOST on Senator Tydings that the best-known Supreme Court justice from Maryland—home state of Marshall and Tydings—was Roger B. Taney. Taney hailed from a family of well-to-do tobacco farmers. He would come to marry Anne Key. Her brother Francis Scott Key wrote “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Taney was respected as a Maryland legislator, rising to be elected state attorney general. That led to appointment as attorney general of the United States. President Andrew Jackson eventually appointed Taney chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. It was Chief Justice Taney who wrote the 1857 Dred Scott decision, a devastating blow that all but reminded Negroes they had no place in the land of the free. Dred Scott, born in Virginia, was a slave who had once been freed by his master. Crisscrossing in and out of slave state and free state, Scott felt sure of his eternal freedom. The established law in Missouri had been “once free, always free.” But the Missouri Supreme Court upended that tenet and ruled, in 1852, that Scott be returned to slavery. Scott’s lawyers sued, and the case landed in the lap of the U.S. Supreme Court. Chief Justice Taney wrote the court’s majority opinion. The court ruled that Negroes were not citizens and thus had no right to sue for their freedom. Anger ensued in the aftermath of the decision, yet another flame on the path to the cannon fire that landed at Fort Sumter.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.