Roger B. Taney
Baltimore, Maryland

Roger B. Taney, Baltimore, Maryland, 1887
William Henry Rinehart
Bronze
89 x 50 x 64 in. (226.1 x 127 x 162.6 cm)
City of Baltimore, Maryland
Filed Under:
Roger B. Taney
Sponsor: William T. Walters (1820-1894)
Dedicated: 1887
Removed: 2017
Roger B. Taney (1777-1864) served as U.S. Attorney General, Secretary of the Treasury, and Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. His thirty-year career as a justice is rightly overshadowed by his decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford [sic] (1857), one of the Supreme Court’s most egregious rulings. Dred Scott (1799-1858) sued his enslaver John F. A. Sanford for emancipation on the grounds that because Sanford resided in a free state, Scott was entitled to his freedom. Ruling in favor of Sanford, Taney wrote that Black Americans, free or enslaved, were not citizens and “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” Going far beyond the parameters of the case at hand, he single-handedly redefined the concept of citizenship in America. This ruling also determined that the Missouri Compromise (1820), which prohibited slavery north of the Mason-Dixon line, was unconstitutional on the grounds that it interfered with the property rights of enslavers. Although Taney had sought to settle the “slavery question,” he instead exacerbated the issue. Along with the Fugitive Slave Act (1850), the Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854), and John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry (1859), the Dred Scott decision hastened the outbreak of the Civil War.
A Maryland native, Taney was a controversial figure during and after his lifetime. The Dred Scott decision was met with such deep and widespread condemnation that it is often credited with helping to get Lincoln elected. Gideon Welles, Secretary of the Navy, summed up popular sentiment when he said that the Dred Scott decision “forfeited respect for [Taney] as a man [and] a judge.” Tellingly, the government refused to install a bust of Taney in the U.S. Capitol, a gesture the Maryland state legislature took as a slight against one of their own and, in 1870, appropriated $15,000 in state funds to commission a statue. The monument was made by Baltimore artist William Henry Rinehart, who lived in Rome. It was erected in front of the statehouse in Annapolis in 1872. William T. Walters, a prominent industrialist, art collector, and Confederate sympathizer, commissioned a copy that was installed in Baltimore’s Mount Vernon Square Park in 1887. When local Democratic Party infighting hampered the planned schedule of speakers for the dedication ceremony, the event was scaled down to an unveiling by Taney’s nine-year-old great-grandson and three cheers for Walters (who was not in attendance).
Rinehart’s portrait of Taney is stern and imposing. Seated and wearing judicial robes, the figure holds a scroll in one hand and rests the other on a tome labeled the Constitution. Looking down upon the viewer, his aging face expresses the weight of his legacy. Throughout the statue’s life in the park, it was a target of vandalism. A 1960 article in The Evening Sun reminded readers that sitting in the statue’s lap or drawing a mustache on it would incur a fine of $100 (over $1,000 in 2024). The monument was removed in 2017 following the violence of the Unite the Right rally. The Annapolis statue was taken down two days later.
In the 1990s, state legislators had attempted to replace the Taney statue in Annapolis with one of the recently deceased Baltimore native Thurgood Marshall. Black delegates on the House Appropriations Committee, including Howard Rawlings, father of Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, future mayor of Baltimore, opposed the proposal, claiming that it would be divisive. Taney’s statue remained, but one of Marshall was installed in 1996. Additionally, a bust of Marshall is set to replace a bust of Taney in the U.S. Capitol that was removed in 2023.




































































































































































































































































































































































