Lincoln and Chief Justice Taney: Slavery, Secession and the President's War Powers

President Abraham Lincoln and Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney bitterly disagreed on three fundamental issues -- slavery, secession, and Lincoln's constitutional authority during the Civil War. But had they known each other in less perilous times, they might have been friends, or at least respectful adversaries. In fact, they had much in common.

Lincoln and Taney were homely physical specimens -- tall, gaunt, slightly cadaverous figures, usually attired in drab, ill-fitting clothes. Each man believed in a divine design that guided him, though Lincoln shirked organized religion while Taney was a devout Catholic. Both men were known for their personal integrity, fairness, and compassion for those less fortunate than themselves. Self-effacing in public, they possessed an unrelenting will to succeed.

In their prime, Taney and Lincoln were among the best litigators in their respective states of Maryland and Illinois. Without flourish, Taney demonstrated the extraordinary ability to lay the facts and law of a case bare before a judge or jury. Lincoln often embroidered his major legal points with folksy stories, but he never lost sight of the argument that would win the case for his client.

Both men disapproved of the institution of slavery. As a young lawyer, Taney freed his slaves and pronounced slavery immoral in a Frederick, Maryland, courtroom. Since childhood, Lincoln had considered slavery wrong and never wavered in his conviction. Taney and Lincoln were actively involved in colonization societies whose purpose was to remove free blacks (including, they hoped, an increasing number of emancipated slaves) from the United States to be resettled in a self-governing colony in Africa. But as lawyers, they defended the property rights of slaveowners under state laws that protected slavery.

Taney and Lincoln agreed on the need for a strong Union. Each was active in state politics and was considered a moderate, though they followed national leaders with very different philosophies. Taney campaigned vigorously for the populist Democrat Andrew Jackson in 1828. Like Jackson, Taney was suspicious of vested corporate interests. After Jackson was elected president, he appointed Taney to be his Attorney General and, later, Secretary of the Treasury. Together, Jackson and Taney fought the Second Bank of the United States, which they believed symbolized autocratic corporate power. When Chief Justice John Marshall died, Taney was Jackson's choice to replace him.

Lincoln's political hero, Kentucky's Henry Clay, challenged Jackson in his reelection bid for the presidency in 1832. The twenty-three-year-old Lincoln (who was a generation younger than Taney) supported Clay's American System, which defended the Bank of the United States as essential to the economic prosperity of the country. After Clay lost the 1832 election, Lincoln served four terms in the Illinois legislature and became a successful Springfield lawyer. Throughout those years, he remained loyal to Clay, supporting him in two more losing efforts to win the presidency.

The issue of slavery did not dominate the national political debate during the 1840s, as it would the next decade. Taney and Lincoln took cautious public positions on slavery in the forties. As Chief Justice, Taney carefully steered the Court away from expansive decisions when slavery was an issue, insisting that the relevant state law governed. In his single term in the House of Representatives in the late forties, Lincoln did not take a leadership role on the slavery issue. His only initiative on the subject was to propose a referendum for the District of Columbia that abolished slavery, but enforced the Fugitive Slave Law and compensated slaveowners who freed their slaves. His compromise proposal did not satisfy either abolitionists or pro-slavery members of Congress and was never formally introduced.