Word: taney
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Abolitionists promptly took up the opinion and used it as a stick to beat Taney with. But Author Lewis argues that Taney was guided by his dedication to the rule of law rather than by any sympathy for slavery, pointing out that Taney had freed the last of his own eight slaves as far back as 1821, and for most of his life was an outspoken critic of slavery. With his brother-in-law, Francis Scott Key, the Maryland attorney who is best remembered for writing the words to The Star-Spangled Banner, Taney was a prime mover...
Firm Hand. The Dred Scott decision alone made Taney extremely unpopular in the North, but public ire reached a crescendo after Fort Sumter, when he steadfastly opposed the war-harassed Lincoln Administration as it tried to circumvent constitutional safeguards for the sake of wartime efficiency...
Civil War or not, Taney held that it was the duty of the court to maintain "with an even and firm hand the rights and powers of the Federal Government, and of the States, and of the citizens, as they are written in the Constitution ..." In a series of unpopular decisions, he held that the President alone did not have the power to order the seizure of ships trading with Confederate ports; he ordered the federal provost marshal to pay damages and costs for merchandise which had been confiscated because it was bound for Virginia. He outraged the Administration...
...came from within, they would surely come from too much (or too little) democracy. So Justices Kent, Story, and the others struggled to create an American law capable of thwarting the course of empire, a system which could both fix and hold the American identity. "The Marshall court and Taney court", writes Miller, "thus kept their purpose fixed upon the idea of restriction, because, perhaps, if nothing were permitted, no violence would result." The brief chapter and the outlines on science suggest that in Miller's hands science and technology would also have spelled out their moral justification in terms...
...soul-rinsing the filthy millions he inherited from his philistine movie-magnate father. Seymour has established a foundation to give grants to needy and worthy writers. Painfully diffident, Seymour has all but turned the running of the foundation over to an extravert pal from Yale days, self-interested Charles Taney (Ralph Meeker), who would rather down a Scotch than lift a book...