Roger Taney, First Catholic Chief Justice

Roger Brooke Taney was the eleventh United States Attorney General. He also was the fifth Chief Justice of the United States, holding that office from 1836 until his death in 1864, and was the first Roman Catholic to hold that office. He is most remembered for delivering the majority opinion in Dred Scott v. Sandford, that ruled, among others, that African Americans, being considered “of an inferior order and altogether unfit to associate with the white race” at the time the Constitution was drafted, could not be considered citizens of the United States. Taney was as ideally suited for the complex and contradictory period of American history as any man could be: he was a Southerner who loved his country over his state; a believer in states’ rights yet a firm believer in the Union; a slaveholder who regretted the institution and manumitted his slaves. In Maryland, he had practiced law and politics simultaneously and succeeded in both. After abandoning Federalism as a losing cause, he rose to the top of the state’s Jacksonian machine. As U.S. Attorney General (1831-1833) and then Secretary of the Treasury (1833-1834), he became one of Andrew Jackson’s closest advisers. It was said of him that he “brought to the Chief Justiceship a high intelligence and legal acumen, kindness and humility, patriotism, and a determination to be a great Chief Justice that enabled him to mold the modest raw material of the Court into an effective and prestigious institution.” Taney died during the final months of the American Civil War on the same day that his home state of Maryland abolished slavery.
(From Wikipedia)