As a young man, Roger Taney gave no sign of becoming the most notorious defender of slavery in the history of American jurisprudence. Indeed, the evidence pointed in the opposite direction. Taney practiced law in Frederick, Maryland, just below the Mason-Dixon Line, and was married to the sister of Francis Scott Key, an advocate for the legal rights of free blacks and the amelioration of the lot of slaves (and the lyricist of America’s eventual national anthem).
Taney joined Key and others in a legal-aid society that battled the kidnapping of free blacks into slavery. He meanwhile emancipated eleven slaves he had inherited, keeping only two who were, as he described them, “too old, when they became my property, to provide for themselves.”
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