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The House passed legislation this week to remove the bust of Calvert County native Roger B. Taney, the nation’s fifth chief justice, former Attorney General of Maryland, and controversial Democratic lawmaker most known for writing the now-infamous 1857 Dred Scott decision that ruled African Americans were not citizens.
"While the removal of Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney's bust from the Capitol does not relieve the Congress of the historical wrongs it committed to protect the institution of slavery, it expresses Congress's recognition of one of the most notorious wrongs to have ever taken place in one of its rooms, that of Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney's Dred Scott v. Sandford decision," the legislation says.
It will now move forward to President Joe Biden's desk if it is to be signed into law.
"Every time I walk to the Floor, Mr. Speaker, I pass sandstone blocks quarried and hewn centuries ago by enslaved Black Americans," Maryland Congressman Steny Hoyer said on the House floor. "It's a tragic irony that the 'People's House' was built by Americans who were originally excluded from those extraordinary first three words of our Constitution, 'We the People.'
"While we cannot remove the stones and bricks that were placed here in bondage, we can ensure that the moveable pieces of art we display here celebrate freedom, not slavery, not sedition, not segregation."
Hoyer added that statues of Taney stood at the east front of the Capitol of Maryland in Annapolis, and it has also been removed from locations in Federick and Southern Maryland.
"His narrow-minded originalist philosophy failed to acknowledge America's capacity for moral growth and for progress," he said. "Indeed, the genius of our Constitution is that it did have moral growth, it did have expanded vision, it did have greater wisdom.
"Taney's ruling denied Black Americans citizenship, upheld slavery, and contributed, frankly, to the outbreak of the Civil War," Hoyer added. "That's why I and so many others advocated for his statue's removal from the Maryland State House."
Taney's bust sits in the Old Supreme Court Chamber of the US Capitol and may possibly be replaced by a similar statue of Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, who became the first African American to sit on the bench when he was appointed in 1967.
Under former President Andrew Jackson, Taney also served briefly as the acting US Secretary of War in 1931, as the US AG for more than two years, and was the nation's 12th Secretary of Treasury between 1833 and 1834.
Before living in Calvert and Frederick counties, Taney married Anne Phoebe Charlton Key, the sister of Francis Scott Key, and the two shared a permanent home in Baltimore before Taney later relocated to Washington, DC when his wife died.
He practiced law in Frederick for decades before turning to local and state politics in Maryland, then federally under Jackson.
Taney died on Oct. 12, 1864, and he was buried in Frederick County at St. John the Evangelist Cemetery.
"In removing Taney's bust, I'm not asking that we would hold Taney's to today's moral standards," Hoyer concluded. "On the contrary, let us hold him who the standard of his contemporaries, Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, as the Gentleman mentioned, and all of those who understood that the enslavement of others has always been an immoral act.
"Figures like Taney belong in history textbooks and classroom discussions, not in marbled bronze on public display of honor, the congressman continued. "Yes, we ought to know who Roger Brooke Taney was, a man who was greatly admired in his time in the state of Maryland.
"But he was wrong."
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