1 In the middle of August in 1818, some three thousand five hundred Methodists descended on a farm in Washington County, Maryland, for days of prayer and fellowship. Their lush surroundings seemed to quiver in the swelter of a mid-Atlantic summer, to which the believers added the fever of faith. Men and women, white and black, freedmen and slaves, they were united by gospel zeal. There was only one hiccup: the scheduled preacher was ill-disposed and nowhere to be found. The anxious crowd turned to the presiding elder, a convert to Methodism from Pennsylvania Dutch country named Jacob Gruber, who accepted the impromptu preaching gig as a matter of ecclesial duty. His sermon began, in the customary style, with a reading from Scripture: “Righteousness exalteth a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people” (Proverbs 14:34). After explaining this verse from a theological perspective, Gruber ventured to apply it to the moral conditions of the American republic at the dawn of the nineteenth century. How did the United States measure up against this biblical standard? Not very well at all. America, Gruber charged, was guilty of “intemperance” and “profaneness.” But worst of all was the “national sin” of “slavery and oppression.” Americans espoused “self-evident truths, that all men are created equal, and have unalienable rights,” even as they also kept men, women, and children in bondage. “Is it not a reproach to a man,” asked Gruber, “to hold articles of liberty and independence in one hand and a bloody whip in the other?” There were slaves as well as white opponents of slavery at the camp that day, and we may assume that they were fired up by Gruber’s jeremiad. But there were also slaveholders among his hearers. This last group was not amused. Following their complaints, he was charged with inciting rebellion and insurrection. Luckily for Gruber, he had the benefit of one of the ablest attorneys in Maryland, a forty-one-year-old former state lawmaker who also served as local counsel to an activist group that helped rescue Northern freedmen who were kidnapped and sold as slaves in the South. The case was tried before a jury in Frederick that included slaveholders and was presided over by judges who were all likewise slaveholders. Even so, Gruber’s lawyer offered a forceful defense of his client’s right to publicly voice revulsion at slavery. In his opening statement, the lawyer declared that there is no law which forbids us to speak of slavery as we think of it. . . . Mr. Gruber did quote the language of our great act of national independence, and insisted on the principles contained in that venerated instrument. He did rebuke those masters who, in the exercise of power, are deaf to the calls of humanity; and he warned of the evils they might bring upon themselves. He did speak of those reptiles who live by trading in human flesh and enrich themselves by tearing the husband from the wife and the infant from the bosom of the mother. The lawyer went on to identify himself with the sentiments expressed in the sermon. “So far is [Gruber] from being an object of punishment,” that the lawyer himself would be “prepared to maintain the same principles and to use, if necessary, the same language here in the temple of justice.” The statement concluded with an unmistakable echo of Gruber’s sermon: that so long as slavery persisted in the United States, it remained a “blot on our national character.” Only if and when the detestable Institution was abolished could Americans “point without a blush to the language held in the Declaration of Independence.” Gruber was acquitted of all charges. His triumphant lawyer was none other than Roger Brooke Taney: radical Jacksonian, successor to John Marshall as chief justice of the Supreme Court, and author of the decisive opinion in Dred Scott v. Sandford. Alongside fellow Jacksonian Orestes Brownson, Taney was the most influential Catholic in American public life during the pre-Civil War period. In Dred Scott, he rendered an opinion defined by an unblinking legal originalism — the notion that the judge’s role is strictly limited to upholding the intentions of constitutional framers and lawmakers, heedless of larger moral concerns. Applying originalist methods, Taney discovered that Congress lacked the power to ban slavery under the Missouri Compromise and that African-Americans could not be recognized as citizens under the federal Constitution. His reasoning prompted his abolitionist critics to “go originalist” themselves, countering that the Constitution had to be decoded using the seeing stone of the declaration. Put another way, Taney set in train a dynamic in American jurisprudence that persists to this day. What do American Catholics make of Taney today? What does he represent to us? For most, Taney is occluded by the fog of historical amnesia that afflicts Americans of every creed. If he is remembered at all, it is as the notorious author of Dred Scott — one of those figures whose name and face are fast being removed from the public square amid our ongoing racial reckoning. Many of the chief justice’s contemporaries would have approved of this fate for “The Unjust Judge” (the title of an anonymous Republican pamphlet, published upon his death, that condemned Taney as a second Pilate). Taney ended his life and career attempting to foist slavery on the whole nation, prompting fears that markets for bondsmen would soon crop up in Northern cities. His evil decision sealed the inevitability of the Civil War and hastened the conflict’s arrival. “History,” concluded one abolitionist paper, “will expose him to eternal scorn in the pillory she has set up for infamous judges.” Speaking against a measure to install a bust of the late chief justice at the Supreme Court, Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts fumed that “the name of Taney is to be hooted down the page of history.” An abolitionist ally of Sumner’s, Benjamin Wade of Ohio, said he would sooner spend two thousand dollars to
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