Roger Taney: Intersectional Racist in an Age of Racist Differentiation
Michael Haggerty * & Gregory P. Downs ** | 24.3 | Essay | Citation: Michael Haggerty & Gregory P. Downs, Roger Taney: Intersectional Racist in an Age of Racist Differentiation, 24 U. Pa. J. Const. L. 729 (2022).
In his Article Dred Scott and Asian Americans, Gabriel J. Chin creatively and persuasively reads the well-known, much-reviled opinion by Chief Justice Roger Taney in Dred Scott v. Sandford through Taney’s little-known opinion in United States v. Dow to argue that Dred Scott “should be regarded as pertinent to all people of color, not only African Americans.”1 Through Professor Chin’s incisive reading of Dow, Taney emerges as deeply engaged not just in the specific question of African Americans’ rights but in a broader project of defining a “Christian white person” as part of a “master” race.2 Taney established historical and legal justifications for excluding non-white Christians from membership in the United States political community, those people with rights that others are required to respect. Chin’s argument raises broad questions about the history and historiography of Asian exclusion, the impact of the Civil War and Reconstruction on constitutional and political.
In this Essay we primarily address those two points: first, Justice Taney as a proponent and defender of interconnected, even intersectional, racial ideologies; and second, Taney’s representativeness as an historian and as a legal realist describing law and politics as they were. In Professor Chin’s first claim, about the interconnected nature of Taney’s racial thought, we find a fascinating insight into the construction of a predominantly Democratic vision of the white race that helped shape not only Taney’s jurisprudence, but also his party’s efforts to develop a constructed identity politics. Professor Chin’s focus on the Naturalization Act of 1790 is a powerful rejoinder to many early U.S. historical narratives that examine race making solely with regard to people already in what became the United States. Taney’s arguments about a white Christian master race in turn helps center nonwhiteness, not just Blackness or indigeneity, in early U.S. history with profound consequences. These are major claims and major contributions.
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* Michael Haggerty is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at the University of California, Davis. He has been the recipient of numerous fellowships, including the Leo J. Hershkowitz Fellowship at the New York Historical Society and the Russell J. and Dorothy S. Bilinski Educational Foundation Dissertation Writing Fellowship at the University of California, Davis. He received his bachelor’s degree in history from the College of Wooster and his master’s degree in American history from Miami University (Ohio).
** Gregory P. Downs is Professor of History at the University of California, Davis. He is the author of three monographs on the Civil War Era, most recently The Second American Revolution: The Civil War-Era Struggle over Cuba and the Rebirth of the American Republic (University of North Carolina Press, 2019). With Kate Masur of Northwestern, he helped lead historians’ lobbying for the first-ever National Park site devoted to Reconstruction, co-wrote the first-ever theme study on Reconstruction for the National Park Service, and now co-edits the Journal of the Civil War Era.