Roger Brooke Taney (; March 17, 1777 – October 12, 1864) was the fifth
Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, holding that office from 1836 until his death in 1864. He was the eleventh
United States Attorney General. He is most remembered for delivering the infamous majority opinion in
Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), that ruled, among other things, that African-Americans, having been considered inferior at the time the
Constitution was drafted, were not part of the original community of citizens and, whether free or slave, could not be considered
citizens of the United States, which created an uproar among abolitionists and the free states of the northern U.S.