Without Fear or Favor: A Biography of Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney (review)

BOOK REVIEWS369 these tensions was repeated schism, for "Ohio was one of the few states in which the two sides stood facing each other with sufficient strength to contest the area." Division, while involving heartbreak, did not mean disaster. Progress was made in the areas of education, welfare, evangelism, stewardship, and home and world missions. By 1900 Ohio Lutherans were seeking concord and unity. Several of the synods became part of the United Lutheran Church in 1918, and the Joint Synod of Ohio merged with the Iowa and Buffalo Synods twelve years later to form the American Lutheran Church. The Ohio Lutheran story, like that of the nation, was not just one of division , but also of reunion. C. George Fry Capital University Without Fear or Favor: A Biography of Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney. By Walker Lewis. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965. Pp. ix, 556. $7.50.) This full biography undertakes to remove any doubt about the private integrity and public greatness of Chief Justice Taney and, through a personal focus, to capture the human and tragic side of his life as it was pulled into the vortex of sectional politics and civil war. The style is narrative , rather than analytical, and heavily anecdotal, with Taney speaking , so far as possible, in his own behalf. No new interpretations of pohtical or constitutional history are essayed. Nor is there any effort to exhaust all available sources, though the standard printed works and basic manuscripts are used. Written with obvious pleasure and with a minimum of academic trappings (the notes are listed by page and relegated to the end), the book seems aimed at the general reader. Taney's family background, his personal life, and professional rise to prominence in Frederick and Baltimore are depicted with a feeling for time and place (though occasionally the anecdotal material obscures young Taney). His break from Federalism over the War of 1812 and his influence in the state Jacksonian machine is discussed—but unfortunately with too litde state pohtical history to make a full assessment of Taney's early politics possible. For his pohtical services and because of his recognized legal talents, he was appointed Attorney General in 1831. But it was as strategist in the assault on the Second Bank that he made his national pohtical mark. No new interpretation of this episode is presented, though a fuller account of Taney's cosdy and embarrassing friendship with the deceitful Thomas Ellicott, president of the Union Bank of Maryland, adds an interesting personal touch. The Bank War is not used as it might have been to illuminate the meaning of Jacksonian Democracy. It follows that Taney's relationship with that movement and the private motives and public philosophy implicit therein are never made quite clear. 370CIVIL WAR HISTORY Treatment of Taney's judicial career minimizes historical analysis in favor of the personal view. Despite interpretative interjections, the Court's work—divided into the customary categories of contract, commerce, banking , and slavery—is treated mainly case-by-case, leaving the reader to fend for himself in regard to the larger picture. The contract decisions would have made more sense if seen as an implementation of the commercial ethos of the nineteenth century (as Willard Hurst has suggested). The confusions and contradictions of the commerce decisions and the institutional fragmentation which accompanied them could have been accounted for as a reaction, perhaps a representation, of new tensions within the post-1819 federal system from which Jacksonian Democracy itself arose. In short, the Taney Court and the Chief Justice himself might have been used more effectively as a mirror of the age—and vice versa. The failure to deal more comprehensively with the larger historical and legal scene makes it hard for Mr. Lewis to contrast successfully the Marshall and Taney Courts. In treating the slavery issue, the author zeroes in on the task of exonerating his subject from the judgment of history and the abuse of historians . Taney's personal views on the subject are convincingly shown to be moderate and humane—he emancipated his own slaves and genuinely hoped for gradual emanciption—and consistent throughout his career. The Court's fatal decision to broach the whole...