Roger Brooke Taney. ADDRESS BY JUDGE GEORGE L. CHRISTIAN OF RICHMOND, President of the Virginia State Bar Association. Gentlemen of the Virginia State Bar Association, Ladies and Gentlemen: It is needless to say that I greatly appreciate the honor conferred on me by this Association in making me its President, and that I especially prize the recollection of the cordial and hearty way in which that honor was conferred. In casting about for a subject for this address, I recalled the genuine pleasure experienced by us in having at our last meeting so many representatives of the Maryland Bar, and I thought it would be a fitting reminder of that occasion to choose as the theme for this a distinguished jurist and native of that State. I confess that other motives prompted me to speak of ROGER BROOKE TANEY. He was a great man and a great judge, a brave and true patriot, who dared to do his duty as he saw it in the most trying and perilous period of his country's history, and, as was said of another great American, "I admired him for the enemies he had made." Before referring to the public career of Mr. Taney, it will be appropriate to glance briefly at some of the incidents of his early private life. These are detailed by him with beautiful simplicity in an autobiography begun in 1854, when in his seventy-eighth year, but of which he only completed one chapter. He was born in Calvert County, Maryland, on March 17th, 1777, and was the son of Michael Taney and Monica, his wife, who was Monica Brooke. His father resided on his farm on the banks of the Patuxent River; was the owner of quite a number of slaves, and there reared a family of four sons and three daughters of which Roger was the third child and second son. Both of his parents were Roman Catholics, and naturally he was of the same faith, and was a devoted follower of his Master in the profession of that faith. The country adjacent to his home was sparsely settled, and "the old field schools" he attended were as indifferent as they were inaccessible; but notwithstanding these hindrances, his determination to acquire an education and his capacity for learning were such that at the age of fifteen he was prepared to enter Dickinson College at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, from which he graduated with honors in three years. After leaving college, he studied law in the office of Judge Jeremiah Townley Chase in Annapolis, and after three years of close study was admitted to the bar in the spring of 1799. His account of his early experiences at the bar, and especially his reminiscences of the great lawyers of Maryland of that day-Luther Martin, William Pinckney, Philip Barton Key, John Thompson Mason and others—are entertaining to a degree. He first located in his home county, Calvert, and was almost at once sent to the legislature as a Federalist, when the names of the two great political parties were Federalists and Republicans, the former then led by John Adams and the latter by Thomas Jefferson. He was a candidate for re-election to the next legislature, but was defeated, doubtless, owing, as he intimates, to the unpopularity of Mr. Adams who he was then supporting. In 1801 he removed to Frederick City, where he practised his profession successfully for twenty-three years, and was sent to the State Senate. On the 7th of January, 1806, he married Anne Phebe Charlton Key, a sister of Francis Scott Key, the author of the "Star Spangled Banner," to whom his devotion can be best illustrated by inserting here a letter written on the forty-six anniversary of their marriage, in which he says: "I cannot, my dearest wife, suffer the 7th of January to pass without renewing to you the pledges of love which I made to you on the 7th of January forty-six years ago. Although I am sensible that in that long period I have done many things that I ought not to have done, and left undone many things that I ought to have done, yet, in constant affection to you, I have never wavered-never been in |