Roger Taney
He was born into a wealthy tobacco-cultivating family in Maryland that owned many slaves.  After becoming a lawyer, he served in the Maryland legislature as a Federalist before becoming a supporter of President Andrew Jackson.  He was Secretary of State and then Secretary of the Treasury under Jackson.   He became the fifth Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in 1836 after the Senate at first refused to confirm his nomination.  In his rulings he generally sided with the states against the national government, except in issues involving slavery.  He upheld fugitive slave laws, ruling that free states could not refuse to obey federal laws requiring fugitives be apprehended and returned to slavery.  In the 1857 Dred Scott decision, Taney declared that even the free descendants of slaves could never be citizens of the US, and that slavery could nowhere be barred from US territory. President Lincoln was his political enemy.  In the middle of the Civil War, he ruled Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus unconstitutional.  He died late in the Civil War on the same day his state of Maryland abolished slavery.
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