Taney Arrest Warrant - History and Evidence

History and Evidence

The single primary source document is a manuscript written in the 1880s by Ward Hill Lamon, Lincoln's friend, bodyguard, and United States Marshal for the District of Columbia during his administration. According to the manuscript, which is a brief history of Ex Parte Merryman by Lamon:

After due consideration the administration determined upon the arrest of the Chief Justice. A warrant or order was issued for his arrest. Then arose the question of service. Who should make the arrest and where should the imprisonment be? This was done by the President with instructions to use his own discretion about making the arrest unless he should receive further orders from him.

The warrant was never served, according to Lamon, for reasons that are not given. The manuscript dates from the 1880s and resides in the collection of Lamon papers at the Huntington Library.

Taney's own memoir, completed from his unfinished autobiography by Samuel Tyler in 1872, refers to the Chief Justice's fears of arrest. According to Tyler, as Taney "left the house of his son-in-law, Mr. Campbell" en route to his courtroom "remarked that it was likely he should be imprisoned in Fort McHenry before night, but that he was going to Court to do his duty."p. 74

Lamon's story emerged during the early 1970s in A More Perfect Union by Harold Hyman. Some recent writers have accepted the story as credible including Jeffrey Rogers Hummel in Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men. For a time in the 1980s and 1990s, it was believed that a second corroborating document by Francis Lieber referred to the warrant. This was the result of a mistaken numerical citation in an earlier work. The error was discovered by John Rodehamel, a manuscripts librarian at the Huntington Library. Once informed of this error, Jeffrey Hummel described Lamon's unsupported account as "not credible." That President Lincoln considered, and then rejected, the possibility of arresting Taney is briefly mentioned in The Civil War produced by Ken Burns and aired on Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) Public television stations.