Roger B. Taney - Early Life and Career

Early Life and Career

Taney was born March 17, 1777. He was the third child and the second son of seven (four sons and three daughters) born to a slaveholding family of tobacco planters in Calvert County, Maryland. He received a rudimentary education from a series of private tutors. After instructing him for a year, his last tutor David English recommended that Taney was ready for college. At the age of 15 he entered Dickinson College, graduating with honors in 1795. As a younger son with no prospect of inheriting the family plantation, Taney chose the profession of law. He read law and in 1799 was admitted to the bar. He quickly distinguished himself as one of Maryland's most promising young lawyers.

Read more about this topic:  Roger B. Taney

Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or career:

    “We early arrive at the great discovery that there is one mind common to all individual men: that what is individual is less than what is universal ... that error, vice and disease have their seat in the superficial or individual nature.”
    —Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    “The time comes when each one of us has to give up as illusions the expectations which, in his youth, he pinned upon his fellow- men, and when he may learn how much difficulty and pain has been added to his life by their ill-will.”
    —Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)

    “In time your relatives will come to accept the idea that a career is as important to you as your family. Of course, in time the polar ice cap will melt.”
    —Barbara Dale (b. 1940)