Roger Brooke Taney was born on March 17, 1777, in Calvert County, Maryland, to Michael Taney and Monica Brooke Taney. He entered a prosperous Roman Catholic planter family whose Maryland roots extended back to the seventeenth century. The family’s tobacco property and social position rested upon enslaved labor. Catholicism remained an important part of Taney’s identity in a state where Catholics had experienced a long history of political restriction, even though the revolutionary era had begun to remove formal disabilities.

Taney was not the eldest son and therefore was not expected to inherit the principal family plantation. His father encouraged him toward a learned profession. After attending local schools, Roger entered Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, at about fifteen. The college’s curriculum exposed him to classical languages, logic, ethics, mathematics, and rhetoric—the intellectual equipment expected of a young man preparing for law and public life. He graduated in 1795, though sources differ over whether the formal graduation year should be given as 1795 or 1796. The Maryland State Archives and Supreme Court Historical Society use 1795.

Returning to Maryland, Taney read law in Annapolis under Jeremiah Townley Chase, a respected judge and former revolutionary political figure. This apprenticeship from roughly 1796 to 1799 required close study of English common law, Maryland statutes, legal forms, pleadings, and courtroom procedure. It also introduced the young Catholic planter’s son to the practical networks of the state capital. Taney was admitted to the Maryland bar in 1799 and established himself in Frederick, where the growing western part of the state offered opportunity to an ambitious lawyer.

That same year, at only twenty-two, Taney won election to the Maryland House of Delegates as a Federalist. His election marks the close of his formation and the beginning of his public career. The habits visible in his youth—religious seriousness, attachment to Maryland’s landed society, legal discipline, and a strong conception of ordered government—would continue to shape him, though his later political affiliations and constitutional views evolved considerably.