page_1051 < previous page page_1051 next page > Page 1051 tion deemed offensive to one or another constitutional principle (most often the contract clause or the commerce clause) served to bolster the power of the national government and to provide reins on state powers. Marshall was succeeded as chief justice in 1836 by Andrew Jackson's close associate, Roger B. Taney. Never again would it make quite so much sense to name a Court after its chief justice, because fragmentation, rather than unity, increasingly characterized future Courts. Broadly speaking, the so-called Taney Court did not deviate too sharply from the paths established earlier. On two occasions it upheld Fugitive Slave Acts, even though Congress was nowhere specifically authorized to pass such legislation. Taney bitterly opposed use of the contract or commerce clause to limit state regulatory power, though he did not always prevail and could only indicate his opposition in dissents. The most notorious case of this period was Dred Scott v. Sanford in 1857. Taney ruled that blacks could not be citizens of the United States (he viewed the founding generation of Americans to have been so racist that they could not have intended that blacks would be part of the political community). He went on to declare that Congress was without power to limit the taking of slaves into new territories being opened. Inasmuch as the newly formed Republican party argued in behalf of Congress's right to make the territories "free soil," the majority of the Court, over sharp dissent, in effect declared the Republican platform unconstitutional. Although the majority may have been motivated by a desire to resolve the tremendous political hostilities generated by the slavery issue, it clearly failed, and many historians view Dred Scott as contributing to the outbreak of war four years later. The Court had varying numbers of members in its first seventy-five years, for the number of justices is not specified in the Constitution. Beginning with six members, it rose to a high of ten in the Lincoln administration, as Congress was eager to make sure that the new administration could in fact control the Court. When Taney died in 1864, he was succeeded by Salmon P. Chase, Lincoln's secretary of the treasury and a noted abolitionist lawyer during the 1850s. Thereafter, when Lincoln was succeeded by Andrew Johnson and open conflict broke out between Congress and the new president, Congress limited membership to eight justices to prevent the president from filling any vacancies. It then increased the membership to nine after the election of President Ulysses S. Grant, where it has stayed since. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, however, frustrated by the hostility of the majority to New Deal legislation, proposed that the number rise to as many as fifteen. But he suffered an overwhelming defeat, and the number nine now seems firmly established as part of what might be termed the "unwritten" Constitution. During much of the nineteenth century, certain associate justices had more impact on legal development than did the chief justices. In the last quarter of the century, the most important members of the Court were Stephen J. Field, Joseph P. Bradley, and, from the perspective of a later generation, John Marshall Harlan. The first two led the Court to monitor, and often rule invalid, state economic regulation and to use the new Fourteenth Amendment to strike down some of the regulation as an illegitimate infringement of "liberty." Enforcement of "freedom of contract" became most extensive in the early twentieth century, reaping a field well sown by these earlier justices. Similarly, these and other justices refused to grant sweeping powers to Congress under the commerce clause. Justice Harlan is noted for two great dissents. The first was delivered in the 1883 civil rights cases, in which the Court struck down the Civil Rights Act of 1875 prohibiting racial discrimination in hotels and other public accommodations. The majority declined to read the Fourteenth Amendment as authorizing such a statute as a means of providing the "equal protection of the laws" promised in its first section. Justice Harlan denounced the majority for refusing to recognize that such racial discrimination was a "badge and incident" of slavery and thus prohibited under both the Fourteenth and the Thirteenth Amendments. Later, in 1896, Harlan wrote an equally eloquent lone dissent denouncing the majority's toleration of racial segregation  < previous page page_1051 next page >