Carl Brent Swisher, Roger B. Taney (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1935).
The South would be injured not so much because its culture would not remain static as because change would be forced upon it from without. Had the southern states of their own volition set about the gradual abolition of slavery and the making of adjustments necessary to the change, the movement would doubtless have had Taney’s deepest sympathy, although he was aware of the difficulties in the way of such a program. It was coercion from the North which he feared, coercion based on the assumption that the southerners were an immoral people. A coerced South would not be the South at all. To survive it must remain independent, even though independence might be maintained only through secession.