Status across Borders: Roger Taney, Black British Subjects, and a Diplomatic Antecedent to the Dred Scott Decision

At the request of the U.S. State Department, Roger B. Taney wrote the following lines regarding the obligation of the U.S. president to honor the treaty rights of black British sailors: "Yet this word [subject] cannot be regarded as having been used in that extensive sense by the parties to the contract. That unfortunate people [of the African races] came into the dominions of Great Britain not as aliens coming to settle among them & whose descendants would be free born British subjects, but as slaves; whose posterity it was then intended should always remain so. The privileges there granted to some of them, are rather favours than rights inherent in British subjects. … They are not to be intended to be included when the British people or British subjects are spoken of. … They have never been looked to or considered as forming any part of the body politic." Taney deduced that black Britons were not protected by existing Anglo-American treaties and that Great Britain had no power to compel the United States to guarantee their free entry and movement. Most noticeable about his lines is their uncanny resemblance to the text of the infamous Scott v. Sandford opinion, where Chief Justice Taney refuted both the existence and the possibility of African American citizenship and boldly enshrined the Jacksonian ideal of the white republic into the canons of constitutional law. Taney handed down the decision in Dred Scott's case in 1857, but he penned his opinion about black sailors' treaty rights in his capacity as Andrew Jackson's attorney general in 1832