Citations please.
While serving as Jackson's Attorney General, Taney was asked by the Secretary of State Edward Livingston for a legal opinion on a conflict between U.S. treaty obligations and a South Carolina law that mandated any black crew members of any merchant ship calling at South Carolina ports must be seized and held in jail for the duration of the ship's visit, and the cost of the imprisonment be paid by the ship's captain before they left. If the captain refused to pay, the crew member was sold into slavery to recoup the costs. Taney replied that the U.S. could not interfere with the state law. He wrote that blacks "...were not looked upon as citizens by the contracting parties who formed the Constitution...evidently not supposed to be included by the term 'citizen'. He further stated, "The African race in the United States even when free, are every where a degraded class, and exercise no political influence. The privileges they are allowed to enjoy, are accorded to them as a matter of kindness and benevolence rather thatn of right. They are the only class of persons who can be held as mere property, as slaves. And where they are nominally admitted by law to the privileges of citizenship, they have no effectual power to defend them, and are permitted to be citizens by the sufferance of the white population and hold whatever rights they enjoy at their mercy."