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He or she is busted, I guess, by a stupid mistake that it would have been easy to prevent.

But how does it change the argument if there's one very peripheral or marginal reference to Vattel in a 400 page book?

If one little-known patriot read 6 authors before taking a stand in 1776 and one of them was Vattel, it shows that Vattel had at least one reader and Kettner was able to find him, but does that really alter anything?

When I came across the Kettner reference, I wasn't researching Vattel, I was doing research on the works of the Englishmen, Algernon Sidney & John Locke, Sidney was executed for his speech about natural law & was sentenced as a traitor by King James who was overthrown. Locke who lived at the same time as Sidney went into exile until King James was overthrown & it was safe to return to England. Finding the Vattel quote and finding that his works were common reading to even the lowliest of farmers is all telling, The farmer didn't take Blackstone to read, in fact, Blackstone was only merely nominal in the US at the time and only known to lawyers.

But how does it change the argument if there's one very peripheral or marginal reference to Vattel in a 400 page book?

If there were one marginal legal reference your point might have relevance. Besides John Jay, John Marshall, Joseph Story, ... Alexander Hamilton, in one of many letters to George Washington, this one on September 15, 1790, in which Hamilton, then Secretary of the Treasury was advising Washington, refers to the wisdom of the legal philosophers whose thoughts were the foundation of the new republic. Remember, this was a brand new nation, violently breaking from a monarchy/oligarchy with its centuries of arbitrary common law, including citizenship statutes which were often modified to address a specific problem with some member of the royal family. Hamililton ran down the opinions of the other great legal minds of the time, Pufendorf, Barbeyrac, Grotius and finished with an observation not controversial to Washington, upon whose desk in New York Vattel’s Law of Nations was the first reference:

But Vatel, perhaps the most accurate and approved of the writers on the laws of nations, preserves a mean between these different opinions.

Many Founders read Vattel..how do you think..they obtained the idea to form the 13 states into the United States.

Vattel gave the idea to the Founders a republic can break away from the King.

Vattel gave the Founders the legal means to self defense. Hint..the 2nd Amendment.

Vattel’s words were printed on pamphlets and distributed to the Colonists...

After the ratification,,,the natives were Americans..White Europeans and their descendents. The only people who became citizens or natives were the descendents of White Europeans.

No other race played a part in the drafting and ratification of the Constitution. Vattel said (1758)..the natives are those born in a country whose parents are citizens.