> The document of interest:
> https://founders.archives.gov/?q=%22natural%20born%20citizens%22&s=1111311111&sa=&r=1&sr=
thanks. i agree (if that is what you are implying) that it is not a totally ironclad argument for or against anything. it just uses the two terms in parallel, suggestively.
i looked up Vattel’s term indigene. I saw that it is apparently an English term as well, meaning someone who is native to a country. what is interesting at least to me is that the FFs deliberately chose not to use the (English word, and also presumably direct translation) indigene when they had the chance to do so in the constitution. This implies to me that they (the FFs) instead chose to signal adoption of the English common law concept of “natural born subject” in its adjectival phrase form (”natural born”), and tacked it onto their usage of “citizen” as a modifier, as is allowed by the English language. Yes, they could have paused and defined the larger phrase. No, they did not pause and define the larger phrase. Up until 1776, they were living under colonial forms of English common law, so they all were familiar (or at least they all should have been familiar) with the adjectival phrase “natural born.” The 1797 Vattel English translation sounds to my coarse ears to the extent that indigene is congruent with natural born citizen, OK, and otherwise, as only so much revisionist backfill.
Hmmm, maybe this is why, in recent history, the USSC has chosen to duck the issue.
Disclaimer: I prefer not to stay in Holiday Hotels.
Early usage of the term natural born subject by limeys partook heavily of actual Natural Law.
As time wore on, monarchical and parliamentary intrusions dragged the term around so as to cover many examples of unnatural subjects, and non-born subjects.
We’re not Limeys. This has been definitively true since at least as early as the end of the Revolutionary War.
Washington was never shot like Trump was.
But, he had plenty of buttons blown off his uniform, and horses shot out from underneath him. His friend John Jay wasn’t pussyfooting around when he recommended to Washington, NBCs only as CinC.
You said: “i looked up Vattel’s term indigene”
You do not have to look up what Vattel mean by the term “indigenes”. He told you what he meant in the very sentence he used it in. He defined it for the reader of his legal treatise on the Principles of Natural Law. Again, he defined the meaning of the nouns he used in the very sentence he used them in at the time he wrote it. So don’t try to look up what a word means today or somewhere else or to someone else when the person using the word defined it when he used it in his treatis. He told you what he meant by the words he chose when he wrote the defining sentence for “Des citoyens et naturels” in French in his 1758 legal treatise. He wrote:
“Les naturels, ou indigénes, sont ceux qui sont nés dans le pays, de parents citoyens.”
Let’s do a direct translation of the key sentence using this online French to English site:
https://translate.yandex.com/?source_lang=fr&target_lang=en&text=Les%20naturels%2C%20ou%20indigenes%2C%20sont%20ceux%20qui%20sont%20nes%20dans%20le%20pays%2C%20de%20parents%20citoyens
The key sentence translated to English by that online translation site is:
“The natural, or indigenous, are those who were born in the country, from citizen parents.”
For more about what Vattel exactly wrote in 1758, see: My Translation and Analysis of a Key Sentence in Emer de Vattel’s 1758 Treatise on Natural Law in Section 212 -“Des citoyens et naturels”: https://cdrkerchner.wordpress.com/2023/04/15/my-translation-of-a-key-sentence-in-emer-de-vattels-1758-treatise-on-natural-law-in-section-212-des-citoyens-et-naturels/
A *LOT* of people want to make that logical leap, but the evidence is against it.
Much of people's desire to assert English Common law as the basis of "Citizen" is the result of William Rawle explicitly saying so in his book "A View of the Constitution."
Rawle was wrong. In fact he was lying. He knew he was wrong, and he printed that in his book anyway.
How do I know that he knew he was wrong? He made this argument in the case of "Negress Flora vs Joseph Graisberry" and the Supreme court of Pennsylvania voted Unanimously that he was wrong and told him he was wrong.
Additionally, Samuel Roberts, a judge in Pennsylvania, wrote a book based on the report of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court regarding what British laws remained in effect, and the book explicitly shows that British Common Law was rejected as the basis of Citizenship. It *SAYS* that Vattel was the source of the meaning of citizenship in the United States.
This book was widely sold in Pennsylvania and the surrounding area, and was also reprinted in 1840. It *TOLD* William Rawle he was wrong about the source of American citizenship, yet he published his book saying the opposite, anyway.
I wish I could take you through the journey that I went through learning all the things I learned about this subject. I am greatly condensing some essential points here, but the evidence indicates the source of US Citizenship is Vattel's definition, not English Common Law.