Replies

<>Beats me - I’ve never read Ramsey.<>

Here, read it and learn:

http://www.thepostemail.com/2010/04/02/founder-and-historian-david-ramsay-defines-natural-born-citizen-in-1789/

<>If it were, it would have been translated thus from the beginning. All it shows is one translator used it AFTER the Constitution was written.<>

And why would he do that if they did not mean the same thing??? And other translators followed. And there was no dispute.

And what makes you think that it wasn’t that way in earlier translations??? Where did John Jay get the phrase “natural born citizen” and how come Washington adn the other Framers understood it enough to put it into Article II and then into the Immigration Act of 1790???

By your reasoning we should all abandon the word “Christ” since it was at some point substituted for the word “Messiah” by some Greek translator well after he had come. It’s ludicrous.

“And what makes you think that it wasn’t that way in earlier translations??? Where did John Jay get the phrase “natural born citizen” and how come Washington adn the other Framers understood it enough to put it into Article II and then into the Immigration Act of 1790???”

I don’t think it was that way in earlier translations because I’ve seen earlier translations, and they don’t attempt to translate the word. This also agrees with what El Gato has posted, and I trust him even while we disagree.

Where did John Jay get the phrase? Several court rulings indicate they think it came from natural born subject, and another birther posted an extract from that time frame where the French read ‘natural subject’ and it was translated as ‘natural born citizen’. The guy posting it thought it proved natural means NBC, while I think the phrase natural subject would reasonably be translated NBC, if the natural born subject theory is true.

SHANKS V. DUPONT, 28 U. S. 242 (1830) tends to support this. It uses phrases like “British born subjects” instead of just British subject. The woman was considered a citizen even after her marriage to a Brit:

“The marriage of Ann Scott with Shanks, a British officer, did not change or destroy her allegiance to the State of South Carolina, because marriage with an alien, whether friend or enemy, produces no dissolution of the native allegiance of the wife.”

Also, “If they were originally British subjects, but then adhering to the states, the treaty deemed them citizens.”

Thus subject and citizen are interchangeable, depending on the form of government.

Where did John Jay get the phrase “natural born citizen” and how come Washington adn the other Framers understood it enough to put it into Article II and then into the Immigration Act of 1790???

Blackstone's Commentaries defined "natural-born subject". Relevant to this discussion, Blackstone says, in Book I, Ch. 10, "THE children of aliens, born here in England, are, generally fpeaking, natural-born fubjects, and entitled to all the privileges of fuch. In which the conftitution of France differs from curs; for there, by their jus albinatus, if a child be born of foreign parents, it is an alien."

John Jay, along with a number of other Founders, was a subscriber to the original edition, of which Book I was published in 1765. Blackstone's Commentaries were of paramount importance to the practice of law in 18th century America.

As far as I can tell, the only prominent source of the phrase "natural-born" in relation to citizenship that existed at the time John Jay wrote his letter was Blackstone's.