Sorry I confused you. I wrote, “Those who helped give birth to the nation were grandfathered in. Those who followed, not having participated in the nation’s birth, would need to be born in the nation. And while they were not natives, they were considered as such - per Kent’s words.”
The first and third sentences are connected. I thought it obvious, since that was the point of contention, and that it would be understood that the second sentence was an aside.
If it helps you to understand, delete the second sentence and you have “”Those who helped give birth to the nation were grandfathered in...And while they were not natives, they were considered as such - per Kent’s words.”
Yes, I was specifically talking about the Grandfather clause. And since Kent was as well, and I was using his words, I thought that obvious.
Yes, Kent and others DID use Vattel - but NOT for citizenship discussions. Kent wrote, and the Supreme Court cited in WKA:
“Chancellor Kent, in his Commentaries, speaking of the ‘general division of the inhabitants of every country under the comprehensive title of aliens and natives,’ says:
Natives are all persons born within the jurisdiction and allegiance of the United States. This is the rule of the common law, without any regard or reference to the political condition or allegiance of their parents, with the exception of the children of ambassadors, who are in theory born within the allegiance of the foreign power they represent. . . . To create allegiance by birth, the party must be born not only within the territory, but within the ligeance of the government. If a portion of the country be taken and held by conquest in war, the conqueror acquires the rights of the conquered as to its dominion and government, and children born in the armies of a State, while [p665] abroad and occupying a foreign country, are deemed to be born in the allegiance of the sovereign to whom the army belongs. It is equally the doctrine of the English common law that, during such hostile occupation of a territory, and the parents be adhering to the enemy as subjects de facto, their children, born under such a temporary dominion, are not born under the ligeance of the conquered.
2 Kent Com. (6th ed.) 39, 42. And he elsewhere says:
And if, at common law, all human beings born within the ligeance of the King, and under the King’s obedience, were natural-born subjects, and not aliens, I do not perceive why this doctrine does not apply to these United States, in all cases in which there is no express constitutional or statute declaration to the contrary. . . . Subject and citizen are, in a degree, convertible terms as applied to natives, and though the term citizen seems to be appropriate to republican freemen, yet we are, equally with the inhabitants of all other countries, subjects, for we are equally bound by allegiance and subjection to the government and law of the land.”
http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/historics/USSC_CR_0169_0649_ZO.html
You will note that is not in agreement with Vattel, but neither the Supreme Court nor Kent believed Vattel was God. And in matters of citizenship, they followed the Constitution, not Vattel.
Feudalism doesn't exist in the United States. There is no King and there are no obedient King Subjects, and there is no empire for a King to rule over.