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NEVER is quite an exclusive neighborhood and far too brief a comment for us to learn the details.

Could you enlighten us all on this thread with some of your knowledge about all this?

By this also I mean the entire entirety of my post which was begun with "I think" and continued with "except for Indians and slaves" (which I honestly think covered 90% of the male exclusions) and then goes on to suggest it may have been a crazy quilt.

The scenarios I am unsure of, which I am hopeful you are more familiar with include:

1. when did "naturalization" 1st get defined here? Did our federal government do this first or was it states by which you got your US citizenship?
Being a citizen and being qualified to vote might have been different in the old colonies, but in the west there were less restrictions and universal white male sufferage was more of the norm.

2. how were annexed territories handled? Surely when Texas came on there must have been some guidelines. Was it everyone in Texas became a US citizen by virtue of being a Texas citizen? Did Texas have laws and rolls to check? Was it everyone around except for the slaves and Indians? Did they leave out the Mexicans?

how about the north-west territories? what if you were a Pennsy native who moved to what became Ohio? I can guess you only got to vote for Pres once you were a resident in a real state, so while you were in Ohio territory you might at best be an absentee ballot from Pennsy, if such a thing was possible way back then ...

how about the Southwest or especially California? Except for Indians and slaves, did they pick and choose or did they take all present? I think the Chinese exclusion act was a much later development, so even the Chinese 49ers might have been counted in the 1850 census.

I would think the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo had something to say about the status of the persons in this former Mexican territory, even if there were irregularities in the actual enforcement.

Maybe most people who "naturalized" as we expanded across the continent did so by being in the annexed territory from the moment of annexation or statehood or something.

I really think there were a lot of situations where blanket naturalizations were the only practical method, (again, except for Indians and slaves).

I remember seeing something on the Mexican War where Jefferson Davis (maybe then Secy of State) was described as unwilling to annex more of Mexico because then those darker people would become Americans. That sounds like the default process was a sort of blanket naturalization. I think the idea of being there or being grandfathered in goes back a long way and I just don't buy NEVER. Another interesting one that I remember is that in the history of the Old Mine Road (from Delaware River to Kingston NY) the author suggested that part of the mystery of the age of the road is caused by Dutch settlers attempting to back-date their land occupation to before the 166? British take-over the 1st time, so their claims were grand-fathered.
If it was England after taking over Canada, I think if you were there, once you swore an oath to the crown you were in. The Arcadians were an example of those not doing that.

4. the old text about the native-born requirement had the escape clause for Alexander Hamilton about "unless you were a resident of the territory of the US at the time of adoption of the Constitution" or such like that always interested me. Do you know if that was ever applied for an area that became part of the US after the 178~ ish era? Vermont? Kentucky? Did they just take people as they were so long as they were taken as citizens in their state? Abe Lincoln was born in 1809 in Kentucky. Would it have been a problem if he had been born in Illinois territory? I'm not sure if being able to be President wasn't just a special case.

What about the people resident in areas of Maine (who until 183? was a part of Mass) who were added to Maine as a part of the Ashburton?-Adams boundary negotiations in 18?? That would be a situation where there was never a territorial interval in the annexation to the US.

Come to think of it, were citizens of the NW territories American citizens by virtue of being subject to laws, like the NW compact, which maybe was under the Articles of the Confederation (don't remember the date of the compact vs. the Constitution, but there were real close).

5. what happened if you the Irish who came over around the time of the famine? What was the basis back then of them becoming citizens? How about the Irish that were supporters of the NY political machines or the Irish that joined the civil war army. This might have been the beginning of naturalization by the methods we knew.

6. The other one that I'd like more info on is the case of seamen either seeking aid from an embassy overseas or even the case of impressment during the war of 1812. The contention of HM Gov was sometimes that the "American" sailors were either Royal Navy deserters or former Englishmen. How did we determine if they were "Americans" if in truth they had come from elsewhere? Were we just defending the property rights of US flag vessels to be unmolested in their employment arrangements? I thought they were referred to as "Americans"?

Inquiring minds want to know...