A Vattel paragraph in English being quoted by Jay who used the term natural born citizen in his letter to Washington. This was in 1785..Obamabots said there was no English version available teill ten years after the Constitution. A Vattel paragraph in English being quoted by Jay who used the term natural born citizen in his letter to Washington. This was in 1785..Obamabots said there was no English version available teill ten years after the Constitution.“Obamabots said there was no English version available teill ten years after the Constitution.”
I’ve said that, and I’m not an Obamabot. It was what I read. When I had more time, I dug into it...there were unauthorized translations within 3 years of the publication, and a formal one a few years after that - well before the Constitutional Convention.
So when I said that, I erred - but it was an honest error. There has been so much Internet discussion on NBC that it is tough to separate the truth from error - and most of us are not experts in the field, but people trying to find out the truth.
To be fair, that is not what they say. The say that the natural born citizen language does not appear in the English translations until the 1793 (sometimes they say the 1797 edition which was just a cleanup of the 1793 translation), However I have not seen any but the first, 1760, translation and the 1793/7 one, so I cannot say for certain.
But it also doesn't matter, enough of the founders could read and speak French, and didn't need the translation. The 1793 translation is clearly the more representative one. The earlier ones did not even translate "indigenes" and translated "naturels" as natives, whereas the better translation is "natural ones" for naturels and "natives" for "indigenes".
There clearly were pre Constitutional Convention translations, the first seems to have been in 1759 and 1760 (different volumes) Since that was right after the French original was published, it was clearly a "quick and dirty" translation.
It's not entirely clear if the Dumas edition, which Franklin thanked Dumas for sending in a letter dated December 19, 1775.
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Oh, in looking up Dumas Franklin and Vattel, I find that what Dumas sent to Franklin was an edition in French. Thus the founders had access to Vattel, and Franklin along with many of the other founders, could certainly read and write in French. So even if they did have an earlier English translation, which they very likely did, they didn't need one either.
John Jay seems to have made the first recorded use of the term, in a letter to G. Washington, that the Commander in Chief of the American Army be required to be a Natural Born Citizen. Jay was Secretary for foreign affairs under the articles of confederation, 1784 to 1789. French was the language of international diplomacy (a fact which lingers on in the Olympics where announcement are made in French). Jay's grandfather was a French Protestant. John Jay was educated at King's College, now Columbia, in New York. he was part of the delegation, along with Franklin and Adams, that negotiated the treaty of Paris, which ended the revolution. At least in part, it was a 3 way negotiation, with France as the 3rd party. I expect he was fluent in French as well.
As an aside, shortly before Jay's letter to Washington, Hamilton had submitted a draft Constitution. The relevant part of it read:
No person shall be eligible to the office of President of the United States unless he be now a Citizen of one of the States, or hereafter be born a Citizen of the United States
Jay suggested to Washington:
Permit me to hint whether it would not be wise and seasonable to provide a strong check to the admission of Foreigners into the administration of our national Government, and to declare expressly that the Command in Chief of the American army shall not be given to nor devolve on, any but a natural born Citizen
Thus the founders expressly rejectged the "born a citizen" language in favor of the "Natural born citizen" language. if they meant the same thing, why change it? Since there were no laws making persons born outside the country citizens, we can eliminate the statutory citizen at birth possibility, which leaves only the "born in the country" type of citizen. That would be included in the Hamiliton language, so "natural born citizen" must mean more than that. The only thing left would be those born in the country to citizen parents, or at least a citizen father.