The term "citizen" as understood in our law, is precisely analogous to the term subject in the common law, and the change of phrase has entirely resulted from the change of government. The sovereignty has been transferred from one man to the collective body of the people - and he who before was a "subject of the king" is now "a citizen of the State."
Gray is citing State v. Manuel, an 1838 case before the North Carolina Supreme Court.
The following is the first portion of the paragraph containing the sentence cited:
It has been said that before our Revolution, free persons of colour did not exercise the right of voting for members of the colonial legislature. How this may hvae been, it would be difficult at this time to ascertain. It is certain however that very few, if any, could have claimed the right of suffrage, for a reason of a very different character than the one supposed. The principle of freehold suffrage seems to have been brought over from England with the first colonists, and to have been preserved almost invariably in the colony ever afterwards. In the act of 1743, ch. 1, (Swan's Revisal, 171,) it will be seen that a freehold of fifty acres was necessary to entitle the inhabitant of a county to vote, and by the act of 2d Sept. of 1746, ch. 1, Ibid. 223, the freeholders only of the respective towns of Edenton, Bath, Newbern and Wilmington were declared entitled to vote for members of the Colonial Legislature. The very Congress which framed our constitution, was chosen by freeholders. That constitution extended the elective franchise to every freeman who had arrived at the age of 21, and paid a public tax; and it is a matter of universal notoriety that under it, free persons without regard to colour, claimed and exercised the franchise until it was taken from free men of colour a few years since by our amended constitution. But surely the possession of political power is not essential to constitute a citizen. If it be, then women, minors, and persons who have not paid public taxes are not citizens - and free white men who have paid public taxes and arrived at full age, but hove not a freehold of fifty acres, inasmuch as they may vote for one branch and cannot vote for the other branch of our legislature, would be in an intermediate state, a sort of hybrids between citizens and not-citizens. The term "citizen" as understood in our law, is precisely analogous to the term subject in the common law, and the change of phrase has entirely resulted from the change of government. The sovereignty has been transferred from one man to the collective body of the people - and he who before was a "subject of the king" is now "a citizen of the State." Considering therefore the defendant as having a right to the protection of the clauses in the constitution and declaration of rights on which he relies, we proceed to the examination of the alleged repugnancy between these and the act of 1831. The 39th section of the constitution is in these words: "The person of a debtor, where there is not a strong presumption of fraud, shall not be continued in prison after delivering up bona fide all his estate, real and personal for the use of his creditors in such manner as shall be hereafter regulated by law."
It is quite clear that Judge Gaston's references to "our law" and "our constitution" are references to the statutes and Constitution of North Carolina. As North Carolina has a reception statute the cited sentence is true in North Carolina. The same can not be said for the federal government which does not incorporate common law via Constitution, reception statute, or other method. The founding principle of the federal government is "the law of nature and nature's god", as such it differs from the states. The cited sentence is inapplicable to the federal government.
Correct.
As North Carolina has a reception statute the cited sentence is true in North Carolina.
Correct.
The same can not be said for the federal government which does not incorporate common law via Constitution, reception statute, or other method.
Only partly correct.
The US Supreme Court cited Gaston as an example of what the situation was, at least, in North Carolina. But the application of the principle went beyond that state.
And Vice Chancellor Sandford in New York (1844) examined the question thoroughly in Lynch v. Clarke. He said (I'm paraphrasing here) that since the Framers of the Constitution talked about citizenship for the United States as if it meant something that everybody understood, then there must have been a national rule that everyone agreed upon, at the time of the Constitution, that determined exactly who was a citizen of the United States. It wasn't written, but it had to exist, otherwise they couldn't have meaningfully talked about citizens.
He said that if there had been variation in the rules used to determine citizenship by the thirteen original States, then there might be a bit of difficulty in determining exactly what that national rule was. But he found that there was no variation at all.
And in fact, my own independent review of the citizenship rules in the thirteen original States found exactly the same thing. Virtually every one of the 13 original States had adopted the English common law. And with it, they adopted the rule for how citizenship was determined. One or two States didn't adopt the common law, but DID adopt the exact same rule for how citizenship was determined.
Therefore, all 13 States were completely unanimous on how citizenship was determined. It was determined as it had always been, using the same rule that had applied in the English common law.
Sandford therefore said that this rule formed an American common law rule for citizenship. No, we didn't adopt the English common law in general terms at the national level. But according to Sandford, we indirectly adopted the same rule for citizenship, because that rule was the law of all 13 original States, and it therefore became the American common law rule for the entire nation.
And the US Supreme Court cited Sandford's analysis approvingly.
Meanwhile, we have the words of Alexander Hamilton as well, who told us in The Federalist that if we wanted to understand the meaning of terms in the Constitution, we should look to that nation from which our jurisprudence is derived: England.
This is a slightly different route that leads to the exact same place. This is the definition-of-words route. If you want to know what some legal term in the Constitution means, go see what it meant in the English common law. Because that was the legal terminology that the Framers used. And there are a bunch of terms in the Constitution that get their meaning from the English common law.
In fact, even the Constitutional reference to the "law of nations" CLEARLY comes from Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England, and NOT from Vattel or any of his fellows. (See my profile for more commentary on that.)
In short, the reason why birther Constitutional claims have met with stiff opposition at FR is NOT because FreeRepublic is crawling with Obama supporters.
It's because they're bullcrap. I'm sorry you've bought into them, but they are about 98% without any basis in history or in law.
And no, the 2% doesn't count for much. The 2% comes from a very few folks out on the fringe (such as David Ramsay and Samuel Roberts) who either didn't know what the heck they were talking about, or had some special axe to grind, or were overruled by people of greater authority.
I'm not counting in the 2% other people whose words have been misrepresented by birthers, like John Bingham, Jacob Howard, Lyman Trumbull, or John Marshall. It's already been discussed how Marshall was talking about treatment of a US citizen living in a country with whom we were at war - NOT citizenship itself; and how nobody in the 1860s debates EVER claimed children of immigrants were anything other than born US citizens, and some of those folks clearly indicated that such people were, in fact, born citizens.