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To: Bruce Campbells Chin
The citizenship of every person in the Colonies at the time of the Revolution was determined by English law. Everyone knew that if you were born in one of the Colonies, you were a full citizen under English law. That's what everyone understood because that's what they were born into.

Madison disagreed. He said the primary allegiance was to the colony of birth and that the allegiance to England was secondary. IOW, one was NOT a full citizen under English law, because the DoI dissolved that allegiance ... and under English law, citizenship requires perpetual allegiance.

I think there is a distinction which will invalidate his doctrine in this particular, a distinction between that primary allegiance which we owe to that particular society of which we are members, and the secondary allegiance we owe to the sovereign established by that society. This distinction will be illustrated by the doctrine established by the laws of Great Britain, which were the laws of this country before the revolution. The sovereign cannot make a citizen by any act of his own; he can confer denizenship, but this does not make a man either a citizen or subject. In order to make a citizen or subject, it is established, that allegiance shall first be due to the whole nation; it is necessary that a national act should pass to admit an individual member. In order to become a member of the British empire, where birth has now endowed the person with that privilege, he must be naturalized by an act of parliament.

Madison explained further:

I conceive that every person who owed this primary allegiance to the particular community in which he was born retained his right of birth, as the member of a new community; that he was consequently absolved from the secondary allegiance he had owed to the British sovereign:

I doubt that English law recognized its citizenship as secondary allegiance. It's because of this principle that Madison references that the founders who were born in and to members of the colonies considered themselves to be natural-born citizens, not natural-born subjects.

36 posted on 02/29/2012 10:17:03 AM PST by edge919
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To: edge919
First, Madison did not disagree. Subjective loyalties don't change citizenship. Further, from what you cited, Madison said this:

I conceive that every person who owed this primary allegiance to the particular community in which he was born retained his right of birth, as the member of a new community;

that he was consequently absolved from the secondary allegiance he had owed to the British sovereign:

Clearly, independence changed to whom loyalty and citizenship ran because the identity of the sovereign changed, but it did not change the rules that determined citizenship itself. Did people who were previously citizens of Massachusetts because they were born there somehow shift to being a non-citizen after independence? No. In fact, the Constitution doesn't define citizenship at all, and the only law in effect in the Colonies that could reasonably be assumed to define citizenship was the exact same pure birthright citizenship to which all the colonists had been subject under English law. It was all they knew.

But again what Madison or any other Framer may have held for an opinion isn't relevant. Power comes from the people, so it is their reasonable understanding of the normal meaning of those words, in the context of their time, that matters. You can't slip some ideosyncratic definition of citizenship into the Constitution silently, based on the unwritten opinions of some of the people involved in its drafting. the citizenship of their parents was suddenly an issue?

40 posted on 02/29/2012 10:38:06 AM PST by Bruce Campbells Chin
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