Posted on 05/12/2010 12:36:53 PM PDT by rxsid
Article II, Section 1, Clause 5 from the U.S. Constitution states:
"No person except a natural born citizen, or a citizen of the United States, at the time of the adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the office of President; neither shall any person be eligible to that office who shall not have attained to the age of thirty five years, and been fourteen Years a resident within the United States."
"When our government took its place among nations, its statesmen were guided by the treatises of Grotius, Barbeyrac, Puffendorf, Bynkershoek, above all, Vattel. 1 Vattel was used 1792-1795 by President Stiles at Yale for instruction." Pg. 516.
"In WILLIAM AND MARY COLLEGE, President Lyon G Tyler states that the Law of Nations was taught first by the Professor of Moral Philosophy in 1779, and continuously since the text book being Vattel until 1861. This seems to have been at Jefferson's suggestion." Pg. 518
Wow. What an amazing distortion of common law and Vattel.
Common law was not subject to change at the whim of the crown, nor was it particularly oligarchical, except as all society was oligarchical at the time. Common law was case law growing out of centuries of judicial decisions. It was remarkably resistant to monarchical tampering. Much of it went to back to medieval and even Anglo-Saxon times and incorporated the ancient customs of the people, not the aristocracy.
Vattel, OTOH, was a Swiss attorney writing theory based on civil law. Civil law was based not in oligarchy but in autocracy, on the law of the Roman Empire which was indeed subject to change at the whim of absolute monarchs.
Portraying Blackstone and common law as aristocratic/autocratic and Vattel and civil law as democratic exactly reverses the true relationship, although admittedly such issues are not as cleancut as my oversimplified description here.
Actually I think they were French language versions. Dumas was the editor of one such.
See Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts, Volume 20 :
I guess that depends on what one means by "prominent", but the phrase "natural born free citizen" appears in the Journal of Congress for 11 Nov 1777.
And for the more certain preservation of friendship and mutual intercourse between the people of the different States in this Union, the Citizens of every State, going to reside in another State, Shall be entitled to all the rights and privileges of the natural born free Citizens of the State to which they go to reside;
Also in 1777, as reported in The POLITICAL TEXTBOOK or ENCYCLOPEDIA, CONTAINING EVERYTHING NECESSARY FOR THE REFERENCE OF THE POLITICIANS AND STATESMEN OF THE UNITED STATES.(1857)
.. the first evidence to which I will refer on this point is a resolution reported to the Continental Congress in 1777, by a committee, of which Thomas Jefferson was chairman, and Mr. Sherman, Mr. Gerry, Mr. Read, and Mr. Williams were members. It is in these words:—
" Resolved, That it is inconsistent with the interests of the United States to appoint any person not a thereof to the office of minister, charg6 d'affaires, consul, or vice-consul, or to any other civil department in a foreign country; and that a copy of this resolve be sent to Messrs. Adams, Franklin and Jay, ministers of the said States in Europe."
Besides, Blackstone was no more prominent than Vattel, and was less quoted or referance by the founders. Yes, the Vattel they were familiar with was in French, but then again, most of them could read and speak that language.
Of natural born subject. While Vattel was definitely writing of citoyens/citizens.
Unfortunately for your theory, when Vattel wrote there were almost no citizens (in the Republican sense you mean) in Europe. Almost all Europeans were the subjects of kings far more absolute than the kings of England.
Use of the term citizen in the sense you mean developed during the French Revolution. Vattel had been dead for a long time by then.
So now citizen doesn't mean citizen?
So what did it mean?
Citizens obviously did not have same sorts of rights as modern ones do, but they were still different from subjects, who owed personal and permanent (in theory) feality to the monarch.
Unfortunately for your theory, when Vattel wrote there were almost no citizens (in the Republican sense you mean) in Europe. Almost all Europeans were the subjects of kings far more absolute than the kings of England.
Use of the term citizen in the sense you mean developed during the French Revolution. Vattel had been dead for a long time by then.
------------------------------------------------------------
I believe Vattel was describing concepts of natural law as he saw it, and not a particular government or society found exclusively in Europe at the time in which he lived. His work built upon previous writers of natural law...going all the way back to the ancient Greeks whose citizens had a legal right to participate in the affairs of the state.
Jefferson left William and Mary in 1762, but remained a law student of George Wythe. Jefferson read "Ethics, religion, natural and sectarian, and natural law for the next fours years (1762-1766). Pg. 36/37.
His (Jefferson) legal notebook - Commonplace Book he called it - is crammed with extracts from his reading. Lord Kames's Historical Law Tracts, a book which among other things applied natural law to the legal profession, made a deep impression, to judge by the number of entries. Pg. 43.
The United States of America, 1765-1865 (1930)
Author Edward Channing
ISBN 0543977420, 9780543977427
describing the Court of Inquiry [regarding Benedict Arnold], Lord Mahon stigmatized Nathaneal Green [who presided over the court] as ignorant to Vattel and Puffendorf, and as having "no light of study." As a matter of fact, there was no man in America who probably knew more about the usages of war than Nathaneal Greene. Vattel was a book much read by the American leaders of that time."
Hey, I’m not the one drawing a legalistic distinction between the idea of subject and citizen.
The concepts in common law that applied to subjects were transferred to the United States legal system under the term citizens, since our country has no subjects.
The idea that there is a distinction is due to a ludicrous claim that all common law references to subjects and their allegiance are not transferrable to the United States, since we don’t have subjects.
Hey, I’m not the one saying that a subject who owes allegiance to a person is identical to a citizen of a Constitutional Republic. If they aren’t identical in meaning, then the framers would not have “transferred” the definition from one term to that of another that shares only 66% of the same words.
Subjects were held to be in perpetual allegiance to the English monarchy.
Expatriation was and is a right that was given an extraordinary amount of consideration by our Founders.
Subjects could not renounce their allegiance, therefore expatriation was not possible. Once a subject of the King of England, always a subject of the king of England, no matter where.
Our Founders did in fact renounce their allegiance and were met with war because of the dispute over it, not once but twice.
The meaning of natural-born citizen and natural born subject do not equate, not then, certainly not to our Founders who were for the most part considered natural born subjects and were under the threat of imprisonment or death for challenging it, and not now.
The treatise that spells out legalities as far as citizenship under a constitutional republic was by all accounts quite popular with those same Founders. Lo and behold, it contains a definition of natural-born citizenship that has been cited nearly word for word by numerous Supreme Court justices and several prominent members of Congress when proposing Amendments dealing with citizenship.
Oddly, this definition is rejected by some, in favor of a term pertaining to a feudal relationship to a sovereign monarch, the very same monarch explicitly rejected by those Founders.
Strange.
Catalogue of the library of the Athenaeum, in Salem, Massachusetts: with the by-laws and regulations
Author: Salem Athenaeum
Publisher: Printed at the office of the Gazette, 1811.
Where did the Statue of Liberty come from and why, Sherman Logan?
The homes of America
Editor: Martha Joanna Lamb
Publisher: D. Appleton and company, 1879
Original from the University of Wisconsin - Madison
"One division [Of the library in the "Bedford House" of the 1st Chief Justice John Jay] contains the favorite authors of the Chief Justice, weighty folios of Grotius, Puffendorf, Vattel and other masters of the science of international law, standard theological and miscellaneous works and the classic authors of antiquity. Pg. 108.
"The Baron von Pufendorf's work, along with that of Locke, convinced Americans of the validity of natural law as early as 1717, when John Wise cited him as a primary authority." Pg. 31
"American legal thought, as it had done for more than one hundred years [from 1789], drew upon world legal thought--from Justinian, Samuel Pufendorf, Hugo Grotius, and Emmerich Vattel--as well as the English tradition from Sir Edward Coke and Edward Vaughn to Blackstone. As the Pennsylvania Law Journal of 1846 put it, Americans had none of "that prejudice against foreign systems of law, merely because they are foreign, which is all-powerful in England." Pg. 87
It does but not for the Presidency. The President must be born here of parents both of whom were also born here.
The founders were adamant and even underlined certain words that for the purpose of serving as President of the U.S. one must be born here in the US of parents who also were born here.
The new country America, was fresh from being ruled by a king of England and the last thing they would have wanted was parents of a potential potus who were not born in the U.S. and had other or dual citizenship. They made that plain and clear over and over.
Anyone who read your intro and then the first 7 posts will have a hard time arguing differently.
Since we are not allowed to view zeros long form we don't know if obama SR. is the true father or who the true mother is either.
He may well have been born of US parents for all we know. If so he lied to get into office making his Presidency even more null and void no matter what.
Your early documentation from Jay's writing to George Washington:
Permit me to hint, whether it would be wise and reasonable to provide a strong check to the admission of foreigners into the administration of our national govt. and to "declare expressly that the Commander in Chief of the American army shall not be given to nor devolve on, any but a natural born citizen.(the word born is underlined in Jay's letter which signifies the importance of allegiance from birth.)
Is it a stretch to infer that Jay meant that both parents should be of U.S. birth as well, considering the times, and our newly formed govt. giving us independence from Eng? Not hardly.
In the New Englander:
the term natural born citizen is used and excludes all persons owing allegiance by birth to foreign states.
This says it all. Intent was to have a potus of whom both parents were born "here".
John Bingham--who was the father of the 14th amendment:
Every human being born within the jurisdiction of the US of parents not owing allegiance to any foreign sovereignty is in the language of your constitution itself a natural born citizen.
Once again we have intent. Parents must be born here--how much does it take?
I love you summation as well;
The point is...the meaning of NBC has always been about being born in the sovereign territory of the US to 2 citizen parents(and those parents who do not owe allegiance to another foreign country.
Brilliant job rxsid!
IMHO to ignore the intent of a newly formed govt. that was seeking independence from a king, not to infer that both parents should be born here is naive and erroneous.
The parents need only be citizens. They generally were born here, but they could just as well be naturalized, as long as it was before their child was born.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.