Posted on 12/12/2008 10:55:50 PM PST by Calpernia
BFL
Thanks!!
My first sentence of my first paragraph. That was a myth. There are cites throughout backing that up.
This is good, question is has the electoral college decided to adhere to the definitive definition or will they fall for the EASY way out.
What is more pertinent is that English Common Law going back 150 years before the Constitution was established stated that a child born in England was a natural born citizen regardless of the nationality of the parents. And the founding fathers would have known that.
Thanks for the great post.
I see no cites that deny the influence of Locke; I see cites that support the idea that there was more than one influence on the Constitution.
Vattel’s principles of constitutional law were entirely different from the British constitution. American colonists attacked the foundation of the King and Parliament’s power, by demanding that Vattel’s principles of constitutional law be the basis for interpreting the British constitution.
You are right, I edited most of the Locke disputes out because the blog post was turning into a thesis.
The American Revolution was a battle against the philosophy of Locke and the English utilitarians. The myth that John Locke was the philosopher behind the American Republic, is easily refuted by examining how Locke’s philosophy steered Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson’s actions make it clear that, had Locke’s philosophy been the inspiration for the American Revolution, the U.S. would never have become the world’s leading nation and industrial power. Jefferson, who claimed that the three greatest men in history were the British empiricists Francis Bacon, John Locke, and Isaac Newton, adopted their outlook that sense certainty is the basis for all knowledge, writing:
I feel, therefore I exist. I feel bodies which are not myself: there are other existences then. I call them matter. I feel them changing place. This gives me motion. Where there is an absence of matter, I call it void, or nothing, or immaterial space. On the basis of sensation, of matter and motion, we may erect the fabric of all the certainties we can have or need.
Having denied that human nature is creative reason, Jefferson saw society and economics as based on fundamentally fixed relationships. Therefore he endorsed Thomas Malthus’ ideology, that man’s needs must exceed his ability to produce. He rejected national economic development through the increase of the productive powers of labor, and instead accepted Adam Smith’s free trade doctrines. Jefferson saw slavery as appropriate for Blacks, whom he considered as inherently inferior.
Jefferson opposed Hamilton’s measures for the development of the nation, and in a private letter stating his opposition to Hamilton’s National Bank, for example, he raved that any person in the state of Virginia, who cooperated with the Bank, “shall be adjudged guilty of high treason and suffer death accordingly.”
Jefferson was fanatically opposed to the development of American industry, and described the growth of cities in America as “a canker which soon eats to the heart of its laws and constitution.” He fought to keep the nation as a feudal plantation.
Cites:
Thomas Jefferson, Letter to John Adams, Aug. 15, 1820.
Thomas Jefferson, Letter to John Trumbull, Feb 15, 1789, in Thomas Jefferson: Writings - New York: Library of America, 1984, pp. 939-40
Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Jean Baptiste Say, Feb. 1, 1804, in Writings, pp. 2243-44.
Thomas Jefferson, Letter to James Madison, Oct. 1, 1792, in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. by John Catanzariti - Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990, pp. 432-33.
Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, in Writings, p. 290.
Leibniz wrote New Essays on Human Understanding as an explicit refutation of Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.
OCR’d it for you. Thanks for the post. :)
BOOK 1 CHAPTER 19
Of Our Native Country, and Several Things That Relate to It
§ 212 Citizen and Natives
The citizens are the members 0f the civil society bound to this
society by certain duties. and subject to its authority. they equally
participate in its advantage, The natives, or natural born citizen
are those born in the Country of parents who are citizens. As the
society cannot exist and perpetuate itself otherwise than by the
children of the citizens, those children naturally follow the condition
of their fathers, and succeed to all their rights. The society is
supposed to desire this, in consequence of what it owes to its own
preservation; and it is presumed as matter of course, that each
citizen on entering into society, reserves to his children the right of
becoming members of it. The country of the fathers is therefore that
of the children: and these become true citizens merely by their tacit
consent. We shall soon see whether, on their coming to the years of
discretion, they may renounce their right, and what they owe to the
country in which they were born. I say that in order to be of the
country, it is necessary that a person be born of a father who is
citizen; for, if he is born there of a foreigner, it will be only
the place of his birth, and not his Country.
Bookmarked for later read.
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