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The Framers assumed the people didn’t need them to define the meanings of plain English words.

Grab an 18th century dictionary, for crying out loud.

I've been studying this issue since 2008 and i've learned a lot of interesting things about it since then. One of the most significant things I have learned is that the word "Citizen" was not in common usage in 1776, and it did not mean at the time what it has come to be known to mean nowadays.

In English usage of the 1770s, the word "Citizen" meant "resident of a city." It was an amalgamation of the word "City" and "zen" as in "denizen." It literally meant "Denizen of a City."

The usage of the word to describe a member of a Country was not an English usage of the word. Blackstone and Shakespeare both use the word exclusively in the context of being a member of a specific City.

Usage of the word to describe membership of a nation was pretty much unknown to the English speaking people's of that time period. This usage of the word only occurred in one place in the world at that time; Switzerland.

This is understandable because Switzerland was the only country in the world at the time which was created from a collection of "city-states", of which there were incidentally thirteen of them. :)

The Swiss founding document "Charte des prêtres, Pfaffenbrief." (1370) is probably the first known usage of the word "Citizen" (Citoyen) to indicate membership in a Nation rather than membership of a city.

The point here is that the Founders were not originally familiar with the word in the manner that we use it today. It was a change to them when they adopted the Swiss usage of the word rather than the English usage of the word at that time.

And why would they adopt the Swiss usage of a word to replace the far more familiar English term "Subject"? Why indeed did they replace the word "Subject" at all? People would have us believe that we adopted the English Law methodology for creating subjects and then applied it to the word "Citizen", but if that's true, why didn't we just keep the word "Subject"?

It is clear the founders wanted to break from the word "Subject" both in meaning and in usage to describe the newly created members of the Republic, and so they adopted this Swiss word to convey this new relationship between the State and the Individual.

My point is that the word "Citizen" itself demonstrates that we followed Vattel's "Natural Law" , and not English common law. Had we intended to follow English common law, we would have kept using the word "Subject."

Very interesting research regarding the etymology of the term "citizen". Thanks for the background.

However, I would disagree with the reason why the framers scuttled "subject" in favor of "citizen". The term "subject" inferred subordination to the state, while the framers considered the individual to be "sovereign".

Otherwise, I'd contend that the 1790 & 1795 laws regarding citizenship clearly indicate that the framers (who were part of the legislature at the time) wanted every benefit of citizenship conveyed to children born abroad of an American citizen father -- including eligibility for the presidency.

Such citizenship was an accepted part of British common law because Britain's far-flung commercial interests required British subjects to be far-flung across the globe themselves. A child was no less British because he was born in India of a British father and a maharani.

It was not until 1932, as I recall, that the U.S. parental citizenship requirement was modernized to make the mother the co-equal of the father -- but the requirement remained one citizen parent.

“...the word “Citizen” itself demonstrates that we followed Vattel’s “Natural Law” , and not English common law. Had we intended to follow English common law, we would have kept using the word “Subject.”

Well done. I wholeheartedly agree.