Natural-Born Subject; Pre-&-Post Calvin Pt 2.

all comments by A. Nash are in [brackets]

Both Timothy Cunningham’s Law Dictionary (1764), and Matthew Bacon’s A New Abridgment of the Law (1736), gave the same exact definition of “natural-born subject” (by birth):

All those are natural born subjects, whose parents, at the time of their birth, were under the actual obedience of our king, and whose place of birth was within his dominions.

This definition matches the definition of “subject born” found in Lord Coke’s Report on Calvin’s Case (1608) and in Giles Jacob’s New Law Dictionary (1782).

What you are discussing here was the necessity of being native-born as a requisite to fulfill one of the two requisites for being deemed a real natural-born subject, just as it was necessary to fulfill this one requisite before being deemed a natural-born citizen in America. This was the one thing that natural-born citizenship shared with natural-born subjectship. Both shared this requisite due to the previous history of native-born citizenship or subjectship.

I have no problem acknowledging that naturalization gave naturalized subjects the rights of natural-born subjects but did not make them natural-born subjects in fact because they lacked jus soli.

[Incorrect.  What they lacked was any natural connection to the English people.  They were foreigners.  They had no English parents.  Natural membership in the English family required being born of members of that family.]

By the way, it was not a foregone conclusion that denizens gained all the same rights during the time period you mentioned. They increasingly gained rights but there was always conflict about their ultimate status. And remember, all subjects, women and denizens included, owed allegiance to the sovereign. Naturalized, native-born and natural-born citizens owed allegiance to the Constitution and to America—a radical difference.

  [but the Constitution owed them the protection of their natural right of membership, unless they were born of foreigners, but it failed to provide that protection, (that was remedied in the Naturalization Act of 1790 which ordered that the foreign-born children of Americans be recognized as “natural born citizens”) resulting in the confusion illustrated by placing a hyphen between natural and born, as if they constitute a term when no such term ever existed.]

“4) All English subjects as distinguished from aliens, (except persons made ‘denizens’ by royal charter), regardless of how or when they acquired their subjecthood, were considered as natural-born subjects. There are multiple examples in which the term ‘natural-born subject’ is used in reference to persons who were naturalized by Parliament, and to persons to whom Parliament granted ‘subject’ status by statute (for example, children born abroad to English fathers).

[again, Parliament “granted” nothing.  Just as Congress granted nothing to foreign-born Americans.  By blood they are natural members of their parents’ nation.  Parliament and Congress might have been more emphatic from our distant perspective, but they were not being vague from their own.  Neither ever wrote a statute ordering the official recognition of a fiction of law, -or at least Congress never did.  They ordered the recognition of actual facts which were not widely recognized by those ignorant of natural law.]

But in all of these examples, Parliament never said that such persons actually were natural-born subjects. All such persons were merely deemed to be “natural-born subjects.” Again, women were subjects or natural subjects but not natural-born subjects. They owed allegiance but they couldn’t bequeath or own lands. You cannot claim that all foreigners made into subjects were deemed natural-born subjects if biologically half of them weren’t considered so. This constitutes a flaw in reasoning.

[a decree by Parliament that one must be adjudged and deemed to be a natural-born subject meant at the time that that is just what they are, -and all of the king’s officials better not fail to recognize them as such.  Half of the foreigners made into subjects were not women.  If America never naturalized foreign women until about a century ago, then that was due to what had been the status quo before the nation was formed.  Women could not benefit from the rights of subjects because they were not subjects.  They were what might be best described as British Nationals; members of the British family, but not allowed the high title and privilege of subject.  It’s a judgement mistake to think that the three terms; “subject” “natural subject” and “natural-born subject” were not synonymous under the law because there was no area of rights which all subjects did not possess.  But there was an area of privilege that was off-limits to the naturalized, and they included high positions in the government and military. It’s mentioned further down.]

Sometimes historians neglect to recognize reality when they read sentences like, “We are bound by Act of Parliament to believe, that the words children of all natural born subjects included the child of every British father; and I beg to know, what there is contained in those words, to denote the difference of sex, or in other words, to make the term natural born subjects apply to men and not to women?” Somehow these historians think that omissions specifically denying women natural-born subjectship equated to their having it. That was not the case.

[It’s easier for law makers to allow tradition to rule rather than state that tradition in law, to the revulsion of all of the women in their lives.  They didn’t need that kind of heat, so they avoided it.]

Multiple sources say that children born in England, of alien parents were statutory denizens, as a result of a law that Parliament had enacted in 1604. Statutory denizens were deemed to be natural-born subjects in the legal sense, but they were not subject-born as defined in Lord Coke’s Report on Calvin’s Case.
All English subjects as distinguished from aliens, (except persons made “denizens” by royal charter), regardless of how or when they acquired their subjecthood, were considered as natural-born subjects. There are multiple examples in which the term “natural-born subject” is used in reference to persons who were naturalized by Parliament, and to persons to whom Parliament granted “subject” status by statute…
When Coke’s day rolled in, naturalized subjects had gained full rights of natural-born subjects [in the sense of the previously equivalent terminology] through common law and statute but they were still not technically natural-born subjects, more an abstract difference than a real one. “Coke in his Fourth Institutes noted that aliens and denizens were ineligible to sit in Parliament but that this disability was removed by naturalization.

‘An alien,’ he observed, ‘cannot be elected of the parliament, because he is not the king’s liege subject, and so it is albeit he be made denizen by letters patent, etc. for thereby he be made quasi, seu tanquam ligeus: but that will not serve, for he must be made ligeus revera and not quasi, etc. And we have had such an one chosen and disallowed by the house of commons, because such a person can hold no place of judicature: but if an alien be naturalized by parliament, then he is eligible to this or any other place of judicatures.’”

Coke’s version of naturalization considered an alien thusly naturalized reborn as a natural subject, owing the same allegiance to the king. What I have presented as Axiom 6 posed no problem to Coke’s illogical thought process that an alien could give up his allegiance to a foreign prince but an Englishman, newly reborn or not, could not give up his allegiance to the English crown [by doing likewise in America, talk about hypocracy!].

Here’s another example that restricted [forbid] a privilege to both denizens and naturalized subjects:

Under his reign as William II, large numbers of Dutch immigrants settled in England, scaring the parliament, which passed the Act of Settlement in 1701 that declared:

no person born out of the dominions of the kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland or of the dominions thereunto belonging (although he be naturalized or made a denizen) except such as are born of English parents shall be capable to be of the Privy Council, or a Member of either House of Parliament, or to enjoy any office or place of trust, either civil or military, or to have any grant of land, tenements or hereditaments from the Crown to himself or to any others in trust for him. [there you have the real explanation of who is a natural subject of Britain.]

And:

From the beginning, reliance on the British system of subjectship cast a shadow over rights to property ownership, inheritance, and, of course, transferability of title for the newcomers. The colonial leaders had always viewed this form of subjectship as detrimental to enticement. They wanted a new form of citizenship that eradicated the impediments ensconced in British subjectship. As the eighteenth century progressed, the colonists started to refer to societal membership in a colony as citizenship rather than subjectship. Their consistent, former rejection of England’s hierarchical ranking of native-born subjects, naturalized subjects, and denizens never relented. They envisioned an America where the laws of nature and the laws of nations provided the basis for citizenship, but that would have to wait for the revolution.

. . .

Madison spoke on 22 May 1789, showing that, in his mind, denizens in Britain did not enjoy full rights: “It is well known to many gentlemen on this floor, as well as to the public, that the petitioner (David Ramsay) is a man of talents, one who would not lightly hazard his reputation in support of visionary principles: yet I cannot but think he has erred in one of the principles upon which he grounds his charge. He supposes, when this country separated from Great Britain, the tie of allegiance subsisted between the inhabitants of America and the king of that nation, unless by some adventitious circumstance the allegiance was transferred to one of the United States. 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. (I have shown this to be partially untrue since the colonies passed many laws in direct contradiction to Britain’s.) 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 not endowed the person with that privilege, he must be naturalized by an act of parliament.

[nash: “birth” is totally ambiguous.  I “know” that it refers to what one is via pro-creation, -not birth location. Others don’t know that and assume it refers to where one’s mother was when she finally delivered her child.]
. . .

How is a sentence like this consistent with any single theory of citizenship? Free denizens never had all the rights of natural born subjects in Great Britain; denizens were generally not allowed to take office; and subjectship never depended on stipulated years of residence, except in some very restricted decrees and acts.

Given the above five points, it is no surprise that, in both Cunningham’s Law Dictionary, published in 1764, and Matthew Bacon’s New Abridgment of the Law, published in 1736, “natural-born subject” (in the factual, as opposed to the legal, sense) is defined as one who is born within the realm, of parents owing actual obedience (allegiance) to the king. All other persons who bear the “natural-born subject” label are natural-born subjects in law, but are not natural born subjects in fact.

[What is missing is a recognition that “natural-born subject” was a legal fiction resulting from the Calvin case which merged two types of subjects who were both born as subjects in the eyes of the law.  But you’ll find no such term in all of the legal documents through-out antiquity before the Calvin decision (1608).  It did NOT followed natural law alone since it combined natural subjects with those who were alien-born subjects but deemed to be subjects at birth due to that decision.  In time it would be applied to refer to even naturalized subjects since they were natural subjects also via the fiction of law of natural-ization.]

 As I see it, the evidence is rather compelling and conclusive. Lord Coke’s Report, the various statutes enacted by Parliament, various dictionaries and commentaries that were used in the American colonies, and the English court rulings rendered after Calvin’s Case, present a clear, coherent and consistent picture — but only if we understand that there were two kinds of natural born subjects: real (born) and fictional (made); and the only thing that distinguished the real from the fictional was that the real natural-born subjects were born within the king’s realm, of parents owning actual allegiance to the king.

[that is true concerning national membership under the warped English system but it is a huge mistake to presume that that system was adopted in whole in America by the founders.  They returned to normal natural law which determines nationality.  They didn’t have to accept a system designed to adapt to one President ruling over two separate nations.  That’s like two bodies with one head.  A completely unnatural situation, -one that they were not tied to and no longer had to accept.]

Bob Gard: Historically, natural-born subject meandered from time to time. It was not a consistent term such that “subjects-born” did not equate in all instances to natural-born subjects but did to natural subjects.

In my eBook, I specifically stated more than once that the Supreme Court has no right to interpret what’s in the Constitution. Their jurisdiction is to address the constitutionality of legislation made after and under the Constitution, not in it. The Supreme Court had no right to interpret or judge the supreme law that created the Supreme Court.

What would Christianity say to Christian justices sitting on the bench of the Supreme Court if they declared they had the right to judge their Creator? The Constitution is their creator in the legal realm. The justices must follow the plain English in the document. I give my reasons as well as the reasons of some of the founding fathers. It follows that I don’t care for the illegal abuse of power by the courts.

Only two powers exist that can determine whether Barack Obama is unconstitutional by simply saying that he is not a natural-born citizen by virtue of his not having two American citizen parents. The powers are the sovereignty of the people and the impeachment authority of Congress.

[“the sovereignty of the people” translates to the sovereignty of the States, their governors, legislators and courts.  We would see a constitutional crisis unlike any seen since the Civil War if a State and its officials refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of a presidential contender who won and was sworn in by the Chief Judas, -I mean Justice.  Boy, then everyone would have to take side; the side of individual liberty and responsibility to their oath of office or the side of federal supremacy over the other co-equal partners of the union, a union of which the States are the parents and creators holding the bulk of authority over the lives of their citizens.]

The framers discussed natural-born subject before the War of Independence in terms of the same concepts described by British jurists. [because there was only one primary law; British law -which they were under.]  The framers and the colonists felt that Britain was not conceding to them their British rights as natural-born subjects based on their vast legal knowledge of what natural-born subjects meant under British law.

[but more directly, Parliament was not “conceding” their rights as colonist living under colonial charters between the colonies and the Crown, -with Parliament not even involved.  Remember that the new world of North America was not claimed on behalf of England but of the King of England.  It belonged to the royal family alone.  So how could Parliament pass oppressive laws when it had no law-making authority over the colonists?  Simple, like all governments, they usurped authority.]

Tonchen:

‘Natural-born subject by birth’ is synonymous with ‘subject born’ because, in the reference materials that the Framers had used and relied upon, both terms are defined identically.”

As a general rule, all denizens — including persons who received “denizen status by virtue of birth on English soil to alien parents — had to pay aliens’ duties, which were nearly twice the duties imposed on naturalized subjects and English-born children of English parents. Despite the fact that they had restricted rights, persons made denizens by an act of Parliament were natural-born subjects, whereas persons made denizens by the king were not.

During Elizabeth’s reign, naturalization and denization were synonymous. Both conferred full rights. But the agency performing the naturalization or endenization — whether Parliament or the king — may, as an after-thought, curtail some of the rights inherent in naturalization or endenization. [that is inaccurate]  Since the king almost always restricted the rights of those he endenized to a far greater extent than did Parliament, those who were endenized by the king were stereotyped as vastly inferior (with respect to status and rights) compared to Parliamentary natural-born subjects.

[The king did not chose of his own will to confer lesser rights.  He was not allowed the authority to confer full membership in the nation since that required the consent of the members of the nation, which could only be given via Parliament since only it represented them.]

In English and American law, there is no statutory difference between “natural-born” and “naturalized”. In the United States, natural born citizens and naturalized citizens are the same in the eyes of the law. The courts have ruled that, although there is a Constitutional difference between “natural-born” and “naturalized”, there is no statutory difference.

[that is not an extensive enough elucidation.  What courts do or do not rule is irrelevant to what is actually true.  Natural citizens are citizen-born, American-fathered, citizens by blood while the naturalized are foreigners until made into (fictional) natural citizens by the oath of Allegiance & Renunciation.  Then they are equal, with the one exception which recognizes no fictional status, the presidential eligibility qualification.]

Unlike American law, which distinguishes between “natural-born” and “naturalize”, British law often blurs the distinction; it uses the term “natural-born” in reference to both. The term “natural-born”, in British law, encompasses, not only those who are natural-born by birth, but also those who are natural-born by naturalization (act of Parliament). [the same fiction of law was continued in America, -which allowed no separate classes of citizenship, -no upper-class nor lower-class. No nobility either.]  In American law, the term “natural-born” is used only in reference to those who are natural-born by birth, not to those who are natural-born by naturalization. In the American system, the phrase “natural-born by naturalization” is a nonsensical oxymoron.

[so true, but then that makes “natural-born” a nonsensical redundancy since the only term necessary is the simple English language term of natural citizen.  And be aware, you will not find the term “natural-born” anywhere in the American Constitution nor any naturalization act.  The employment of a hyphen between the two words is the result of not knowing that they have no connection to each other but only to the noun “citizen”.  That means they do not constitute a term of legal artifice as they did in the British system, but are simply common words carrying their common meanings.  The founders were not chained by God to use the same system, or words, or meaning as did the British.  They were free to dump that system and return to natural law and normal common English.  Which they did.]

 The two books by Plowden were published in 1784 and 1785 — too late for them to have had much influence on the Framers of the Constitution as adopted in 1787.
~~~~
Lord Coke’s 7th Report on Calvin’s case: “any place within the King’s dominions without obedience can never produce a natural subject. And therefore if any of the King’s ambassadors in foreign nations, have children there of their wives, being English women, by the common laws of England they are natural-born subjects, and yet they are born out-of the King’s dominions. . . . And whosoever is born within the fee [fidelity?] of the King of England, though it be in another kingdom, is a natural-born subject, and capable and inheritable of lands in England,.”  [“the common laws of England” merely recognized and followed natural law, they didn’t supersede it.]

Gard: It seems evident that natural subjects and natural born subjects were being used interchangeably in the report.
Coke turned everything inside out with a huge number of legal citations going back to ancient times and made everyone in England and Scotland natural-born subjects of James I literally from the day of adjudication [of Calvin’s case] to the next.

[something of an essentially identical nature was done in 1898 by justice Gray in the Supreme Court opinion regarding the Wong Kim Ark case.  He followed the same pattern in order to justify the very same sort of thing; making the alien-born in America citizens, and supposedly basing it on the 14th Amendment (which was construed not on the basis of what it meant then it was written and passed, but what they wanted it to mean, supported by tons of ancient British legal history regarding nationality.  So the direct plain meaning of the original text was ignored.

That wasn’t by accident or oversight.  It was the choice of the court which refused to allow into evidence any testimony as to the original intent of the authors of the amendment.  So… the fix was in even before they heard the case.  Their choice had already been made to make all native-born persons citizens.]

Natural subjects could also owe allegiance to a more general governmental body. Perpetual allegiance, a unique Cokean component, [invented from nothing as a new doctrine] was never a part of “natural subject” in the law of nature or the law of nations.

If there exists anything that made natural-born subject unique, it was perpetual allegiance. In order not to get confused by the apparent interchangeability of natural subject with natural-born subject, you must consider that Calvin’s Case was defining a new term by comparing it to old terms. I argue that, though natural subject was not clearly separated from natural-born subject in many political discourses later, the very act of creating a new term reinforces differences between the two. It seems evident that natural subjects and natural born subjects were being used interchangeably in the report”.  [the best way to incorrectly and dishonestly conflate two different things is to use their labels interchangeably.]

The delegates to the Constitutional Convention had to be informed by Washington as to Jay’s definition, [not if there was none, -but just plain ordinary English] although no hard-copy evidence exists, only corroborative, circumstantial and correlative. [all of which can be and is misinterpreted due to false assumptions, along with ignorance of the preeminence of Natural Law in the thinking of the Founders.] (3) No publisher changed section 212 in Volume I, Book I, Chapter XIX of The Law of Nations until 1797, where “indigenes” was replaced with “natural-born citizens.”

[another textual dishonesty since the original in French was: “Les Naturels ou les Indigenes” -the words “born” and “citizen” were never used by Vattel in relationship to “citoyens”.  Proper translation yields: “The natural (inhabitants) or indigenous (population) are those born in a country of parents who are its citizens.”]

Gard: In 1842 Lord Ashburton acknowledged indirectly that natural-born subject had little to do with natural-born citizen. In a famous letter to Congressman Webster, he wrote: “I am well aware that the laws of our two countries maintain opposite principles respecting allegiance to the sovereign.” (Anti-birthers, the British government admitted that the second tenet of natural-born subject, perpetual allegiance, was not the model for any tenet of natural-born citizen, so why won’t you acknowledge that perhaps the first tenet was not either?)

“America, receiving every year, by thousands, the emigrants of Europe, maintains the doctrine suitable to her condition of the right of transferring allegiance at will. The laws of Great Britain have maintained, from all time [Calvin’s Case] the opposite doctrine. The duties of allegiance are held to be indefeasible, and it is believed that this doctrine, under various modifications, prevails in most, if not in all, the civilized states of Europe. (This was the same kind of political double-talk that Americans have been forced to listen to every day for the last century.)

Gard: in Chapter 8, “The British Constitution and English Common Law,” we were introduced to Edward Coke, a renowned English jurist who tackled the formidable problem faced by James I to unite Scotland and England under his rule. Coke resolved the problem in Calvin’s Case of 1608, which introduced Britain to the term natural-born subject. This meant that the term was not found in ancient history or medieval history. It was fashioned in the last century of the Renaissance with the advent of Calvin’s Case. I have ascribed it to the hand of Edward Coke.

“[Kettner] recognized that “It was not until Sir Edward Coke’s influential opinion in Calvin’s Case (1608) that a theory of allegiance and subjectship was fully articulated.” He didn’t understand the incorrectness of his belief that: “subjectship involved a personal relationship with the king, a relationship rooted in the laws of nature, and hence perpetual and immutable.”

The law of nature that he referred to was not the law of natural inclusion or membership but the law of the jungle.  By it the most powerful specimen has a “natural right” to dominate and subjugate the weaker members.  Since that is certainly a law of nature, he latched on to it even though it is in direct opposition to the law of human nature designed by a creator who only made one class of human, -not a superior class and an inferior class.  So the new doctrine was in violation of the fundamental tenants of natural rights and the natural law related to man, and not to beasts.]

This was the grievous error that always led researchers astray when it came to unraveling the meaning of natural born citizenship. England did not follow the law of nature in this respect, but America did.

Perpetual allegiance was not the overwhelming principle of the law of nations. Expatriation, accepted by America, was. Interestingly, Kettner recognized that the British theory of naturalization included  perpetual allegiance [once naturalized, one could not expatriate one’s self from life-long submission to the crown] and that, “In the colonies this pattern of thinking was reversed. Americans first came to see the allegiance of adopted members as reflecting the character of the naturalization process. This legal procedure involved a form of contract between an alien who chose a new allegiance and a community that consented to adopt him as a subject, and the colonists began to view the allegiance that resulted as volitional and contractual. . . .

Naturalized subjects seemed in fact to share the same status as natives; thus their allegiance ought to be the same. Significantly, the colonists took the model of the naturalized subject as their starting point, and they ultimately concluded that all allegiance ought to be considered the result of a contract resting on consent.”

[No, that was not their view.  They viewed naturalization as a transformation into a new man.  A shedding of all of the old man and his obedience, submission, attachment and loyalty to his foreign monarch and the emergence of a new man, -a free man embracing total liberty bounded only by the civil laws of society and the requirement (a contract) to bear arms to defend the nation if needed.  That was mandatory for naturalization until a Supreme Court ruling after WWII.  The oath was written solely for men since only they could swear to that requirement and be naturalized.  Somewhere in time, that fact was ignored and foreign women began to take the oath of men and become naturalized directly rather than through their husband.]

How could Kettner accept the reversal of perpetual allegiance in America and still believe that American citizenship of any nature was based on British roots? It seems to be an illogical addiction to British heritage and it violates grossly Axiom 6 (Chapter 6 or Glossary). One needs to shed this addiction if he is going to understand the term “natural born Citizen.”

The colonists believed that the bond between the individual and the community was not irrevocably perpetual by birth, but rather a voluntary contract that could be nullified by volition. [that doesn’t take into account the various meanings of the word “bond”.] Membership in a free Republican community had to depend on consent and it had to confer equal rights, the dominant philosophy in the colonies and the thirteen states until John Jay came along to tweak it a bit by his July 25, 1787 letter to Washington, which suggested that one office in America, the Presidency, should not be open to every citizen, native or naturalized.

~the regulations of inheritance seemed adequate. Jumping to 1640, three judges ruled that the daughter of an English merchant born in Poland after the father’s death, was deemed a subject and could inherent by English common law based on the maxim partus sequitur patrem (the offspring follows the condition of the father), which was a maxim of the law of nations and a part of Emer de Vattel’s famous §212 of Volume I, Book I, Chapter IX. They considered the “mother’s status immaterial, as she was under the power of the husband: ‘sub potestate viri, and quasi under the allegiance of our King.

[wives were in subjection to their husbands, the head of the family.  He was the one subject to the Crown directly.  They were not true free subjects but were more like the property of their husband.  They could not be forced to “bear arms” to defend the nation, but he could, in event of an invasion.  That court opinion was a clear and unequivocal validation of natural law being the true determinant of natural nationality, -not the laws of men.  Few cases have ever had to “go there” and make a determination not dependent on national law but on the law of nations, -the law common to all mankind.]

So strong was his [Locke’s] belief that the law of nature had absolutely nothing to do with perpetual allegiance to any king with “Divine Rights” that he did not use once the term of “natural-born subject” in his two treatises.

What should that tell the reader? Remember that Locke, too, was in all likelihood on every bookshelf of every framer of our Constitution.

Locke refused to use the adjectival “natural-born” with the noun “subject” and, for that matter, rarely used the unadorned “subject” but rather used “man” in its place, because perpetual allegiance and king were wrapped up in the term of “natural-born subject.”

Given this, why would the framers, who quoted Locke frequently and who had agreed to establish a presidency and not a monarchy, model natural born Citizen after natural-born subject when Locke himself had rejected it?

[they were all about “rejection”, -rejection of the king, rejection of the Parliament, rejection of the British military and agents to strangle them, rejection of perpetual allegiance, and rejection of dual allegiance.  Instead of following the warped British system, they returned to square one, natural law, natural bonds, natural membership, natural inclusion, along with membership by permission (naturalization) but seeking to promote immigration, the States, or some of them, continued the century old tradition of jus soli common law citizenship for children of unnaturalized immigrants.  So the federal government and the State governments were at odds.  The view of those in State government might have been that such alien-born children who were in-state born were their natural citizens, but more likely not or else a term like “sons of the soil” would not have been coined to describe them, it being apposed to “sons of natives” or “sons of blood”.  But the United States Department of State definitely did not consider them natural citizens.]

In addition, “Locke . . . expressly denied that citizenship could be determined by birth within a certain territory or under a particular government, -writing instead:  ‘a Child is born subject of no Country and Government. He is under his Father’s Tuition and Authority, till he comes to Age of the Discretion and then he is a Free-man, at liberty what Government he will put himself under, what body politic he will unite himself to.’ Apart from patriarchal rule over wives and children, which Locke endorsed only in weakened form, no type of political membership or subjectship was in any sense natural.”

[his view was way too cerebral, -as if humans are cyborgs without feelings of attachment connected to their family, neighborhood, community and society.  In his view, there are essentially no differences between nations.  No racial, language, cultural, ethnic, or religious differences.  One could just transplant himself down in any one of them and not much would be different.  If you grow up in a selfish and heartless society and under an indifferent government, you very likely would not feel any bounds of attachment to such a country, but that can’t be construed to be a normal situation.  Natural bonds attach to one’s own people and nation in normal circumstances, even if liberty is absent.  Just consider the dedication of the French under Napoleon, and the Japanese people to their leadership during WWII, along with the Germans.  But the label “political membership” is not the same as cultural membership.  Americans were political members of the British world but were not cultural members.]

Lawyers and judges manipulated earlier laws through the use of explanatory and declaratory acts in Britain. Even our Supreme Court used this tactic, unconstitutional in the U.S., to redefine Obamacare to erect a façade that it is constitutional

[When discussing the act and statute of King William made in the year 1700 (11 & 12 William 3. c. 36.) Plowden wrote:] “… the statute therefore only confines the benefit to such children, whose fathers and mothers were at the faith (Anglican religion; religion never played a part in natural born citizenship, but it did in natural-born subjectship, still another profound reason to disavow a strong connection) and ligeance of the king of England, at the time of their birth: thus readmitting to the participation of our laws and constitution, these persons, who had only, as it were, accidentally lost the benefit and protection thereof, by their foreign birth; although by every tie of consanguinity and society, they must be supposed to possess an affection and regard for their country and government: so that thus naturalized, they might become in fact and law, as well as in heart and spirit, true native subjects

[It’s a great travesty of mental perspective when natural things are seen only through the eyes of law, legal history, legal opinions, and legal precedent.  One belongs to what they belong to regardless of where they exit the womb.  To submit one’s thinking to the idea that men can disenfranchised the children of their own in order to make their political dogma seem more sensible, is a pathetic degree of surrender of what should be one’s natural perspective.

Children naturally belong to their parents.  The parents are members of a country.  The children inherit that membership.  The law says they can’t?  No law said that, but it was simply assumed it must be so if birth within the king’s realm was an element of being his subject.  But it was not so. It violated the law of nature and the law of nations based on it.  The government could not ignore that fact so it pretended to allow them to be English by passing ordinances recognizing them as that which they were born as; natural members of their parents’ homeland where they would no doubt be raised.]

British natural-born subjects were equivalent to native-born subjects (in reality and not just legal jargon) after all the Scots born before the union [of the Scottish and English Crowns] had died. Lord Coke rejected the term native-born because he was trying to unite two nations—Scotland and England. If he had used native-born subject, it would have introduced the obvious argument that Scots prior to Calvin’s Case were not native-born in England. He skirted the problem by inventing natural-born subject, which encompassed the two categories of subjects—Scottish and English—under one legal umbrella. The invention of natural born citizen for the presidential eligibility clause was far removed from the roots and reasons pertaining to the invention of natural-born subject.

Plowden was well aware of the confusion regarding terms used to describe English subjects when he wrote:

“. . . no person out of the ligeance or dominion of the king, can owe him faith or ligeance, besides his own subjects, who are therefore called his liege subjects or liegemen, and that such liege subjects, in whatever parts they may be, or whatsoever engagements they may have affirmed to foreign powers, must necessarily remain at the faith and ligeance of the king; for every man by his birth in this country, becomes a liege subject to our king, nor shall he by any act of his own cease to be such a subject, while he has life.

[that displays an intellectually bankrupt logic and contradiction.  If one remains the king’s subject for life, regardless of location in the world, then such a subject’s “issue” is born in the ownership of one (the father) who is the king’s subject, regardless also of where born.  The son of the king’s liegeman is born with the same perpetual inherited subjection as the parents, -just as the child of a slave is born into the same subjection as its parents, and is not born free nor born as the property of the estate on which it was born if it happens to not be that of its owners.  Everything in his statement makes perfect sense until he flew off the rails with “by his birth in this country,” instead of “by his birth to a leigeman or subject of the king”.

One must very carefully parse these words: “for every man, by his birth in this country, becomes a liege subject to our king,”.  That is a statement referring only to the status of those born in the country.  It makes no reference to the status of those not born in the country.  It does not declare it impossible that they also are subjects-born or natural subjects.

But his wording reveals that he believed in the royal doctrine that anyone born within the king’s domain belonged to him for life.  He was a loyal royal sycophant.  A drinker of the king’s Kool-Aid.  A true believer in his divine appointment to rule his equals, -his fellow Christians who were born to be free… if they were born Protestant and not Catholic, -with the Anglican Church being simply the Catholic Church nationalized.

Protestants rejected such vertical hierarchical authority, and they are the ones who founded the colonies to escape such papist thinking.  That’s why no colony was settled by Anglicans nor Catholics since they weren’t seeking to escape their subjection to “Divine Authority” in the form of the King or the Pope.  They accepted that as their position in life.

The Americans never accepted any such fate. They would make their own fate and would never bow to any king except the King of Kings.  And they would retain their unalienable right that their national membership would pass to their young.  They would not surrender it at the water’s edge.  They would not make it contingent on colonial nor State soil.  They would not allow that their children be viewed socially nor legally as aliens simply because of the happenstance location of where their child entered the world.  They had unalienable rights, and that was certainly one of them.

But today they don’t even realize that fact.  Knowledge is absent.  Ignorance permeates everywhere, -from law schools, to State bars, to legal departments, to state and federal courts.  They were educated to be ignorant of the truth because their teachers were ignorant, -and their teachers before them, back well over a century.

They think that the Calvin case is still the controlling rule for American citizenship, unaware of natural membership.  They think that the rule that was applied to about two percent of the population applies to the 98% also.  They think we are all just common law citizens; Americans because we were born in America according to some unwritten ancient rule or something, -not because we were born of Americans, -which is the only thing that makes us the natural born citizens of America.  We were born as her natural citizens.