Questions for Mario Apuzzo (6)
Dred Scott
Here’s a natural born thought experiment. Consider two hypothetical persons, both born on January 1, 1799 in Charleston, South Carolina.
Ezekiel Crowe was born a slave and the son of slaves. Both he and his Charleston-born parents were owned by John Rutledge, a Framer of the Constitution of the United States. Young Crowe was raised listening to anecdotes about the great Mr. Rutledge. Mr. Crowe was freed from slavery by the proclamation of Abraham Lincoln in 1863 when he was 64 years old. He served in the reconstruction legislature in South Carolina, and received a law degree from the University of South Carolina.
Otto Shicklegruber was born the son of German immigrants who arrived from Germany in 1793 and had become naturalized US Citizens. Otto’s father died of yellow fever before Otto was born and his mother died in childbirth. Because both of his parents were dead, the newborn Shicklegruber was sent back to Germany to live with grandparents. In 1857 he returned to the United States and established residence in a German speaking community in Wisconsin (Shicklegruber did not speak any English), where he lived as a loan shark.
Questions:
- Which of the two were natural born citizens of the United States on April 15, 1856? (Before the Dred Scott decision)
- Which of the two were natural born citizens of the United States on April 15, 1862? (After Dred Scott, but before the Emancipation Proclamation))
- Which of the two were natural born citizens of the United States on April 15, 1865? (After the Emancipation Proclamation, but before the 14th Amendment
- Which of the two were natural born citizens of the United States on April 15, 1870? (After the 14th Amendment)
- Which of the two were eligible to run against President Grant in 1872? (after Shicklegruber had lived in the US for 14 years)
Natural Born in South Carolina
John Rutledge of South Carolina
Much is made about a letter from John Jay of New York to George Washington during the Convention that drew up the Constitution of the United States, and exactly what Jay meant by “natural born citizen”. It may well be that his letter arrived in time for the convention’s deliberation (although it was never mentioned in the debate) and it may well be that the words “natural born citizen” in the Constitution were taken from it, but when it comes to original intent, it doesn’t matter what John Jay meant, because John Jay was not a delegate to the Constitutional Convention, he had no vote nor did he have any part in the debate. All the input he had to the process was the words themselves in his letter, not even an explanation of what he meant beyond someone who was not a “foreigner”.
Let’s focus on someone, who was a delegate to the Constitutional Convention, John Rutledge of South Carolina. Rutledge served as the Chief Judge of South Carolina (as well as its governor and as a justice of the US Supreme Court). Having received his legal education in London, he was a formidable presence in the court room (reportedly having lost only one case). John Rutledge was the Chairman of the Committee of Detail, the committee charged with drafting the Constitution draft that the delegates debated. What did the laws of his own state of South Carolina, of which he was certainly familiar, say about citizenship?
In 1712 the [General Assembly of the colony of South Carolina] reenacted certain English laws and among them the one of William III providing that a natural born subject might inherit estates even though his father or mother or the person he inherited from was an alien. This merely strengthened the rights of the natural born but did not change naturalization Its main interest lies in the fact that the assembly was in the habit of accepting English laws bodily.
From this we see that natural born subjects in South Carolina could have an alien parent.
Natural Born Citizen for Dummies
Much is being blogged about natural born citizenship since Barack Obama ran for president. There are lengthy legal-sounding arguments and long quotations from books. If you want an advanced degree in Natural Born Citizen, there’s an incredible and growing repository of facts and documents over at What’s Your Evidence? and The Great Mother of All Natural Born Citizenship Quotation Pages. The Wikipedia article is good too. But for folks who would like just the basics, Obama Conspiracy Theories Presents:
As seen on TV
As seen on TV
Natural Born Citizen For Dummies
The Constitution
The Constitution of the United States uses the phrase “natural born citizen” but doesn’t define it. In fact the Constitution does not even define citizen except to say that some are “natural born” and some are “naturalized”. In the beginning, citizenship was defined by the States. (more…)
