Yesterday in Mises Wire I looked at how citizenship in the United States was originally determined by the member states themselves. There was no definition of citizenship in either the original US constitution (i.e., the Articles of Confederation) on in the later 1787 constitution. Thus, the way to “US citizenship,” to the degree that it existed at all, was to become a citizen of one of the US’s member states.
A problem with this situation quickly arose, however. The United States from the very beginning was an expansionist state, and according to the Treaty of Paris which ended the Revolutionary War, the new “United States” included vast territories west of the Appalachian mountains. These areas were, for all practical purposes, not part of any US state. Yes, state governments claimed to be the proper authority in much of this territory, but it was clear that the “far west” was de facto independent of any state or federal government entity.
With the Land Ordinance of 1784, Congress (which then functioned under the Articles of Confederation) the states agreed to allow the federal government to govern the areas north of the Ohio River and east of the Mississippi River. This meant that, for the first time, there were to be places in America (other than military forts) where there was no state government as an intermediary between the people and the federal government. In these new territories, Congress exercised direct rule.
This posed a problem for matters of naturalization and citizenship. Was it possible to naturalize the people in these places without the possibility of citizenship in a state? Everywhere else in America, the people—those who weren’t slaves, of course—became citizens of the United States be becoming citizens of their respective states. In the new territories, however, these people were potentially citizens of the federal government only. It is not clear that the authors of either of the US constitutions imagined there would be large numbers of “Americans” without citizenship in any state for a significant period of time.
Science? What kind of bearing does this have on science? This is political science at its best. Who has the rights to making citizens? There are several ways to approach this problem; from the states or from the federation union or whatever you want to call the leviathan. The constitution makes no claims on this authority aside from the somewhat unclear 14th amendment. Now the science of law comes into play to interpret what is going on.