Constitution will one find the word “Citizen” where the letter “C” is not capitalized as if it werea proper noun. Nowhere in the Bill of Rights is the term ever found at all. It first appears as acommon noun in the eleventh amendment which states;
“The Judicial power of the United States shall not be construed to extend to any suit in law orequity, commenced or prosecuted against one of the United States by citizens of anotherstate, or by citizens or subjects of any foreign state.”
In the original articles many key terms are capitalized. This is consistent with old style English.The Constitution was a formal (some may even say sacred) contract of a newly declared freepeople. Throughout the articles the terms “Citizen,” “People,” “Person,” “Persons,” and“Inhabitant” are all spelled with the first letter capitalized. In English grammar a proper noun isalways capitalized. It is a sign of importance or deference to the character of the thing beingdescribed. One may draw the conclusion that the writers of the Constitution sought to highlight,to give deference to, the authority from which this document was born.Anyone who has read the writings of Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, or the Federalist Paperswould know that the founding fathers were highly educated and sophisticated men. But when theframers of the Constitution met to write this document, they boarded up the windows of Independence Hall so that no one might pass by and hear someone in heated debate speaking aposition in argument that may be taken out of context. Recall these people had just come out of arather bloody war for an idea whose time had come, that being the notion that all men werecreated equal and each was a sovereign with all rights and privileges of the King of Englandhimself.The framers debated fiercely over significant concepts of government and delegation of power,whether or not to have a President, currency and banking, and whether to have a Bill of Rights.But these wordsmiths also debated over minutia like whether a phrase need be followed by acomma, a semi-colon, or a colon. The point is this: If the framers made the point of a wordbeginning with a capital letter, there was indeed a point to that capitalization.To this day, even in the United States Government Style Manual, there is only one way to write aproper noun. The first letter must be capitalized followed by lower case. So it stands to reasonthat the words “Citizen,” “People,” “Person,” and “Inhabitant” were meant to be read with asense of deference and respect. So one might also argue with respect to terms like “Powers,”“Representatives,” “Electors,” “Duty,” and “Revenue.”What is immediately apparent, as one moves forward into the amendments to the Constitution, isthe decreasing use of this unique grammatical style. With very few exceptions, the only wordsthat get a capital letter in mid-sentence are words relating to government, military, and the legalsystem. The terms “person,” “people,” and “citizen” are relegated to the level of common nouns.As stated above, the only use of the term citizen between the original articles and the fourteenthamendment is in the eleventh amendment. The amendment makes a clear distinction between theterm “citizens” and “subjects.” This same distinction is clearly evident in Article III, Section 2,which reads in the last line of the first paragraph “Citizens or Subjects.”
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