The thread was getting unwieldy. Let's start fresh, and talk of "traitors". I raised the question, how exactly can someone be a "traitor" to a government he is not now or never was a citizen of, and a government that would deny him citizenship if he asked to be included? Slaves were not ever citizens, they held no rights of citizenship, they were counted for population purposes only. A US citizen living in Italy may be a resident of Italy, living in Italy and counted as a number in population figures but he owes no allegience to Italy and holds no rights of citizenship in Italy.

A free black man living in Massachusetts owes no allegience whatsoever to any southern state or confederacy of states in which he never held citizenship status, let alone ever held residence in. Especially when that government confederate government has only been in existance for few years! How is someone, anyone, even a former slave, owe any allegiance to a government that did not even exist when he was born, or when he took up residence in a Massachusetts or New York?

To call him a traitor to that government is an absolute fundamental absurdity. To say that the possibility that his anscestors may have once been held in that state, or that geographical region makes him a traitor to the government is beyond absurdity and it hold no basis in recognized law whatsover. Now or in the 19th century.

Think of the nations created after WW2, none of them could ever declare that someone whose father once lived in the region years before the government was ever established or boundaries ever drawn owed that newly created government any allegience whatseover under any stretch of the imagination. Only the most wildly absurd tortured logic could try to make such a case, and so it was recognized in 19th century America, and rightly so, excpet for the handfull folks so far out on the limb of trying to justify the impossible that could no longer see the ground not the sky. These men, masked with blinders of their own making, had nothing to stand on and they knew it. They made the claim anyway, and have tried long after the fact to obfuscate and confuse what is so clearly absurd. Their supporters make excuses even today to cover this gaulling absurdity.

If an Italian immigrant came to the US in 1918 after WW1, got married here in New York and had children, and years later his adult son, born in the US, a full US citizen, joined the army during WW2 and fought in Italy in 1943, the Italian governemt could not ever proclaim this US citizen, whose father was once an Italian citizen, to be a traitor to Italy! It is an absurdity now and it was EQUALLY an absurdity then. This is NOT a case of someone imposing 20th century standards on 19th century minds, since so many many 19th century American minds instantly recognized the absurdity and said so quite plainly.