What Senator Howard Really Said About the Fourteenth Amendment

When Senator Jacob Howard explained the Fourteenth Amendment's citizenship clause, he said: "This will not, of course, include persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens, who belong to the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers accredited to the Government of the United States."

Most people today read this statement and assume Howard was listing four separate categories of people who would not receive birthright citizenship:

1. Foreigners
2. Aliens
3. People who belong to families of ambassadors
4. Foreign ministers

This interpretation has shaped decades of constitutional debate, but it's based on a fundamental misunderstanding of how Howard structured his sentence.

Testing the List Theory

There's a simple way to check whether a sentence actually contains a list. In English, when you have items separated by commas in a list, you can break the sentence apart into separate sentences for each item in the list, and they should all make sense.

Take this example: "Bob is wearing his hat, coat, and boots." You can split this into three separate sentences:

1. Bob is wearing his hat.  
2. Bob is wearing his coat.
3. Bob is wearing his boots.

Each one works perfectly, which confirms it's a genuine list.

What Happens When We Test Howard's Statement

Let's try the same test on Senator Howard's words. If he really meant to list four categories, we should be able to create four sentences that all make sense:

1. This will not include persons born in the United States who are foreigners.
2. This will not include persons born in the United States who are aliens.
3. This will not include persons born in the United States who are who belong to the families of ambassadors.
4. This will not include persons born in the United States who are foreign ministers.

The problem jumps out immediately in sentence three: "who are who belong to the families of ambassadors." This isn't proper English. The phrase is grammatically incorrect, and an accomplished nineteenth-century orator like Senator Howard would never have spoken this way.

This test proves that Howard wasn't creating a list of four different categories.

Understanding the Real Grammar

So what was Howard actually doing? He was using a grammatical construction called an appositive, where one word clarifies or restates another. In nineteenth-century English, the appositive was a common and sophisticated way to ensure precision.

In Howard's statement, "aliens" is an appositive for "foreigners"—he's using both terms to refer to the same group of people, not two different groups. The legal term "aliens" clarifies what he means by "foreigners."

The phrase "who belong to the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers" then describes which specific foreigners/aliens he's talking about.

A Modern Example

Here's a similar sentence that shows the same structure: "The team consisted of several teenagers, adolescents, who belonged to the parents or guardians watching from the bleachers."

No one would think this describes four different groups. We understand that "adolescents" is just another word for "teenagers," and the rest tells us which teenagers—the ones whose parents are in the stands.

Howard's sentence follows exactly the same pattern.

What Senator Howard Actually Said

When you read it with proper grammar, Howard's statement means: "This will not include persons born in the United States who are foreigners (that is, aliens) who belong to the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers."

He's describing one specific group: children born in America to foreign diplomatic families. That's it. Not multiple broad categories, but one narrow exception based on diplomatic immunity.

Why This Distinction Matters

The difference between these two interpretations is enormous for constitutional law. The misreading suggests the Fourteenth Amendment contains several broad exceptions to birthright citizenship. The correct reading shows just one specific exception for diplomatic families.

This affects how we understand the amendment's scope and intent. The framers of the amendment didn’t create a narrow category of citizens with multiple exclusions—they were acknowledging a single established principle of international law regarding diplomatic immunity.

How the Mistake Happened

The misinterpretation stems from reading nineteenth-century sentences with twenty-first-century assumptions. Modern readers expect simple, direct constructions and assume that commas always separate list items. But nineteenth-century writers used more complex structures that served different grammatical functions.

Howard wasn't being unclear or overly complicated. He was writing in the sophisticated style that educated people of his era considered normal and precise. The problem isn't with his sentence—it's with our unfamiliarity with his grammatical conventions.

Click here for a detailed analysis of the phrase "subject to the jurisdiction."

And click here to purchase my book The Birthright: A History of Citizenship in America where I use original source documents to trace the history of birthright citizenship all the way back to George Washington's administration.