Lorianne Updike Toler, Northern Illinois University College of Law, visiting at YLS, has posted Freemanship:
American citizenship, scholars contend, is informed by British subjectship as found in Calvin's Case. Current debates over birthright citizenship, for instance, revolve around this limited legal concept. The problem with this state of play is that British subjectship provided only part-and a small one at that-of citizenship at the Framing.
The major part sounded in freemanship, a local legal status reserved for non-vassal, nonenslaved men who took an oath of loyalty, defended the locality with their arms, and contributed to its coffers in exchange for the privileges and immunities reserved for town members. Such freeman were given the "freedom of the city." The concept was of ancient date, hearkening back to Greco-Roman times, evolved in medieval England as reflected in the Magna Carta, and arrived in the New World via colonial charters, which recognized freemen as those who could serve in and vote on colonial leadership. When the colonies created American citizenship in the Articles of Confederation, colonial freemen were rendered citizens. The only relic of subjectship that survived the onset of American citizenship was that natural born subjects if free were entitled to take the oath and become freemen when they came of age, but so too could aliens through naturalization. It was freemanship, not necessarily subjects, which became citizens of the new republic.
Freemanship as the true antecedent to citizenship deepens our understanding of privileges & immunities as appurtenant to ancient freemanship and supports and delimits the general law theory of the Fourteenth Amendment to those privileges and immunities.
--Dan Ernst
