Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, Transmitted to Congress, With the Annual Message of the President, December 3, 1888, Part II
No. 1099.
Mr. Bayard to Mr. Straus.
Washington, October 26, 1888.
Sir: I inclose herewith a copy of a letter of the 25th instant to Mr. Hercules A. Proios, in regard to his demand for protection by this Government as a citizen of the United States.
The circumstances of his case, as found in the records of this Department and disclosed in the letter in question, appear to leave no doubt as to the groundlessness of Mr. Proios’ claim to further recognition as an American citizen. You are therefore instructed to decline further to recognize him as such.
A copy of the Department’s letter to Mr. Proios has been sent to the consul-general at the Turkish capital for the files of the consulate-general.
No action beyond the withholding of such recognition and the cancellation of his passport need be taken by you.
I am, etc.,
Mr. Rives to Mr. Proios.
Washington, October 25, 1888.
Sir: I have to acknowledge the receipt of your letter of the 24th ultimo in relation to your claim of the protection and assistance of this Government as a citizen of the United States.
The facts in your case are now fully before this Department, which is thus prepared to announce to you its decision upon your claim.
It appears that in January last you were arrested by the Russian authorities at Marianople, on the sea of Azof, Russia, for extradition to Turkey, upon the request of the Turkish consul at Berdiansk, who claimed your surrender to the Ottoman Porte as a Turkish subject on a charge of embezzlement of funds and falsification of accounts while in the service of the sanitary commission at Galata, in the Ottoman dominions.
Immediately upon your arrest you appealed for intervention to stay your extradition to the legation of the United States at St. Petersburg, and to Mr. Heenan, United States consul at Odessa, both of whom interested themselves in your behalf.
On the 14th of March last you arrived at Odessa in the custody of the Russian police. On the 21st of the same month Mr. Heenan, who had previously been corresponding with various officials in regard to your case, and who had ascertained that you had an American passport, addressed a communication to the governor of south Russia reviewing the facts and asking for your discharge. The answer of the governor-general, bearing date the same day, stated that he had instructed the prefect at Odessa to investigate the matter, and that he had also immediately communicated with the Russian embassy at Constantinople for the purpose of securing further information; and later Mr. Heenan received the assurance of the governor-general that you would not be extradited until the right of Turkey to claim you was established.
On the 23d of April, Mr. Heenan, who had not ceased to exert himself in your behalf, addressed to the governor-general a demand for your release. The governor-general at once replied that he was unable to grant the demand, but that it was his opinion that you should be sent to Constantinople and that the questions raised concerning your case should there be determined.
On the following day, the 24th of April, Mr. Heenan, in an interview with the governor-general, asked that your American citizenship be conceded; that you be sent to the Russian embassy in Constantinople, as an American citizen; that the Russian ambassador be instructed to hold you as such citizen, and upon your arrival in Constantinople at once to give notice of your presence to the American minister there. This arrangement was agreed to by the governor-general, but was not carried into effect till the 14th of July, on which day you departed from Odessa for Constantinople. [Page 1621] On that day Mr. Heenan, writing to the Department, said: “Proios called at the consulate on his way to the steamer, and thanked me for the assistance which be had received. He denied absolutely ever having renounced his citizenship, and begged that I would so inform the Department. In appearance Proios has much improved since his arrival in Odessa, and he speaks very kindly of the prison officials and the treatment he received at their hands.”
On the 16th of July you were turned over by the Russian consul-general at Constantinople to Mr. Pringle, the American consul-general at that place. On the 14th of August, the Turkish authorities having claimed the right to try you under article 4 of the treaty of 1830 between the United States and the Ottoman Porte and refused to furnish any specific and formal complaint to him, Mr. Pringle discharged you on your own recognizance. Whether there were also other reasons for the refusal of the Porte to formulate charges the Department is not prepared to say. Ulterior motives on the part of the Turkish officials in their conduct towards you are intimated in your communications to the Department. Into the consideration of this subject I do not now enter further than to observe, as a fact having relevance to present questions, that in view of your long and voluntary service in a Turkish governmental agency the Department does not seem called upon to base any action upon allegations of that character.
So far as the complaint of the Turkish Government against you is concerned, your case seems now to be ended. This supposition is confirmed by a telegraphic dispatch received at the Department from Mr. Pringle on the 16th instant, in which he states that you demand a visa, it is supposed of your passport, for the purpose of enabling you to go abroad as an American citizen. To this telegraphic request the Department has replied by telegraph that instructions in regard to your application will be sent by mail.
The facts above stated conclusively demonstrate that in your difficulty with the Turkish Government you have had the active and efficient aid of the officials of the United States in Russia and in Turkey. Their conduct in this regard has been approved by the Department, which has not been disposed to deny to you, while in difficulty, the benefit of any possible doubt in regard to your title to its aid and protection. But a conjuncture has now arrived when it becomes necessary for the Department, the facts being now for the first time fully before it, to determine the future relations of this Government to your case.
By the records of this Department it appears that you were naturalized as a citizen of the United States by the circuit court of Cook County, Illinois, on the 14th day of August, 1871. In the following month yon applied to this Department, from New York City, for a passport to go abroad. Accompanying your application on that occasion is your affidavit, made before Abel C. Wilmarth, a notary public in New York City, in which you state that you were born in Greece, on or about the 23d day of November, 1844. A passport was issued to you on the 8th of September, 1871, less then a month after the date of your naturalization. In the affidavit above referred to your age is stated to be twenty-six years, which would be correct according to the date of birth therein stated. The date of your arrival in the United States and the length of your residence here before naturalization are not known, and the documents in the possession of this Department disclose statements and evidences on the subject which lead to very doubtful conclusions. In your communication to this Department of the 24th of August last, you state that you went to England at the age of eighteen, and proceeded thence to the United States, where you remained for eight years. In the same letter you state that you left the United States in 1873. These statements would make the date of your coming to this country fall in the year 1865, or, possibly, making every allowance for inaccuracy as to the duration of your stay here, 1864. But in your application to the legation of the United States in Constantinople, July 30, 1887, for new passport, you make affidavit that you came to the United States in 1859. The original of this affidavit is now in the possession of this Department. There appears to be no doubt, however, that you came to the United States after the middle of the year 1864. The exact date of your arrival here is not given in any of your communications to the Department, and Mr. Pringle writes that you tell him you are unable to give even the year. But it appears by the records of the Greek consulate in Constantinople that a passport was issued to you by that consulate to enable you to go to London, on the 6th of June, 1864.
The Department, however, although it has received one statement to the contrary, assumes that you had been in the United States five years prior to your naturalization, and that it was regular and lawful.
The date of your departure from the United States is not certainly ascertained. Your affidavit before Mr. King on the 30th of July, 1887, which has been referred to, alleges that you arrived in Constantinople in 1871. You state in your letter of the 24th of August last that you were in the Turkish service for a period of sixteen years, which would also indicate that your entrance into it took place in 1871. Whatever may be said to break the force of these statements it is indubitably shown by your obtaining [Page 1622] a passport from this Department on the 8th of September, 1871, that within a month from the date of your naturalization you had decided at least temporarily to leave the United States.
It is also to he observed that if the passport issued in September, 1871, was not used until 1873, it became invalid, since from 1870 until 1874 passports issued by this Department were valid only for one year, and officers of the United States were directed, and the officials of foreign Governments were requested, not to visa them after that year had elapsed. No passport was issued to you by any officer of this Government between 1871 and 1887.
In your letter of the 24th of August last you account to the Department for your departure from this country in the following manner:
“In the year 1873 I was advised by my doctor to take a trip to Europe on account of my health, and in consequence I started on a visit to my parents at Constantinople.”
It is obvious that this statement wholly fails to explain the undoubted facts above disclosed.
In respect to your birth, the case appears to be that you were born in Constantinople of Greek parents; whether in 1844, as stated in your passport application in 1871, or in 1840, as stated in your application before Mr. King in 1887, is immaterial. The fact that you were born in Turkey, and not in Greece, as stated in the passport application of 1871, is supposed to be the ground on which the Ottoman Porte recently based its allegation that you were a Turkish subject. In 1869, as you are doubtless informed, the Turkish Government promulgated its law forbidding Ottoman subjects to expatriate themselves without the consent of their Government. This law was in force at the time of your naturalization in the United States, and under it Turkey has assumed to refuse to recognize the expatriation of her subjects who have sought to change their allegiance without complying with its provisions. This Government has always refused to admit, and has resisted, whenever attempted, the application of this law to naturalized citizens of the United States. The Department adverts to it now, and to the controversies that have constantly arisen out of it, merely for the purpose of disclosing all the circumstances of the case now under consideration. The Department is also far from intending to intimate an opinion favorable to the soundness of the Porte’s claim in respect to your citizenship, supposing you had never been naturalized in the United States. Under those circumstances the question would be between Greece and Turkey.
However that may be, and whatever may be the exact date of your departure from the United States, it nevertheless appears that soon after your naturalization here you returned to the place of your origin, and there continuously remained until 1887, for a period of from fourteen to sixteen years, when you left and settled yourself as a ship-chandler in southern Russia. You state that you left Turkey voluntarily. But this is not material to our present inquiry. While in Turkey, after your return thereto, you were employed in an institution under the jurisdiction of the Government. You were not a member of any American community in that country, nor connected with any American interests there or elsewhere. In all this time you manifested no intention to return to the United States and incur the burdens of citizenship here, and when you left Turkey it was to proceed to Russia, where you engaged in business of a permanent character, to which you have expressed an intention to return. Mr. Pringle reports that you have also distinctly told him that you do not intend ever to return to the United States.
In view of all these facts, there does not appear to be room to doubt that you have long since abandoned your American citizenship. The assumption that a person once a citizen of the United States is ever afterwards entitled to the protection of this Government, unless he by an express and formal declaration renounce it, is entirely unfounded and opposed to the settled doctrines of this Government. In the administration of President Washington the rule was formulated by Mr. Jefferson, his Secretary of State, that “our citizens are certainly free to divest themselves of that character by emigration, and other acts manifesting their intention, and may then become the subjects of another power and free to do whatever the subjects of that power may do.”
By another eminent Secretary of State the opinion was expressed that “it can admit of no doubt that the naturalization laws of the United States contemplate the residence in the country of naturalized citizens unless they shall go abroad in the public service or for temporary purposes.” This opinion was subsequently adopted by Mr. Fish, Secretary of State, who declared that a residence for a long series of years in a foreign land, coupled with a non-payment of taxes to the sovereign of birth or naturalization, whichever the case may be, may, without formal change of allegiance, forfeit a claim to protection from such sovereign. It would be useless to cite at length the many and various instances in which this rule has been laid down and applied by this Department. It will suffice to quote from a recent decision of the Department the following passage:
“Citizenship of the United States, it is my duty to say, is a high privilege, and, [Page 1623] when granted to an alien, confers great prerogatives, whose maintenance, when they are honestly procured and faithfully exercised, the United States will exert its fullest powers to vindicate. * * * But the enjoyment of the prerogatives is conditioned on the performance of the correlative duties of loyal service, of love to the country of adoption, of support of the country when she needs support, and the payment of the just taxes that country imposes on all its citizens. When the performance of that duty ceases then cease the prerogatives of the citizenship on which they are conditioned.”
This principle has found expression in many of our treaties of naturalization, in which it has been provided that the return of a naturalized citizen to the country of his origin, without an intention to return to the country of adoption, shall operate and be treated as a renunciation of adoptive allegiance, and a two years’ residence after return to the country of origin is generally adopted in such treaties as prima facie evidence of such renunciation.
The Department does not lose sight of the fact that exceptional and peculiar doctrines prevail as to the continuous preservation by foreigners of their nationality in Turkey. But such doctrines have no application to persons resident in Russia, where you seem to have gone in order to enter upon a permanent occupation involving a domicile in that country; nor is it to be implied that the other circumstances of the present case bring it, so far as this Government is concerned, within the purview of those doctrines. The simple question now before the Department is whether it should permit the protection of this Government to be further used for your convenience when it is made to appear that you are living permanently in foreign lands, that you never intend to return to the United States, and that you have no American connections and contribute to no American interests or institutions. On this subject there is no room for doubt or hesitation. This Department, as a constituted organ of the American people, is not permitted to involve and jeopard their interests by supporting such a pretension.
The legation and consulate-general of the United States at Constantinople will therefore be instructed to decline to visa your passport or to further recognize your claim to American citizenship.
I am, sir, etc.,
Assistant Secretary.