Mr. Hay to Mr. Powell.
Washington, September 2, 1899.
Sir: Your dispatches Nos. 621 and 622, both dated the 14th ultimo, in relation to the status and liability to military service of certain persons who claim registration as citizens of the United States, have been received.
It appears that the persons you describe are either persons who have emigrated from the Southern States of the Union as settlers in Haiti under grants of land, or the children of such settlers born in Haiti.
It therefore becomes pertinent to ascertain, if possible, whether the grants to these colonists were conditioned upon the assumption by them of full or qualified Haitian allegiance. Such a condition is common in grants of land to immigrant settlers. If these persons immigrated to Haiti and took up land under a contractual tenure, whereby they shared in the political concerns of the Republic, that circumstance would, prima facie, establish an adoption of a new status and an abandonment of their original status, which would operate to give their children born in Haiti the character of Haitian allegiance, but to what extent, if at all, would depend upon the terms of their grants.
Assuming, however, that the immigrants held their lands under conditions which left their American citizenship unimpaired, they and their children would have enjoyed the right to protection, qualified by their ability to show that their residence in Haiti was of a temporary character and that they have in good faith held, and now hold, the fixed purpose to return to the United States, here to dwell and perform the duties of citizenship. The facts in each individual case would determine the title to receive a passport as evidence of the right to continued protection while sojourning in an alien land.
Your No. 622 reports two individual applications of persons who are supposed to belong to the classes you describe in your No. 621. The applicants, Antoine Phelps and Emanuel Phelps, are stated by you to be, respectively, 31 and 30 years of age, both having been born in Haiti of American parents who went thither in 1824. Neither of them was registered at the time of birth, or has at any time been in the United States, or has shown since attaining majority any purpose to come hither. The only evidence they present of their American character is a certificate, given by your predecessor, Mr. Hollister, in 1869, to one Pierre Phelps, whose relationship to the applicants is not stated, while their present application appears to be for some form of permit which will enable them to continue to reside in Haiti exempt from all burdens of such residence.
Under the reported circumstances you are not authorized to grant to the persons named a passport, which, as you correctly suggest, is the only certificate of citizenship which you are authorized to grant in any case.
A fuller report from you on the subject presented in your No. 621 is awaited.
I am, etc.,