# Titles of Nobility Amendment (Passed Congress May 1, 1810) > If any citizen of the United States shall accept, claim, receive or retain, any title of nobility or honour, or shall, without the consent of Congress, accept and retain any present, pension, office or emolument of any kind whatever, from any emperor, king, prince or foreign power, such person shall cease to be a citizen of the United States, and shall be incapable of holding any office of trust or profit under them, or either of them. The Titles of Nobility Amendment — proposed by Senator Philip Reed of Maryland and passed by the Senate (19-5) on April 27, 1810 and the House (87-3) on May 1, 1810 — would have stripped United States citizenship from any citizen who accepted a title of nobility or any gift, pension, or emolument from a foreign government without congressional consent. The amendment passed with overwhelming margins and came within two states of ratification before the [[War of 1812]] disrupted the ratification process. Because Congress set no deadline, it remains technically pending. ## The Political Context The amendment reflected early Republic anxieties about foreign influence on American governance — a concern that animated the existing Titles of Nobility Clauses in the [[Constitution]] (Article I, Sections 9 and 10, which prohibit the federal and state governments from granting titles of nobility and require congressional consent for officeholders to accept foreign gifts). The proposed amendment went further: instead of merely prohibiting officeholders from accepting foreign honors, it would have stripped *citizenship itself* from any citizen who did so. The immediate context was the marriage of Jerome Bonaparte (Napoleon's brother) to Elizabeth Patterson of Baltimore in 1803, which made an American citizen a member of a European royal family. Napoleon later annulled the marriage, but the episode highlighted the theoretical possibility that American citizens might acquire foreign titles and dual loyalties. The broader concern was the young republic's vulnerability to European monarchical influence — a fear amplified by ongoing tensions with both Britain and France in the lead-up to the [[War of 1812]]. By early 1812, twelve states had ratified the amendment — one short of the thirteen needed. Louisiana's admission as a state in 1812 raised the threshold to fourteen, and no additional state ratified. The War of 1812 consumed congressional and state attention, and the amendment was effectively forgotten. ## The "Thirteenthers" and the Conspiracy-Theory Afterlife The Titles of Nobility Amendment's most notable afterlife is as a conspiracy theory. In several early nineteenth-century printings of the [[Constitution]], the amendment was mistakenly included as the ratified "Thirteenth Amendment." This error — which came to the attention of the House of Representatives in 1817 — gave rise to the "Thirteenther" movement: a persistent fringe claim that the amendment was secretly ratified, that its ratification was deliberately suppressed, and that its disappearance from published texts was part of a conspiracy by lawyers (who allegedly held British titles via the honorary "Esquire" suffix) to conceal a constitutional provision that would have stripped them of citizenship. The Thirteenther theory has been promoted by various sovereign-citizen and anti-government movements and has occasionally surfaced in state legislatures — as recently as a 2023 Montana bill that sought to "recognize" the amendment as ratified. No court has ever upheld the claim that the Titles of Nobility Amendment was ratified. The historical evidence is clear: twelve states ratified, thirteen (later fourteen) were needed, and the amendment was not adopted. The conspiracy theory is analytically interesting not for its substance (which is baseless) but as an early example of the constitutional-conspiracy genre that the KB encounters in sovereign-citizen ideology, "constitutional sheriff" movements, and other anti-government legal theories. The pattern — a "real" constitutional provision was secretly suppressed by a self-interested elite — recurs across these movements, and the Titles of Nobility Amendment is one of its oldest exemplars. ## Why It Matters for the KB The amendment's analytical significance is modest compared to the [[Corwin Amendment]] or [[Equal Rights Amendment]], but it carries two threads the KB tracks: **Foreign influence anxiety as a founding-era concern.** The Emoluments Clauses and the Titles of Nobility Amendment reflect a genuine and persistent anxiety about foreign influence on American governance — an anxiety that the Trump era's emoluments litigation revived. The Founders' concern was aristocratic capture; the contemporary concern is financial entanglement with foreign governments. The through-line is the structural question of how a republic protects itself from external corruption, and the constitutional mechanisms (emoluments clauses, the TONA's proposed citizenship-stripping) represent early attempts to answer it. **The sovereign-citizen constitutional imaginary.** The Thirteenther conspiracy theory is a useful entry point for understanding the sovereign-citizen movement's relationship to constitutional text. These movements treat the [[Constitution]] as a sacred document whose "true" meaning has been concealed by a legal establishment that profits from the concealment. The Titles of Nobility Amendment — which really was erroneously published as ratified, creating a genuine historical anomaly — provides just enough factual foundation for the conspiracy theory to seem plausible to people already inclined toward anti-institutional suspicion. ## See Also - [[Unratified Amendments]] — the hub page for all six unratified amendments - [[Constitution]] — the document the amendment would have altered, including the existing Emoluments Clauses - [[War of 1812]] — the conflict that disrupted the ratification process - [[Popular Sovereignty]] — the republican principle the amendment was designed to protect against foreign aristocratic influence