The 14 Names
One people. One treaty class. Renamed thirteen times across three centuries. Each name change corresponded to a legal instrument, a census reclassification, or a colonial statute — each designed to sever the connection between the person and the treaty that protected them. Every name after the first is a nom de guerre assigned by an opposing force. The original name — and the rights attached to it — was never lawfully removed.
What you are reading: Each step below is documented with a primary source — a law, a court ruling, a government record, a census document, or a contemporaneous written account. The chain is not an interpretation. It is what the record shows.
The year shown is when the name first appeared as a legal category or was formally applied to the treaty class. Multiple names were in use simultaneously — colonization does not follow a clean timeline. What matters is the direction: always away from "Moroccan Subject," always away from the treaty.
8 Stat. 484
Verrazzano Letter, 1524 ("not much unlike the Saracens").
The word "Indian" did not originate from a geographic mistake. Columbus was Franciscan-educated. The Catholic Church already used the Latin term Indigenae — "native people of the land" — as an administrative category for non-Christian peoples under Church jurisdiction before Columbus sailed in 1492. Columbus applied this pre-existing Church administrative vocabulary to the western territories. The Papal Bull Dudum Siquidem (1493) then formally extended colonial authorization to "Indians" in the western direction — a category created by a power (the Pope) with no jurisdiction over the Emperor of Morocco's domain. The "geographical mistake" is impossible: Columbus would have known the Franciscan Indigenae category before he left port.
Read Article III, Section 2 of the US Constitution — the clause governing federal court jurisdiction. It extends judicial power to controversies "between a State, or the Citizens thereof, and foreign States, Citizens or Subjects." Subjects. That word is in the Constitution. Moroccan Subjects — nationals of a foreign sovereign empire with whom the US had an active treaty — had a direct pathway into federal court under Article III's own text. A Moroccan Subject could bring a case invoking Article III standing as a "Subject" of a foreign state. That pathway was open. The 14th Amendment closed it. By converting the treaty class from "Subjects" — a constitutionally named category with Article III standing — to "Black citizens" of the United States, the 14th Amendment simultaneously imposed citizenship and eliminated the foreign-subject status that would have given treaty class members direct access to the federal judiciary as nationals of the Empire of Morocco. If the founding principle that "all men are created equal" had been true and applied, the 14th Amendment would have been unnecessary. The fact that it was passed as a constitutional amendment — to create citizenship where it did not previously exist — is itself evidence that the treaty class had not previously been citizens. They had been Subjects. The amendment's function was not to add rights. Its function was to convert a foreign treaty class into domestic citizens — closing the Article III jurisdictional hook in the process.
Every name severed a specific, documentable legal protection from the record. This is not a metaphor — these are identified rights, identified instruments, identified moments where a law was issued that purported to sever a treaty class member from something they were entitled to claim. Each instrument is void ab initio — the entitlement itself remains intact.
The treaty class was not transported from Africa. They were already home — on their own sovereign territory. The colonial apparatus could not legally enslave, emancipate, and naturalize sovereign subjects of a foreign empire standing on their own land. So it reclassified them first.
Start with the word itself. "Slave" is not a neutral administrative category. It is a word with a specific denotative origin: it derives from "Slav" — the name for Eastern European Slavic peoples who were taken in large numbers by the Roman and Byzantine Empires as captives of war. The word "slave" was built to describe Slavic people. That is its etymology. That is its denotative meaning. Government archives — including US federal records — document white European slaves in the Americas: people of Slavic and other European origins held in servitude, with photographic records and administrative documentation from the relevant periods. The historical record does not limit slavery to African-origin people. The word's own etymology points to European-origin people. The colonial narrative — that "slave" means exclusively or inherently Black African — is the lie. Moroccan Subjects, by the denotative meaning of the word they were assigned, could never be slaves. A Moroccan Subject is a national of the Empire of Morocco, subject of the Emperor, protected by a bilateral treaty. A "slave" by etymology is a Slavic person reduced to property by a European imperial power. The application of the word "slave" to the treaty class was not a description. It was a legal operation: name a category of property; put the people in it; make the naming do the legal work of extinguishing their rights.
Under the Law of Nations — the body of customary international law operative long before the 1949 Geneva Conventions codified it — the subjects of a sovereign state brought under the military or administrative control of another power retain their national identity. The occupying power cannot strip occupied persons of their nationality. Cannot naturalize them as citizens of the occupying state without individual voluntary consent. Cannot reclassify them as property. Cannot deny them access to their own sovereign's diplomatic representatives. EOM subjects on Al-Maghrib al-Aqsa — the Americas, the Sultan's western dominion — were in precisely this position: sovereign subjects on their own land, facing a colonial overlay that had arrived without valid title.
The "slave" classification performed a specific four-step legal operation that could not have been performed on EOM subjects left in their correct legal status:
Step 1 — Convert persons to property. Property has no legal standing. Property cannot hold treaty rights. Property cannot petition a consul. Property cannot assert "I am a subject of the Empire of Morocco under the 1836 Treaty." The Virginia Slave Code of 1705 contains both the mechanism (Section XI — civil disability, property classification) and the exemption ("Turks and Moors in amity with her majesty" — Section IV). A colonial officer applying this statute to a Senegambian-origin, Islamic-practice, Arabic-literate, copper-complexioned person had both tools before him. The choice of Section XI over Section IV — in the presence of all four identifying markers and the express exemption — was deliberate. It is documented in the statute's own text. It was not ignorance. It was selection.
Step 2 — Manufacture African origin. Once classified as "Negro" (not "Moor," not "Moroccan Subject"), the colonial record manufactured an African origin for the treaty class. This severed the territorial claim: an EOM subject on their own sovereign land has a territorial claim to the Americas. A "displaced African" has none. The narrative had to be inverted — "home" had to become "foreign," and the people who were already there had to become "arrivals" — for the colonial overlay to have any legal plausibility. Webster's 1828 Dictionary directly refutes this: the copper-colored races were "FOUND HERE by the Europeans" — already in the Americas when the Europeans arrived.
Step 3 — Emancipation without restoration. The 13th Amendment (1865) abolished "slavery." Emancipation restores person-status — but only what the property classification removed. It did not restore treaty status. It did not disclose the prior treaty rights that had been suppressed. It created a legal blank: a person with no assigned nationality, no disclosed prior status — ready for the next step.
Step 4 — Forced naturalization. The 14th Amendment (1868), issued 2 years and 7 months after emancipation, absorbed the now-restored persons into US citizenship — collectively, without individual adjudication, without disclosure of prior treaty status, without consent. The Expatriation Act, passed in the same legislative session, confirmed that citizenship must be voluntary. Both provisions exist in the same session: citizenship imposed without consent for the treaty class; voluntary requirement confirmed for everyone else. Without Steps 1-3, this step fails on its face: you cannot forcibly naturalize a sovereign subject of a foreign empire, standing on their own sovereign territory, without individual consent and without disclosing the prior status being extinguished.
The preprocessing did not fully succeed. Public Law 856 (1956) — passed 91 years after the 13th Amendment and 88 years after the 14th Amendment — still named "subjects of Morocco" and "protégés" as active legal categories requiring US consular protection. The treaty class's Moroccan subject status survived 88 years of forced citizenship overlay and was still visible enough in 1956 that Congress needed a specific statute to close the institutional mechanism that would have enforced it.
You cannot legally enslave, emancipate, and naturalize a sovereign subject of a treaty-partner empire standing on their own sovereign territory. The slave narrative was not a historical description. It was the legal preprocessing that made the 14th Amendment's forced naturalization appear to have a legal basis it could not otherwise have had.— Moroccan Treaty Research: Slave Narrative as Legal Preprocessing, 2026
In 1952, the International Court of Justice issued its judgment in Rights of Nationals of the United States of America in Morocco. The name of that case — and what it confirmed — is one of the most important documents in this chain.
This is the ICJ's own language: "still in force." Not historically significant. Not historically notable. In force — present tense, 1952. The ICJ confirmed the 1836 Treaty's operative status 7 years before the 1959 Note declared it "obsolete and without effect." The 1959 Note was issued by the State Department. It attempted to declare void a treaty that the ICJ had just confirmed in 1952 as operative. The State Department does not have authority to void a treaty — Knox (1913) and Lansing (1917) both confirmed that treaty termination "can only be" by "a treaty…regularly ratified by the United States Senate." The ICJ's 1952 confirmation makes the 1959 Note not merely procedurally defective but also factually wrong — the treaty was in force in 1952 and the instrument that declared it "obsolete" in 1959 was void from the moment of issuance.
The name of the case is itself an admission
The ICJ case was titled Rights of Nationals of the United States of America in Morocco. Note: in Morocco. The ICJ located US nationals inside the Emperor's dominion — not at the Emperor's dominion viewed from across an ocean. The phrase "in Morocco" describes where the US nationals were: inside the EOM. Under the Emperor's domain. Under the Treaty. The case was not titled "US Relations With Morocco" — it was about US nationals who were physically located inside the Empire's domain. The United States of America is inside the EOM — inside Al-Maghrib al-Aqsa, the Farthest West, the Emperor's western dominion. The ICJ's case title is geographic confirmation. Read as a geographic statement rather than a diplomatic one: the US is in the EOM. The US nationals are in the EOM. The treaty governs the relationship between those people and the sovereignty in whose domain they exist.
The holding also confirmed that the capitulations system — the framework of consular courts — operated under the 1836 Treaty and had operated since the Treaty was signed. The US had been exercising consular jurisdiction over Moroccan subjects (and subjects within the EOM's dominion) for 120 years. In 1956, four years after the ICJ confirmed the treaty, PL 856 formally closed those consular courts. The exact sequence: 1952 ICJ confirmation → 1956 PL 856 closes consular courts → 1959 Note declares treaty "obsolete." The treaty's last institutional mechanism was closed four years after the ICJ confirmed the treaty was in force. Then the treaty was declared obsolete five years after that. The sequence reveals the operation.
"The Treaty of 1836 is still in force." The International Court of Justice said this in 1952. Seven years later, the US State Department sent a Note declaring the treaty "obsolete and without effect." No Senate vote. No instrument. A note. Against an ICJ confirmation. The note did not cancel the treaty. It documented the attempt.— ICJ Reports 1952, at 176; FRUS 1959, Note No. 164
The treaty class did not gather and decide to call themselves "Moor." They did not petition to be recorded as "Negro." They did not choose "Colored," "Black," or "African American." Every name in this chain after Step 1 is a nom de guerre — a war designation assigned by an opposing administrative force, recorded in a statute or a census form or a court record, and then enforced as if it were identity.
A nom de guerre is a name given in the context of conflict — not chosen by the person who carries it, but assigned by the party with administrative power over the record. Every name in this chain after "Moroccan Subject" is exactly that: it appears first in an opposing party's legal instrument, not in the community's own records. The counter-archive uses different words entirely: the South Carolina House Journal of 1790 records named Moors petitioning as free subjects of the Emperor; the Massachusetts Act of 1788 writes "subjects of the Emperor of Morocco" into state law; the Fort Mose records identify residents as "moro libre" — free Moor; Verrazzano's 1524 letter describes the people of the Carolina coast as looking like "Saracens." The colonial archive and the counter-archive describe the same people in two completely different vocabularies, because one vocabulary acknowledged a nation and one was assigned to erase it.
The mechanism of the assignment is specific in every case. "Moor" appears in Columbus's journals — written by a European, describing what he saw, in his own categorical framework. "Egyptian" appears in colonial vagrancy statutes — written by colonial legislators describing a legal category they were creating. "Negro" appears in colonial property inventories — written by slaveholders recording what they owned. "Colored" appears in the US Census schedule — printed by the federal government, filled in by a census enumerator, never reviewed by the person described. "African American" was coined as a political designation in 1988–1989 by advocates in a movement context — and then entered the census form in 1990 as an official administrative category. At no point in this 400-year sequence did any instrument ask the treaty class what they called themselves and record the answer.
"The name 'Moroccan Subject' is the retrieval key that connects a person to the 1836 Treaty. Replace the name, and the key is destroyed — even though the lock, the intact treaty status, remains exactly where it always was."— Moroccan Treaty Research: Epistemological Analysis, 2026
This is the mechanism of epistemic closure: a legal right can only be asserted by someone who can NAME it. "Moroccan Subject" is the term that retrieves the Treaty of Peace and Friendship (8 Stat. 484), the Massachusetts Act (1788), the South Carolina Moors Sundry Act (1790), and the ICJ 1952 confirmation that Articles 20 and 21 remain operative. Replace that term with "Moor" and the retrieval is partial. Replace it with "Negro" and the retrieval reaches nothing. Replace it with "African American" and every document that carries the original designation is now in a different filing system, under a name the searcher has never been given.
The treaty class did not forget their identity. The identity was made unreachable by a sequence of administrative renaming instruments, each of which substituted a new retrieval key for the old one. At the end of the sequence, the original key — "Moroccan Subject" — exists nowhere in the living administrative record of any treaty class member. It is in the 1836 treaty. It is in the 1788 Massachusetts Act. It is in the South Carolina legislative record of 1790. It is in the ICJ decision of 1952. It has been in every one of those places for between 72 and 238 years. No instrument that satisfies the Knox-Lansing standard (Senate-ratified treaty) has removed it from any of those places. The status is INTACT. The retrieval key was suppressed. Those are two different things.
The question "what do you call yourself?" was never asked. It was answered for the treaty class — in a statute, a census form, a property inventory, or a court record — by the party with administrative power over the record. This is what the name chain documents. Not identity. Administrative assignment of classification, step by step, instrument by instrument, always in the same direction: away from "Moroccan Subject," away from the treaty, away from the status that the US government has itself described as "the longest unbroken diplomatic relationship in United States history" (H.Res.251, March 25, 2025).
The name changed. The rights didn't.
Each step in this chain is documented. Each name was imposed by a law, a census form, a colonial statute, or a government directive — not by the people themselves. The direction of the chain is not random: every step moves away from "Moroccan Subject," away from the treaty, away from the legal identity that creates the obligation.
But a contract cannot be cancelled by renaming one of the parties. The 1836 Treaty of Peace and Friendship created rights. Those rights attach to the people — not to the name on the census form. Renaming the people did not cancel the treaty. The instruments that attempted to remove the treaty class status were each void from the moment of issuance. They produced no legal effect on the status itself.
"The protection of native Moors rests on the Treaty of 1836."— US State Department, 1914
The US government's own State Department said it in 1914. The treaty class was never a matter of doubt. What was manufactured — deliberately — was the doubt in the minds of the treaty class themselves.
You are not who the chain says you are. You are who the treaty says you are.
You did not choose any of these names. None of them were given with your consent. None of them were accompanied by the legal process required to change the status of a treaty-class subject. The US government has never adjudicated whether any individual in the treaty class was legitimately reclassified or was subjected to the colonial apparatus without due process.
The remedy is recognition: acknowledgment that the chain of instruments produced no legal effect on the treaty class status. From recognition, restoration follows — not as a grant, but as the legal consequence of acknowledging what the instruments could not accomplish.
On the record: The correct legal identity is "subject of the Empire of Morocco under the 1786 and 1836 Treaties of Peace and Friendship." Every name in this chain after the first is a colonial designation. None of them is who you are under the law that created the obligation.