Resident/Minister
The seventh booklet and the corpus’s most aggressive etymological argument. Beers parses “resident” as res (a thing with a claim upon it) + ident (identity), citing Vattel’s Law of Nations and feudal-law sources to argue that “resident” is historically the status of a tenant residing on a lord’s land — functionally indistinguishable from a slave. The treatise extends this to a claim that Americans classified as “residents” for tax and other purposes occupy a status of servitude.
The operative version of this claim is foreclosed by the existing finding on the movement claim that ‘resident’ means a federal functionary — Beers’s etymological argument is more ambitious than Mitchell’s functionary argument, but reaches the same operative conclusion and fails on the same grounds (the dwelling sense controls in modern statutes). The companion finding on the person / man distinction addresses the broader statutory-construction layer.
Per-treatise triage cycle pending — claims pre-extracted in notes/beers-treatise-07-extraction.md.