Mr. Baker to Mr. Gresham.
Managua , December 6, 1893 . (Received January 3.)
Sir: Referring to my communication No. 161, of December 5, I beg to say that I received last night the following telegram from Mrs. Jacoby:
Granada (11.45 a.m.).
Lewis Baker, Minister of the United States:
I am being forced to pay contribution, and fine, an escort being placed at my door and forbidding all communication. Mr. Low, consul, told me he had passed at the ministry asking them to suspend until Washington heard from. I beg you will protect me. Answer.
The governor telegraphed to the ministry, and they answered that before all I am a Nicaraguan citizen.
Josefa Jacoby.
This morning I accompanied Mr. Low, our vice-consul, to the Presidential palace to make inquiries in the matter. I saw the President, who, upon hearing of the object of our errand, sent for his minister of foreign relations, Mr. Madriz. Mr. Low explained that Mrs. Jacoby’s husband was an American citizen; that upon his death he left her in charge of his estate, equally divided between her and her sons; that she is the curator of her sons’ property, and that recently, when a forced contribution of $600, for purposes of paying the expenses of a civil war, was demanded of her, she appealed to him for protection against the demand. Mr. Low had then gone to see the minister of finances and was promised verbally that the matter would be left in abeyance until he could get instructions from Washington. Notwithstanding that promise the authorities had insisted upon the payment of the amount, and had pursued for that purpose the means related in Mrs. Jacoby’s letter to me.
Mr. Madriz said that above all things Mrs. Jacoby was a Nicaraguan; that by the death of Mr. Jacoby the legal fiction under which she had acquired the nationality of her husband, and which was recognized by some nations but denied by others, was abrogated, and that she naturally returned to her antenuptial conditions of nationality and citizenship, as far as a woman can be a citizen.
Mr. Low and I called attention to the fact that in the United States a woman is not supposed to lose the privileges acquired by her marriage [Page 453] on account of the death of her husband; on the contrary, that in the case of pensioners, for instance, the widow enjoys the pension of her deceased husband until she renounces the privilege by a new alliance; that the United States do not recognize the tenets that nationality of birth is an unalterable condition, and that the American ideas of naturalization are beginning to be recognized the world over.
Mr. Madriz cited the case of a woman claiming exemption from certain contributions in 1869, which, he said, was ably argued on Nicaragua’s side by Mr. Tomas Ayon, then minister of foreign affairs, and which was the occasion of a diplomatic incident between the United States and Nicaragua. In that case the husband was living.
After further conversation the President offered that Mrs. Jacoby deposit the money under protest, but, not satisfied with that, we insisted that the case remain in statu quo until definite instructions could be had from the Department to establish a precedent for our guidance. This we obtained at last, and I now beg to ask your decision in the matter.
I have absolute documentary evidence that Mr. Jacoby was an American citizen by naturalization. I have her certificate of marriage. She has just handed me a letter of a former minister of gobernacion of Nicaragua in reply to a protest made by her against the payment of a similar tax in 1885, a translation of which I send. The argument used then was similar to the one used at present, that she ceased being an American citizen by the death of her husband. But the authority of Carlos Calvo, vol. 2, 1868, was quoted as follows (p. 538): “Modern jurisprudence has accepted in all its parts the logical and undisputable maxim of the Roman code which assigns to the married woman as legal domicile that of her husband, whose name and rank she takes, and which establishes, therefore, that the widow retains it unless she should contract a new marriage, in which case she will acquire that of her new husband,” and the demand was withdrawn.
He also hands me a statement signed by Don Alejandro Chamorro, prefect of Granada, to the effect that “the undersigned prefect of the department states that he exempted Dona Josefa Mayorga, widow of Jacoby, from the contribution, because the latter has proved that she is a North American citizen. Granada, May 21, 1893. The Prefect: Alejandro Chamorro.”
I have asked Mrs. Jacoby to notify me in case she should be subjected to further vexations, but I hope that the case will remain in statu quo until I may hear from you. But should she be interfered with again, I shall make an energetic protest, as from present lights I can not fail to recognize her right to the protection of our Government.
I beg to remain, etc.,