Nobody who ran before 1824 could have been born a citizen of the United States.
“Nobody who ran before 1824 could have been born a citizen of the United States.”
Actually, that is incorrect and an all too common misconception. The U.S. educational system has done an incompetent job of teaching U.S. history and thereby obscured one of the key causes for the American Revolutionary War. When the English colonies were established in North America, thy were established by a personal charter from the King of England and were thereby authorized to establish their own legislatures apart from the English Parliament and the English state. Thereafter, the colonies in the Americas underwent a number of changes in their legal status before the onset of the American Revolutionary War. In the beginning, the colonists were citizens of only their own colony. Later, the King of England reorganized his colonies and made the citizens of the colonies also citizens of the King’s North American colonies. It was this official King’s proclamation that made Canadian colonists into citizens of the same North American colonies which led to the rebellious United States of America to offer British Canada statehood in the United States of America. Upon the advent of the American Revolutionary War, those colonists who retained their loyalty to their revolutionary colonial legislature instead of the King retained their colonial and state citizenship and thereby their citizenship in the new United States of America. When the King and the English Parliament abrogated the colonial charters and the historical legislative independence and political separation of the North American colonies from the English state and the English Parliament, those usurpations of colonial authorities became the fundamental cause of the taxation controversies and the American Revolutionary War.
Persons born before 1824 were citizens of the United States, because the United States was established on 2-4 July 1776. Also, some persons who were U.S. citizens of the United States on 4 July 1776 were also citizens of the British North American colonies and their individual colony before 4 July 1776. The Constitution Article II, Section 1, Clause 5 only concerns itself with persons who were and were not U.S. citizens when the Constitution was adopted, and not when the United States or their predecessor colonies were established and their inhabitants acquired citizenship. The date of 1824 is significant only because that is when a natural born citizen born after the adoption of the Constitution could be old enough to become eligible as President.