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Ah I remember your name danamco, and you are of course correct that today a president must be a U.S. citizen, as, of course, all natural born citizens are. For good reason, the Constitution’s rigorous framers did not specify a U.S. Citizen in Article II Section 1 Clause 5.

As we novices attempted to unravel who was eligible, most of us without much historical context, the language of our framers seemed puzzling. During the late 1780s each former colony had its own citizenship laws. A few states would have made slaves, of which there were many whose families had been resident for generations, into citizens. The union would have failed and North America would have been neighboring states with different languages, perhaps at war as their colonizers dictated. Naturalization, citizen’s by man’s laws, had to come later.

Because a union was urgent, given the imminent danger of an attempt to reverse the Revolution, our framers wisely punted, using Article 1 Section 8 which, among many other things, requires Congress “to establish an Uniform rule for Naturalization.” Congress didn’t get around to it until 1867, following the Civil War, where Southern States could not secede or fight another war.

In 1787 there was no federal definition for who were citizens, only the requirement that the most important citizen protecting our rights to individual sovereignty be “natural born”. Then, as Chief Justice Waite explained, and John Bingham, and dozens more, “it was never doubted that natural born or “Natives” were those born in the country to citizen parents. as cited by John Marshall in his 1814 decision in The Venus, 12 U.S. 253, and in dozens of other cases.

That is also the reason for the construction of the decision, a construction I didn’t understand until I had read Leo Donofrio’s explanation several times, of Chief Justice Waite in Minor v. Happersett. To have standing Virginia Minor needed to have been a citizen before the passage of the 14th Amendment. Before the 14th Amendment there was no federal definition so Justice Waite asserted that because Virginia minor was a natural born citizen, born in Missouri to two citizen parents she was a natural born citizen, and therefore a citizen. That made the definition into precedent, and even Justice Gray quoted Minor v. Happersett, citing it as precedent.

Waite’s reaoning sounds tautological, but our founders were disciplined, and understood the need for rigor, particularly if a nations is to be founded upon laws, and not men. Benjamin Franklin, Dr. Franklin, an active and not honorary member of the Royal Society of London, ordered the first English translations and delivered the first copies of Vattel’s “Natures’ Law and the Law of Nations”, to his colleagues in The Colonies in the 1760s. Jefferson made Vattel our new nation’s law book at our first law school, founded by Jefferson in 1779 at William and Mary. John Marshal, a student at Jefferson’s law school at William and Mary, cited Vattel as the most concise authority in his clarification, dictum because it wasn’t essential to the decision, but important to our history to understand the two classes of citizenship, natural born and naturalized, since the case, The Venus, was about the prerogatives of citizens in question during the War of 1812.