"Oops. That should pretty well settle that. Those who actually wrote the Constitution rejected the notion that citizen parents were required to be a natural born citizen."
Complete Obot disinformation.
The case was about the eligibility of William Loughton Smith to hold his newly won seat (1788) in congress. David Ramsay, his opponent, contended that Smith did not meet the seven years a citizen requirement for congressmen as written in the Constitution.
In a nutshell:
Smith (b. 1758) was sent to England by his father Benjamin in 1770 at the age of 12 years. Later that same year, his father died, a British subject, six years prior to the Declaration of Independence. Smith's mother died in 1760. William Smith did not return to America until 1783, after the bloody fight for our freedom was finished.
Ramsay basically asserted correctly that Smith's father Benjamin could not have passed U.S. Citizenship to his son as he died six years prior to the Declaration of Independence in 1776.
I believe Mr. Jackson in reply to Mr. Madison's argument, said it best:
The case was decided by vote in committee in favor of Smith, with the objections of Mr. Jackson as noted above. Political considerations seem to have trumped reason in this case, as there is no possible way that Smith could have been considered a U.S. Citizen prior to the year 1783, when he arrived in the newly created United States as a young man in his twenties.