The earliest citation that I found, as you all know, is Thomas Paine's reference in his 1791 book The Rights Of Man to "foreigner" and "half-foreigner" as not being eligible to be president.
I wanted to find more citations, though, because one is not enough to prove a point. I hadn't found any words for or against the thought that both parents had to be citizens for a child to be a natural born citizen, other than Paine's reference to "half-foreigners" being excluded. However, absence of proof is not proof of absence. So I went looking for more.
I found a fascinating website called 19th Century Schoolbooks, which I had hoped would shed some light on what the school children were taught about American history, the Constitution, and politics and governments in the years after ratification of the Constitution.
After reviewing all the political books at this collection, I drew some generalizations:
1. The earliest reference is to Noah Webster's 1806 book "Elements of Useful Knowledge." In his section on the Constitution, he refers to the president's qualifications as "The executive power of the United States is vested in a president, who holds his office for four years. To qualify a man for president, he must have been a citizen at the adoption of the constitution, or must be a native of the United States; he must have attained to the age of thirty-fire years, and been fourteen years a resident within the United States..."
All future books use this same language, "native of the United States." While they all go on to explain that the purpose was to prevent foreign influence and corruption, they never give a fuller definition of "native."
2. This was an interesting take on the qualifications from Analysis of civil government: including a topical and tabular arrangement of the Constitution of the United States : designed as a class-book for the use of grammar, high, and normal schools, academies, and other institutions of learning, Author: Townsend, Calvin, 1869
This book skips over the natural-born part and goes to the grandfather clause instead, which is a shame. I am somewhat humored by the caution against citizens who were raised abroad who return to the United States and become president. Obama is everything this author warns of. Although he lived in the country for the required period of time, his past records have been sealed so that the people cannot gain the acquaintence with him that the author expected to be the case.
Chapter XII. Executive Department.[snip]
Art. III Eligibility.
1. The age required was regarded as necessary to give the candidate for this office sufficient time to demonstrate his character, and enable his fellow-citizens to judge of his fitness for the high position of chief executive of a great nation. The mental faculities are usually in full vigor at this age; and opportunities must have been afforded for long public service, and for varied and large experience in the public councils.
2. Fourteen years's residence in the United States is intended not only to give opportunity for an extensive acquaintance on the part of his fellow-citizens with the candidate for this office, but also to furnish him with the requisite knowledge of the wants and institutions of the country. Besides, it may be presumed that a citizen whose residence has been chiefly abroad may not only be deficient in affection for his own country, but he may have become partial to the institutions of other countries with which he has long been familiar.
3. The Constitution requires that the President shall be a natural-born citizen of the United States, or a citizen at the time of the adoption of the Constitution. This is an important restriction, when we consider the sacredness of the trust committed to the charge of the Executive. It will be useless for ambitious foreigners to intrigue for the office, as this qualification of birth cuts off all those inducements from abroad, to corruption, negotiation, and war, which have frequently and fatally harassed the elective monarchies of other countries.
4. But, through the bloody struggle of the American Revolution, our fathers were greatly assisted by the aid of many citizens who were natives of other countries. They had espoused our cause, faught and bled in our interests, had become naturlaized citizens, and had proved their attachments to our institutions beyond all doubt. It would have been ungenerous and ungrateful to have excluded this class of citizens from all possibility of attaining to any office, however exalted, under a government which they had sacrified so much to establish. Hence this saving clause of the Constitution, that, if a person was a citizen of the United States at the time of the adoption of that instrument, this clause has become practically obsolete.
3. I was especially intrigued by this book, Introduction to the science of government, and compend of constitutional and civil jurisprudence: comprehending a general view of the government of the United States, and of the government of the state of New York, together with the most important provisions in the constitutions of the several states by Andrew Young, 1825. He, too, skips over the part about natural born, but his chapter on Naturalization of Aliens was interesting. He talks about the citizenship status of minor children of aliens who become citizens, and of widows and children of men who declare intent to become citizens but die before doing so. What he does not discuss is the alien who births a child while in the United States. Perhaps such discussions were not considered proper topics for schoolchildren, and that's why we don't have paper trail?
In the Founders' and Framers' days, I can only assume that travel from afar was rare, the few sailing ships of the time used for commerce or warfare between England and France, and that people assumed that native citizens (people born here) were, by definition, born to parents who were already here, and not some border-crosser who arrived within days of producing a child. Any infidelity that produced a child would still have been between two existing citizens of the country, and not a temporary already-married student visiting for a few years.
I'm still on a quest for early writings, but I have to admit that the absence of proof is starting to become circumstantial proof to me. That said, I still think that the Preamble provides a clue to the Framers' thinking that the Constitution was established to secure liberty for citizens and their posterity, posterity being the citizen children of citizen parents, who are the natural-born of We the People.
-PJ
“In the Founders’ and Framers’ days, I can only assume that travel from afar was rare, the few sailing ships of the time used for commerce or warfare between England and France, and that people assumed that native citizens (people born here) were, by definition, born to parents who were already here, and not some border-crosser who arrived within days of producing a child. Any infidelity that produced a child would still have been between two existing citizens of the country, and not a temporary already-married student visiting for a few years.”
Key word here, “I assume”
This is all just speculation. What does native mean? Born in the United States. What evidence is there for a distinction drawn that you are drawing here? Absolutely none.
In those days, "native" (derived from "Natal" meaning birth) was interchangeable with natural-born as demonstrated by the Minor v Happersett decision.
The Constitution does not, in words, say who shall be natural-born citizens. Resort must be had elsewhere to ascertain that. At common-law, with the nomenclature of which the framers of the Constitution were familiar, it was never doubted that all children born in a country of parents who were its citizens became themselves, upon their birth, citizens also. These were natives, or natural-born citizens, as distinguished from aliens or foreigners.
In the Founders' and Framers' days, I can only assume that travel from afar was rare, the few sailing ships of the time used for commerce or warfare between England and France, and that people assumed that native citizens (people born here) were, by definition, born to parents who were already here, and not some border-crosser who arrived within days of producing a child. Any infidelity that produced a child would still have been between two existing citizens of the country, and not a temporary already-married student visiting for a few years.
I've made this point as well. In those days, if a child is born in the United States, the vast majority of the time it is because the parents have made the decision to immigrate here and become American Citizens. The occasions where they might be here only temporarily and with intent to return to another country were exceedingly rare during the era of sailing ships.
For all practical purposes, the term "natural born" and "native" (meaning "born here" in modern parlance") are the exact same group of people. The exceptions are so rare as to be dismissed in conversation on the topic. And that is how we arrived at the current confusion.
People came to regard the two terms to mean exactly the same thing, when in fact, they do not. It just became a shorthand way of speaking, rather then specifying the tedious distinction.