It would have been improper and legally invalid for the Justices in that case to make any such ruling, because the definition of "natural born citizen" was not at issue in the case, and courts are not supposed to make rulings on issues not presented to them by the litigants. That alone proves you utterly wrong.
As for the Chester Arthur issue, you have presented no evidence to prove your case whatsoever. No references. No quotes. Nothing. Just historically incorrect assertions, with no evidence.
You either don't know, or don't have the intellectual honesty to mention, that Chester Arthur was not elected President. He was elected Vice President, and succeeded to the Presidency when President Garfield was assassinated. That fact could be enough by itself to explain why Arthur was not more thoroughly investigated.
However, the fact is that Arthur's eligibility was questioned based on the "natural born citizen" requirement, not based on his father's citizenship, but instead over the suspicion that he might have been born in Canada, or perhaps even Ireland. The charge was made, but no one was able to prove it.
But the ruckus raised over Arthur's place of birth served to deflect any scrutiny over other issues. That should sound familiar. The same thing has happened today, with so much focus on whether or not Obama was born in Hawaii, it has been extremely difficult to get any widespread or mainstream focus on the fact that Obama's father was not a US citizen.
Chester Arthur was born in 1829, although he falsely claimed to have been born in 1830. Arthur's father had become a naturalized US citizen in 1843, decades before Chester was elected Vice President, but 14 years after Chester was born.
The definitive biography on Chester Arthur is “Gentleman Boss” by Thomas Reeves. It’s an exhaustive reference. Many of the blanks in Chester Arthur’s legend were filled in by this book which utilized interviews with family members and authentic documents like the Arthur family Bible. It was a necessary work since old Chester Arthur was a very wily protector of his strange history. He burned all of his papers. (See page 2365.)
From “Gentleman Boss”, page 202 and 203: “…Hinman was hired, apparently by democrats, to explore rumors that Arthur had been born in a foreign country, was not a natural-born citizen of the United States, and was thus, by the Constitution, ineligible for the vice-presidency. By mid-August, Hinman was claiming that Arthur was born in Ireland and had been brought to the United States by his father when he was fourteen. Arthur denied the charge and said that his mother was a New Englander who had never left her native country — a statement every member of the Arthur family knew was untrue.”
Arthur’s mother had lived in Canada with her husband and even had her first child there.
In the Brooklyn Eagle newspaper, an article interviewing Chester Arthur about Hinman’s accusations was published on August 13, 1880. In that article, Chester Arthur defended himself as follows:
“My father, the late Rev. William Arthur, D.D., was of Scotch blood, and was a native of the North of Ireland. He came to this country when he was eighteen years of age, and resided here several years before he was married.”
This was another blatant lie. His father emigrated from Ireland to Canada at the age of 22 or 23. William Arthur didn’t come to the United States until sometime between March 1822 – when his first child was born in Dunham, Canada – and March 1824 – when his second child was born in Burlington, Vermont. The youngest he could have been when he came to Vermont was 26.
On August 16, 1880 Chester Arthur told the Brooklyn Eagle newspaper that at the time of his birth, his father was forty years old. Another blatant lie. His father would have been only thirty-three years old when Chester was born.
In that same article he lied that his father settled in Vermont and reiterated the lie that William came here at the age of eighteen. This age discrepancy was exposed in the August 19, 1880 edition of the Brooklyn Eagle in an article written by Hinman.
It was very convenient for Arthur that Hinman kept the focus on the extraordinary and false claim – that Arthur was born abroad – while the more subtle and true eligibility issue stayed hidden in plain site.
Chester Arthur had something to hide, and his lies prove he knew it, and knew what it was. It was not the location of his birth, because he had been truthful about that. That alone proves you wrong, but let's continue.
He had all of his papers burned which was very odd for a President.
Arthur lied about his mother’s time in Canada. He lied about his father’s time in Canada. He lied about his father’s age plus where and when he got off the boat from Ireland. By obscuring his parents’ personal history he curtailed the possibility that anybody might discover he was born many years before his father had naturalized.
When Chester runs for VP, Hinman comes along essentially demanding to see Chester’s birth certificate to prove he was born in the United States. This causes a minor scandal easily thwarted by Chester, because Chester was born in Vermont…but at the same time, the fake scandal provides cover for the real scandal.
William Arthur was not a naturalized citizen at the time of Chester Arthur’s birth, and therefore Chester Arthur was a British subject at birth and not eligible to be Vice President or President.
Chester Arthur lied about his father’s emigration to Canada and the time his mother spent there married to William. Some sixty years later, Chester lied about all of this and kept his candidacy on track. Back then it would have been virtually impossible to see through this, especially since Arthur’s father had died in 1875 and had been a United States citizen for thirty-two years.
And without knowledge of his father’s time in Canada, or the proper timeline of events, potential researchers in 1880 would have been hard pressed to even know where to start.
And that refutes so utterly and comprehensively, that I am done with this conversation.
Assuming Americans had relied solely on the information provided by Arthur it wouldn't have lessoned the motivation of Americans to scrutinize his father's citizenship. Again, assuming they had accepted Arthur's version, his father would have had a minimum of ten years to be naturalized before Chester's birth. That's plenty of time to get naturalized and provides plenty of reason for Americans (had they agreed with you) to at least raise the issue!
If Americans accepted your theory, they had to be the most clueless idiots who ever lived for not asking Arthur about it or even raising the issue! Assuming you are right, they were also incredibly reckless since they knew from recent experience (1865) that the VP was a heartbeart from the presidency. I assert that the voters of 1880 were much smarter and less trusting of politicians than you give them credit for.
"is yet, in the words of Lord Coke in Calvin’s Case, 7 Coke, 6a, ’strong enough to make a natural subject, for, if he hath issue here, that issue is a natural-born subject’; and his child, as said by Mr. Binney in his essay before quoted, ‘If born in the country, is as much a citizen as the natural-born child of a citizen, and by operation of the same principle.’"
