There are citizens who are natural born.
There are/were citizens who were exempted from the NBC requirement if they were alive at the time of the adoption of the Constitution.
There are naturalized citizens.
Exactly what was the distinction between those citizens who were exempted and those who were ‘natural born citizens?’
Few will address that when their opinion is agenda driven.
None of which exist any longer, so there is no third category.
"Exactly what was the distinction between those citizens who were exempted and those who were 'natural born citizens?'"
"Few will address that when their opinion is agenda driven."
It's been addressed plenty of times. It's obvious. Americans who were alive at the time of adoption of the Constitution became citizens of the US when the US was founded. They weren't naturalized, but they weren't born US citizens either. When they were born there was no US. That's all it means. At the moment of adoption there were no "natural born citizens", but the next baby born in the US became one.
The passage is there so that George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and the other people of that generation weren't excluded from being President by the natural born clause.