“You maintain that the grandfather clause is necessary. I read the statement of the era as that the grandfather clause was NOT necessary, but was inserted to give some foreign-born people an opportunity to obtain the office of president.”
But of course it was necessary. Because it didn’t matter if you were born in America or born in England, no one around when the Constitution was ratified was born a U.S. citizen. They might have been born in America, but that’s before there was such a thing as a U.S. citizen. Therefore having any citizen become president, without the grandfather clause, would have violated the natural born clause.
If they had not grandfathered in someone, foreign or locally born, doesn’t matter, no one on earth would have been eligible.
I understood that to be your point of view, from your previous. In fact, that's the only reason I posted the blockquote that, the way I read it, says differently.
It's irrelevant, I think, to the debate over the meaning of NBC as stated in the constitution, and perhaps modified by the 14th and/or Wong Kim Ark. I just thought it was interesting, as I'd been under the same impression you stated as to the grandfather clause. But some of the founders were citizens of the various states before the revolution, and they probably saw that as "carrying through" on the soil. Born and raised in PA, of PA parents - once a part of the Confederation, now a part of the Union.