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Chester Arthur is a red herring for the particular matter at hand. I specifically asked what made Lincoln a natural born citizen. It is your contention that presidents prior to 1868 weren’t constitutionally eligible to be president unless congress deemed them as such in their naturalization acts.

I believe that all the presidents prior to ratification of the 14th Amendment were natural born citizens of the United States but their actual status as such was never challenged or tested in a court of law. The only issue concerning the first 17 presidents is the parentage of those who were born abroad: Thomas Jefferson (mother born in England), Andrew Jackson (whose two parents were born in Ireland) and James Buchanan (Irish father).

As I already said, there were no legal challenges to the eligibility of any president prior to the passage of the 14th Amendment.

What made Abraham Lincoln eligible as a natural born citizen was a general acceptance by his political allies and his political opponents alike that he was born in Hodgenville, Kentucky.

Since you don’t like the Chester A. Arthur example, a more interesting and relevant example would be James Buchanan who served before the ratification of the 14th Amendment and who had a father who was a British subject who passed his British citizenship on to James Buchanan. The elder Buchanan died a dual citizen of the British Empire and the United States.

Chester Arthur is a red herring for the particular matter at hand.

Why? He served as president, it was public knowledge that his father was a British subject at his birth, and yet no one challanged his eligibility on that basis. That seems to be the perfect precedent for Obama's case.