The first President of the United States to qualify as a natural born citizen was Martin Van Buren who assumed the office in 1837.
Historian, Secretary of the Navy and Founder of the U.S. Naval Academy at Anapolis George Bancroft wrote in his “History of the Formation of the Constitution of the United States” (1884) (Volume 1 Page 346):
“One question on the qualifications of the president was among the last to be decided. On the twenty-second of August the committee of detail, fixing the requisite age of the president at thirty-five, on their own motion and for the first time required that the president should be a citizen of the United States, and should have been an inhabitant of them for twenty-one years. The idea then arose that no number of years could properly prepare a foreigner for the office of president; but as men of other lands had spilled their blood in the cause of the United States, and had assisted at every stage of the formation of their institutions, the committee of states who were charged with all unfinished business proposed, on the fourth of September, that “no person except a natural-born citizen, or a citizen of the United States at the the of the adoption of this constitution, should be eligible to the office of president,” and for the foreign-born proposed a reduction of the requisite years of residence to fourteen. On the seventh of September, the modification, with the restriction as to the age of the president, was unanimously adopted.”
Mr. Bancroft had interviewed an elderly James Madison in preparation for his books on the formation of the Constitution.
http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/99-02-02-3262
Thank you, that is a great link and a very special look at the perspective of the Founding Fathers.
However I hope you are not using the link in your post above to argue that the Founders did not know exactly what they meant by NBC, born on US soil to two citizen parents. Your link supports the great store Madison set by not allowing any foreign born Presidents except for the foreign born men who had done service and/or had shed blood in service during the birth of our Nation.
In the creation of the exception for “citizens at the time of the adoption of the constitution, Madison and the other signers limited to only this one circumstance any exception to the natural born citizen requirement.
The possibility of a misreading of the Naturalization Act of 1790 caused Madison to require its Repeal and the substitution of the Act of 1795 which more clearly spells out the intent to grant citizenship but not NBC to children of citizens born outside our Country.