Not Accepted

clipped from naturalborncitizen.wordpress.com Hamilton’s first draft of our Constitution (1787), Article IX, Section 1, suggests that the qualification for president should contain; “No person shall be eligible to the office of President of the United States unless he be now a citizen of one of the States, or hereafter be born a citizen of the United States” That suggestion was not accepted, and instead, the more restrictive “natural born citizen”, sugested by our soon-to-be first Chief Justice, John Jay, was adopted. If “born a citizen of the United States” was to have the same meaning as that of “natural born citizen” we would have had no need to change the original suggestion. For those interested in reading “in context”, I invite you to look at page 407 of “The works of Alexander Hamilton”.