Page:Qualifications for President and the “Natural Born” Citizenship Eligibility Requirement.pdf/9

 eventually reported and recommended after the debates and discussion of congressional eligibility requirements, there were no further discussions of the issue in Convention.

Although there was no discussion concerning the precise meaning or derivation of the term “natural born,” there is in the Documentary History of the Convention a possible clue from where the qualification for President to be a “natural born” citizen may have derived. The history of the Convention indicates that George Washington, the presiding officer, received a letter dated July 25, 1787, from John Jay, which appears to raise for the first time the issue of a requirement to be a “natural born” citizen of the United States as a requisite qualification to be President: "Permit me to hint, whether it would not be wise & seasonable to provide a strong check to the admission of Foreigners into the administration of our national Government; and to declare expressly that the Command in chief of the american army shall not be given to, nor devolve on, any but a natural born Citizen."

There is no specific indication as to the precise role this letter and its “hint” actually played in the adoption by the Convention of the particular qualification of being a “natural born” citizen. However, no other expressions of this particular term are evident in Convention deliberations prior to the receipt of Jay’s letter, and the September 4 draft of the Constitution reported from the Committee of Eleven to the delegates, at a time shortly after John Jay’s letter had been acknowledged by Washington, contained for the first time such a qualification. The timing of Jay’s letter, the acknowledgment of its receipt by Washington on September 2, and the first use of the term in the subsequent report of the Committee of Eleven, on September 4, 1787, may thus indicate more than a mere coincidence. If this were the case, then the concern over “foreigners,” without sufficient allegiance to the United States, serving as President and Commander-in-Chief, would appear to be the initial and principal motivating concern of the framers, in a somewhat similar vein as their concerns over congressional citizenship qualifications.

Such purpose of the “natural born” citizen qualification was expressed by Justice Joseph Story in his historic treatise on the Constitution in 1833: It is indispensable, too, that the president should be a natural born citizen of the United States… [T]he general propriety of the exclusion of foreigners, in common cases, will scarcely be doubted by any sound statesman. It cuts off all chances for ambitious foreigners, who might otherwise be intriguing for the office; and interposes a barrier against those corrupt Rh