User:Arne Eickenberg/Chester Arthur

Allegations of foreign birth
During Chester Arthur's Vice-Presidential campaign alongside James A. Garfield, Arthur P. Hinman, an attorney who had apparently been hired by the members of the Democratic party, explored the "rumors that Arthur had been born in a foreign country, was not a natural-born citizen of the United States, and was thus, by the Constitution, ineligible for the vice-presidency." When Hinman's initial claim of a birth in Ireland failed to gain traction, he maintained instead that Arthur was born in Canada and lobbied the press for support while searching for Arthur's birth records, eventually in vain.

After Arthur had become President due to Garfield's assassination, Hinman published a book that was aimed at casting doubt on Arthur's presidential eligibility during his re-election campaign. Since Arthur did not run for a second term, Hinman's pamphlet went widely unnoticed.

Arthur's responses
Arthur himself continuously gave false information on his family's history, thereby obscuring the circumstances and chronology of his own birth. Arthur knew of Hinman and his allegations and defended himself against the original claim that he was not a native-born citzen by stating that his father "came to this country when he was eighteen years of age, and resided here several years before he was married", whereas in reality his father William emigrated from Ireland to Canada at the age of 22 or 23. Arthur further claimed that "his mother was a New Englander who had never left her native country—a statement every member of the Arthur family knew was untrue." In a second interview he repeated some of the historical revisions and further stated that his father had been forty years of age at the time of his birth, which was revealed by Hinman to be a lie. Somewhere between 1870 and 1880 Chester Arthur had caused additional confusion by creating 1830 as a false year of his birth, which was quoted in several publications and was also engraved on his tombstone.

British subjecthood
However, due to the focus on Hinman's unfounded allegations regarding Chester Arthur's foreign place of birth, it remained unknown during the Garfield campaign that Arthur was nevertheless a natural-born subject of the British crown, because his British-Irish father William Arthur had not naturalized as a U.S. citizen until August 1843, fourteen years after Chester Arthur's birth, and was at best a denizen of the State of Vermont.

Neither the law nor any federal court ruling in the United States has ever determined whether a natural-born British subject like Chester Arthur can at the same time also be a natural born citizen of the United States, which is one of the constitutional requirements for the offices of President and Vice-President. It is equally unclear whether Arthur was even a U.S. citizen at birth, because until the Civil Rights Act of 1866 there had been no federal citizenship rule for U.S. territory. He may have been born a subject of Vermont with British citizenship under the common law of the state, but the Fourteenth Amendment, which introduced ius soli into the United States Constitution, was ratified and adopted not until forty years after Arthur's birth. Even if applied retroactively, the 14th Amendment only covers born and naturalized citizens under complete U.S. jurisdiction, whereas Arthur's status at birth was governed by British common law.

Arthur's presidency and aftermath
In 1882 Chester Arthur nominated Horace Gray as U.S. Supreme Court Justice, whose seminal decision in United States v. Wong Kim Ark extended the right of 14th Amendment citizenship to children born on U.S. territory of foreign parents, who have permanent residence and domicile in the United States. If Arthur, by appointing Gray, ever intended to sanitize his problematic status with regard to natural born citizenship, he failed posthumously, because the court only ruled that Wong Kim Ark was a citizen, while Gray in fact indicated that Wong Kim Ark was not natural born.

Shortly before his death Arthur caused several Presidential materials, which had been in his private possession, to be destroyed, while other historical documents pertaining to Arthur's life and presidency were lost for unknown reasons.