User:Arne Eickenberg/Chester Arthur

Arthur P. Hinman: The initial controversy
During Chester Arthur's Vice-Presidential campaign alongside James A. Garfield, Arthur P. Hinman, an attorney who had been hired by 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 in vain for Arthur's birth records. Hinman's allegations were widely known due to several national publications. In 1881 the New York Sun maintained after an independent inquest that Hinman's claims were unsubstantiated, whereas Samuel J. Tilden stated in 1882 that the evidence showed that Arthur was Canadian-born and was therefore a usurper to the Presidency.

Chester Arthur's responses: The Brooklyn Eagle debate
Chester Arthur 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.

Hinman's new theory: Chester Abell Arthur
After Arthur had become President due to Garfield's assassination, Hinman resumed his research and published a booklet that was aimed at casting doubt on Arthur's presidential eligibility during his re-election campaign. Since President Arthur was disowned by his party and did not run for a second term, Hinman's pamphlet went widely unnoticed.

XYZ: Content of Hinman's book

Sources and historiography
No member of the Arthur family is referenced in the town records of Fairfield, Vermont. There are also no official records of Arthur's birth in Vermont, because neither the state nor the town of Fairfield began receiving and archiving birth records before 1857. The Arthurs' family bible provides the only written primary source that Arthur was born in Fairfield on October 5, 1829, as Chester Alan Arthur, and the majority of his later biographers has never argued or assumed otherwise, although this opinion does not accord to many historiographical sources and witness testimonies.

The earliest independent written source states that Arthur was born in Franklin County, Vermont, on October 5, 1830, as Chester Absalom Arthur. An 1883 biographical dictionary states that Arthur was born in St. Albany, Vermont, in 1831, also under the name Chester Absalom Arthur. Many later sources misspell one of his known names as Chester Allan Arthur. A 1903 genealogical source states that Arthur was born in Fairfield on October 5, 1830, as Chester Abell Arthur.

Vermont Historical Society debate.

George P. Howe dismissed Hinman's book as fiction. Presidential biographer Richard L. Tobin reported on Hinman's accusations and stated that it is "conceivable that Chester Alan Arthur was […] literally ineligible for the office". Thomas C. Reeves dismissed Hinman's theory, but noted that

1829 accepted (Reeves, family bible: 1829, but no Chester Abell Arthur, only doctor, p. 435)

Legal situation: Ius soli and foreign birth
Naturalization Acts 1790 & 1795

British subjecthood
Due to the public focus on the unprovable allegations regarding Chester Arthur's foreign place of birth, it remained unknown that Arthur was nevertheless a natural-born subject of the British monarch by ius sanguinis, because his British-Irish father William Arthur did not naturalize as a U.S. citizen until August 1843, when Chester Arthur was thirteen years of age, and had only been a denizen of the State of Vermont at the time of Arthur's birth.

Legal situation: Ius sanguinis and foreign subject
The concepts of natural-born subject and natural born citizen, the latter being one of the constitutional requirements for the offices of President and Vice-President, were specificially differentiated in United States v. Rhodes, and in Minor v. Happersett the Supreme Court stated that there were doubts that a child is a natural born citizen, if born on U.S. territory of foreign parentage, i.e. with additional non-U.S. allegiance while born under U.S. territorial jurisdiction.

Chester Arthur was born a British subject and a subject of Vermont under the common law of the state, long before the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Fourteenth Amendment, which codified federal citizenship rule for U.S. territory. Even if applied retroactively, the 14th Amendment at the time was equivalent to Section 1992 of the Revised Statutes and only covered citizens born under complete U.S. jurisdiction, whereas Arthur's status at birth was governed by British common law. Section 1992 and the original 14th Amendment did not confer citizenship on persons born in the United States as foreign subjects. Therefore Chester Arthur's only available path to U.S. citizenship was by his 1843 co-naturalization as the minor of his naturalized father in accordance with Section 2172 of the Revised Statutes.

Evidence of Chester Arthur's Presidential ineligibility
Collins, contemporary legal opinion.

(1) Arthur still Prez; according to Collins' own arguments, Prez Arthur would have been ineligible; but he didn't mention him, so he can't have known about his British subjecthood (2) Natural born citizens are not the same as natural born subjects (3) Framers followed the law of nations, which stated in vattel xyz

In 1885, as Secretary of State under Grover Cleveland, Thomas F. Bayard ruled that a person born in the United States and subject to a foreign power was not a U.S. citizen under the Constitution or a federal statute, which not only indicates that Secretary Bayard knew nothing about President Arthur's foreign subjecthood at birth, but which also shows that Arthur would have been deemed ineligible for the office of President under the contemporary laws and the policies of the United States Department of State, had his citizenship status been known.

John C. Eastman on the original meaning of 14A etc.

Judicial legacy: Chester Arthur, Justice Horace Gray and Wong Kim Ark
In 1882 Chester Arthur nominated Horace Gray as U.S. Supreme Court Justice. A few months after George D. Collins had published his legal treatise on U.S. citizenship (v.s.), the Supreme Court ruled in Elk v. Wilkins that a person born in the United States subject to a foreign power was not a U.S. citizen, thereby affirming the prevalent interpretation of the 14th Amendment citizenship clause. Only one month later Chester Arthur addressed the topic of citizenship in his 1884 State of the Union address, where he reminded the legislature to revise the existing naturalization laws. He openly referred to sections 1992 and 2172 of the Revised Statutes, which had directly effectuated his own problematic citizenship status with regard to Presidential eligibility: Arthur pointed out that the statute granting citizenship to minors of naturalizing parents was "ambiguous", and that the rule of naturalization did not yet define "the status of persons born within the United States subject to a foreign power". Since Chester Arthur was himself a natural-born subject of the British monarch, his remarks before Congress prove that he considered himself to be a naturalized U.S. citizen at best.

It remains unknown if Horace Gray at some point learned about Chester Arthur's secret ineligibility problem, and if he ever attempted to retroactively legitimize his appointment as Supreme Court Justice, but a few years later Gray nevertheless about-faced on his previous decision in Elk v. Wilkins by writing the highly contested ruling and majority opinion in the seminal case United States v. Wong Kim Ark, which used the citizenship regulations in British common law to redefine the meaning of "subject to [U.S.] jurisdiction" in the 14th Amendment, severed the previously joined concepts of territorial and complete political jurisdiction, and thereby managed to extend the right of 14th Amendment citizenship to children born on U.S. territory of foreign subject parents, who have permanent residence and domicile in the United States. If Arthur, already by appointing Gray, ever intended to sanitize his own eligibility problems, he failed posthumously, because the court under Justice Gray only ruled that Wong Kim Ark was a citizen, while Gray in fact indicated that Wong Kim Ark was not natural born.

Aftermath
Chester Arthur has been called "the most obscure President" in American history, which was largely "by design", because he was a "clever" and "at times unscrupulous" politician.

Forged year of birth
Along with Arthur's lies about his family's history and chronology (v.s.), he also created 1830 as a false year of his birth, at the earliest in the 1870s and probably in 1880, when he ran for Vice-President, which caused considerable biographical confusion, because it has been quoted in several publications to this day and had also been engraved on his tombstone (see image). Arthur's motivation for the one-year change from 1829 to 1830 is unknown, but he had four possible reasons:
 * 1) The confusion about the correct year of birth kept Arthur's later biographers occupied with the imperfections of his biography and obscured his father's citizenship history.
 * 2) The change from 1829 to 1830 was made out of vanity.
 * 3) Abell connection
 * 4) jurisdiction/denizenship connection

Lost records
Documents from Chester Arthur's military career as well as his marriage records, which should be on file at the Calvary Church in New York, are "curiously missing". Shortly before his death Arthur caused several Presidential materials, which had been in his private possession, to be destroyed, which was overseen by his son Chester A. Arthur II on the President's orders, while other historical documents pertaining to Arthur's life and presidency, which had been transferred to a New York store house, were destroyed by the Custom House officer on duty at the personal request of the dying President.