The Down Range Forum
Member Section => Politics & RKBA => Topic started by: tombogan03884 on September 02, 2009, 04:08:48 PM
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Chester Alan Arthur: The Barack Obama of the 19th Century:
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2009_08_30-2009_09_05.shtml#1251923886
Thanks to some comments in my previous post on presidential aspirants
and citizenship, I found some interesting facts about Chester Alan
Arthur, who served as President in 1881-85, succeeding to the office
after the assassination of James Garfield.
Arthur's father was an Irishman who moved to Canada. There, he eloped
with an American woman from Vermont. Canada and Ireland were, at the
time, under the government of the United Kingdom. The couple had
several children, including Chester. The father did not become a
naturalized American citizen until long after Chester's birth.
During the 1880 presidential campaign, Democrats hired Wall Street
lawyer Arthur P. Hinman to investigate Arthur's background. Hinman
released his findings to the Brooklyn Eagle newspaper during the
campaign, and later wrote a book, How a British subject became
president of the United States (1884).
Hinman contended that Arthur had been born in Canada, and was thus
constitutionally ineligible to be Vice-President or President. (The
Natural Born Citizen clause, however, applies only to who "shall be
eligible to the Office of President." It does not, on its face, apply
to the Vice Presidency. The clause of course reflects the original
system of presidential elections, by which the electors cast two
ballots, and whoever came in second became Vice President. The 12th
Amendment changed that system, but did not revise the NBC clause
accordingly.)
Arthur [1]specifically denied the claim, and said that he had been
born in Vermont. There was apparently no birth certificate, since such
certificates were not used in many areas at the time that Arthur was
born.
Later biographers have concluded that [2]Arthur lied about his own
age, and perhaps about various aspects of his father's life. The
American people obviously made a political judgement, in electing
Garfield-Arthur, that they either did not believe the charge of
Canadian birth, or did not care about it.
Personally, I probably would have voted for the Democratic nominee,
[3]Winfield Scott Hancock, a man of impeccable integrity and great
regard for constitutional rights. He lost the popular vote to Garfield
by few than 10,000 votes. In 1881, Hancock became President of the
National Rifle Association. (Following in the footsteps of Ulysses
Grant, who served as NRA President after serving two terms as United
States President.)
In any case, the existence of the Arthur controversy is an example of
political opponents raising questions about whether a president was
really a natural born citizen, and raising such questions for reasons
other than racism.
References
1. http://eagle.brooklynpubliclibrary.org/Repository/getFiles.asp?Style=OliveXLib:LowLevelEntityToSaveGifMSIE_BEAGLE&Type=text/html&Locale=english-skin-custom&Path=BEG/1880/08/15&ChunkNum=-1&ID=Ar00401
2. http://www.boston.com/news/local/vermont/articles/2009/08/17/chester_arthur_rumor_still_lingers_in_vermont/
3. http://www.davekopel.org/NRO/Hero-of-Gettysburg.htm