Was this racist too ?

[tombogan03884]

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