Natural Born Citizen, the Phrase the Founders Borrowed and Never Defined

To become President of the United States you need exactly three qualifications, and the Constitution lists them in a single sentence. You must be thirty-five. You must have lived in the country fourteen years. And you must be a "natural born Citizen", a phrase that every American thinks he understands until somebody asks him to define it.

Try it at the dinner table. Is a child born in Paris to two American parents natural born? Almost everyone says yes. Is a child born in a U.S. territory before statehood? Probably. Is a child born abroad to one American parent who had lived in the United States only briefly? Now the room gets quiet. The Founders wrote the phrase, adopted it without recorded debate, and left. The Supreme Court has never squarely held what it means for the presidency. This post explains where the phrase came from, what we know for certain, and which questions remain open. And yes, we will be plain about which is which.

The text, and its three requirements

Article II, Section 1, Clause 5 reads:

"No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States."

Take the pieces in turn.

Natural born citizen, or a citizen at the adoption. The second half of that phrase is a grandfather clause. In 1787 nobody old enough to be president had been born a citizen of the United States, because the United States did not exist when they were born. Every one of them was born a British subject. So the Framers let anyone who was a citizen when the Constitution was adopted qualify. That covered the first seven presidents, Washington through Jackson, and William Henry Harrison after them. Martin Van Buren, born in Kinderhook, New York, on December 5, 1782, was the first president born after the Declaration of Independence, and therefore the first born a citizen of the United States.

Thirty-five years old. Senators must be thirty and representatives twenty-five. The presidency's higher age requirement reflected a belief that the office demanded mature judgment and a public record the voters could examine.

Fourteen years a resident. The clause does not say the fourteen years must be consecutive or immediately before the election. Historians have generally read it as requiring that the person have spent a meaningful portion of life in the country, enough to be formed by it. No candidate has been excluded on this ground.

The Twelfth Amendment, ratified in 1804, extended the same rules to the vice presidency: "But no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States."

John Jay's letter of July 25, 1787

Why did the Framers add the requirement at all? The best evidence is a short letter.

On July 25, 1787, John Jay, who was not a delegate but was then the Confederation's secretary for foreign affairs, wrote to George Washington, who was presiding over the Convention. Jay suggested that it would be wise to provide a strong check to the admission of foreigners into the administration of the 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.

Notice what worried Jay: command of the army. The fear was not about immigrants in general, whom the young Republic welcomed in large numbers. It was about foreign influence at the top, a European prince or adventurer invited over to rule, or a man whose loyalties lay with a foreign crown. Europe had a long history of importing monarchs. Britain itself had imported its current royal family from Hanover in 1714. Americans who had just fought a war against that family were not eager to repeat the experiment.

Washington replied to Jay's letter in early September, thanking him for the hints it contained. Within days the phrase appeared in the draft Constitution.

How the phrase entered the Constitution

Earlier proposals had required only that the president be a citizen, of a certain age and with a period of residence. The Committee of Eleven, the group that also invented the Electoral College and is the subject of The Committee of Eleven Invented the Electoral College in the Final Weeks, reported its proposals on September 4, 1787. Its report required that the president be a natural born citizen or a citizen at the time of adoption, thirty-five years old and fourteen years a resident.

The Convention approved the provision on September 7. There is no recorded debate on the phrase. Nobody stood up, as far as Madison's notes show, and asked what "natural born" meant. That silence is itself evidence. The delegates apparently assumed the term had a settled meaning that needed no explanation. The question is what that meaning was.

The English common-law background

The Founders were lawyers trained in English law, and "natural born" was an English legal term with centuries of history.

Under English common law, the basic rule was place of birth. A person born within the king's dominions and under his protection was a natural-born subject, whatever the parents' nationality. The rule was settled in Calvin's Case in 1608, which held that a child born in Scotland after James I had become king of both Scotland and England was not an alien in England, because he was born within the king's allegiance. There were narrow exceptions, chiefly the children of foreign ambassadors and of hostile occupying armies, who were not born under the king's protection.

Birth abroad was handled differently. At common law, a child born outside the realm was generally an alien, but Parliament changed that by statute. A series of acts, beginning in the fourteenth century and expanded in the eighteenth, provided that children born abroad to English or British fathers would be treated as natural-born subjects. Blackstone's Commentaries, the law book the founding generation knew best, described both rules: birth within the dominions made a natural-born subject at common law, and statutes extended that status to certain children born abroad.

So when the Framers used the phrase, it most likely meant at least this: a person who was a citizen at birth, either by birth on American soil under American jurisdiction or by birth abroad to citizen parents as the law recognized. It almost certainly excluded naturalized citizens, people who became citizens after birth. That much has near-universal agreement among scholars.

The Naturalization Act of 1790 and its repeal

The First Congress spoke to the question almost immediately. The Naturalization Act of 1790 set the rules for naturalizing immigrants, and it included this provision:

"the children of citizens of the United States, that may be born beyond sea, or out of the limits of the United States, shall be considered as natural born citizens"

The Act went on to require that the father had resided in the United States, and it excluded children of fathers who had never lived here.

This looks like strong evidence that the founding generation thought children born abroad to American parents could be natural born. Many of the members of that Congress had attended the Convention, and Washington signed the bill.

But there is a complication, and honesty requires stating it. Congress repealed the 1790 Act and replaced it with the Naturalization Act of 1795. The new act kept the rule for children born abroad, but it dropped the words "natural born". It said such children "shall be considered as citizens of the United States." Historians disagree about why. Some think Congress realized it could not define a constitutional term by statute and pulled back. Others think the change was a drafting choice with no significance. The record does not settle it.

What is settled, and what is open

Here is what can be said with confidence, sorted in the order of certainty.

Settled.

1. A person born on American soil to citizen parents is a natural born citizen. Nobody disputes it.
2. A naturalized citizen is not a natural born citizen and is ineligible. Under this rule, distinguished naturalized Americans who served as governors or secretaries of state could not run for president.
3. The age and residency rules are fixed by the text and are not in serious doubt.

Probably settled, though never decided for the presidency.

1. A person born on American soil to non-citizen parents who are lawfully present is a citizen at birth under the Fourteenth Amendment's Citizenship Clause, as the Supreme Court held in United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898). A citizen at birth is most likely a natural born citizen. That case is read from both sides in Wong Kim Ark and the 1898 Birthright Case, Read Fairly From Both Sides.

Genuinely open.

1. Whether a person born abroad to one or two American parents, who is a citizen at birth by statute, is a natural born citizen. The weight of opinion among lawyers, including in public memos written for both parties, says yes. But the Supreme Court has never decided it.
2. Whether a person born in a U.S. territory, or in a place like the old Panama Canal Zone, is natural born. Probably yes if citizen at birth, but undecided.
3. The scope of citizenship by birth for children of parents who are not lawfully present, a question tied to the meaning of "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" in the Fourteenth Amendment. President Trump issued an executive order on January 20, 2025, addressing that question, and the litigation over it belongs to the courts. Readers should follow it on the Supreme Court's own docket rather than in anyone's summary.

Several real candidates have tested question five without a court ever answering it. Governor George Romney of Michigan, who sought the Republican nomination in 1968, was born in Mexico to American parents. Senator Barry Goldwater, the 1964 nominee, was born in the Arizona Territory in 1909, before statehood. Senator John McCain, the 2008 nominee, was born in the Panama Canal Zone; the Senate passed a nonbinding resolution in 2008 declaring him natural born. Senator Ted Cruz, a candidate in 2016, was born in Canada to an American mother. Lawsuits challenging candidates' eligibility have generally been dismissed, most often because the plaintiffs lacked standing, not on the merits.

The strongest argument for a narrow reading, and the answer

There is a serious argument that "natural born" should be read narrowly, to mean only those born on American soil. It goes like this. The common-law core of the term was birth within the dominions. The statutes extending natural-born status to children born abroad were acts of Parliament, and in the United States, Congress cannot change the meaning of a constitutional term by statute. Congress's own retreat in 1795 shows it understood this. And the purpose of the clause, keeping foreign influence out of the presidency, is best served by requiring birth on American soil, since a child raised abroad may be shaped by a foreign nation.

That argument is respectable. Here is why most scholars, including many originalists, reject it.

1. The English meaning included the statutes. By 1787, natural-born subject status for children born abroad to British fathers had been English law for generations. Blackstone described it. A lawyer of 1787 using the term would have understood it to include them.
2. The First Congress said so. The 1790 Act is the earliest congressional reading of the phrase, written by men who had just ratified the Constitution. The 1795 change is ambiguous, and an ambiguous later act does not erase a clear earlier one.
3. The purpose cuts both ways. Jay's fear was a foreign adventurer seizing command. The child of American parents who happened to be abroad, a diplomat's or a soldier's child for instance, is the opposite of a foreign adventurer. A reading that disqualified the children of American servicemen stationed overseas would turn the clause against those who serve.
4. Citizenship at birth is the best line. The cleanest reading is that a natural born citizen is someone who was a citizen at the moment of birth, by soil or by descent, and needed no naturalization. That line is administrable, faithful to the history and consistent with the 1790 Act.

There is, though, an honest limit to that conclusion. It is the better reading, not a holding. Until the Court decides a case with a party who has standing, question five remains open, and anyone who tells you otherwise with total confidence is selling something.

Why the clause still matters

It would be easy to dismiss this as a lawyers' puzzle. It is not. The clause is one of the few places the Constitution expresses a view about national loyalty and the risk of foreign influence. It reflects a conviction the Founders held firmly: that the man holding the sword of the nation should be bound to it from birth.

The clause also carries a lesson about constitutional humility. The Framers left some terms undefined, trusting that a shared legal vocabulary would supply the meaning. Where that vocabulary has faded, the right response is to recover it from the history, not to replace it with whatever we wish it meant. That is the originalist method at its most practical. It is the same method that runs through the debate over citizenship in Subject to the Jurisdiction Thereof, Six Words at the Center of Citizenship and through the comparison with other nations in Most of Europe Does Not Grant Citizenship by Birth Alone. Here Is the Map.

The case in brief

1. The president must be a natural born citizen, at least thirty-five and fourteen years a resident; the Twelfth Amendment applies the same rules to the vice president.
2. John Jay's letter of July 25, 1787, urged the requirement to keep foreign influence from the command of the army, and the Convention adopted it without recorded debate.
3. English law, as Blackstone described it, included birth within the dominions and, by statute, birth abroad to subjects; the Naturalization Act of 1790 used the phrase the same way before the 1795 Act dropped it.
4. Birth on American soil to citizen parents is settled, naturalized citizens are excluded, and birth abroad to citizen parents is very probably included but has never been decided by the Supreme Court.

What you can do: read Article II, Section 1 and the Fourteenth Amendment on our Constitution page, then take our civics test and see how many of the citizenship questions you can answer from the text.