I was wrong! Hamilton edition

[beatrice_otter]

I love Hamilton, but there's one thing that annoyed me: the repeated statement that, after the Reynolds pamphlet, Hamilton was "never goin' be President now."

Because, as Hamilton points out A LOT, Hamilton was an immigrant. And immigrants can't be President! You have to be a natural-born citizen!* It says so right in the constitution!

But then I decided to double-check, and there was a curlicue I didn't know about (because it hasn't applied in 200 years). Clause Five of Article Two 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.

And there it goes. Hamilton was an immigrant, but he was a citizen of the United States when the Constitution was adopted, so he would indeed have been eligible to be president if he hadn't been such an idiot.

*Which is why the "birther" idiots kept trying to "prove" that Obama's birth certificate was fake, and he was born in Kenya instead of Hawaii, and thus not a US Citizen--which is stupid because even if it were true, Obama would still be a natural-born citizen because his mother was a citizen.

Comments

[beatrice_otter]

I always thought that for that first generation, they meant "had been a natural born citizen of one of the 13 colonies"