![\"arthur\"](\"http:\/\/law.marquette.edu\/facultyblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/10\/arthur.jpg\" "\\"arthur\\"")
The Obama citizenship \u201cdebate\u201d has surprisingly brought former president Chester A. Arthur (1829-1886) back into the pages of American newspapers, which is no small feat.\u00a0 Unlike President Obama, who is clearly eligible to hold the nation\u2019s highest office, Arthur, the\u00a0twenty-first president (1881-84), may well have been an \u201cunconstitutional\u201d president.<\/p>\n
Although Arthur is frequently seen as Millard Fillmore primary competition for the title of \u201cMost Obscure President in U.S. History,\u201d the circumstances of his birth have raised questions eeriely similar to those asked about President Barack Obama by the birthers.<\/p>\n
Before 1880, Chester Arthur was a minor New York City politician who was a prot\u00e9g\u00e9 of Sen. Roscoe Conkling of the Empire State.\u00a0 Although he was a prominent lawyer, he had never run for, let alone held, elective office at any level.\u00a0 Nevertheless, at the 1880 Republican Presidential Convention in Chicago, he was added to the Republican national ticket as the running mate of presidential candidate James Garfield.\u00a0 Arthur was selected to balance the slate geographically \u2014 Garfield was from Ohio, part of the Midwest in an era when regions mattered \u2014 and to placate Sen. Conkling, a presidential aspirant himself and the leader of the Stalwart faction of the Republican Party.<\/p>\n
In 1871, President Grant, with Conkling\u2019s blessings, had appointed Arthur to the lucrative position as Collector of the Port of New York.\u00a0 However, seven years later, he had been removed from that position by President Rutherford B. Hayes, as part of a presidential effort to crack down on the spoils system.\u00a0 Although there was no evidence of real corruption at the custom house while Arthur was Collector, it was also clear that Arthur had no objections to padding the Collector\u2019s payroll with loyal Republicans. Once elected, Arthur remained loyal to Conkling and the spoils system, and he and Garfield clashed repeatedly on questions of federal appointments, which led Garfield to ban Arthur from the White House.<\/p>\n
However, on July 2, 1881, Garfield was assassinated by Charles Guiteau, a deranged supporter of Conkling, who, after shooting the president, shouted, \u201cI am a Stalwart of the Stalwarts . . . Arthur is president now!\u201d\u00a0 Guiteau\u2019s two shots actually did not prove to be fatal, and Garfield lived until September 19, when he was finally done in by a combination of infection and poor medical care.<\/p>\n
Although he was a product of, and, at least initially, a supporter of the spoils system, as president Arthur actually turned out to be fairly progressive and a strong supporter of civil service reform.\u00a0 In 1883, he signed the Pendleton Act, which established the first Civil Service Commission.\u00a0 Although he sought his party\u2019s presidential nomination for 1885, he was not renominated by the Republican Party.\u00a0 Even so, he left office widely respected by members of both parties.\u00a0 Even Mark Twain begrudgingly acknowledged that \u201cit would be hard indeed to better President Arthur\u2019s administration.\u201d<\/p>\n
Questions of Arthur\u2019s eligibility for the nation\u2019s highest office surfaced during the 1880 campaign.\u00a0 Arthur was the son of an Irishman who emigrated first to Canada and the then to the United States, and who finally became a naturalized United States citizen in 1843, fifteen years after his son Arthur\u2019s birth in 1829.\u00a0 Arthur\u2019s mother was a United States citizen born in Vermont but whose family emigrated to Canada where she met and married her husband.\u00a0 By the time of Arthur\u2019s birth, his parents had moved back to Vermont.<\/p>\n
The controversy over Arthur\u2019s citizenship status centers around the place of Arthur\u2019s actual birth.\u00a0 By one account he was born in his family\u2019s home in Franklin County, Vermont.\u00a0 If this was true, then he was clearly a natural born citizen.\u00a0 On the other hand, the competing account has it that he was born during his pregnant mother\u2019s visit to her family\u2019s home in Canada.<\/p>\n
If the latter story is true, then Arthur was technically foreign-born, and in 1829, citizenship in such cases passed to the child only if the father was a United States citizen, and, of course, at this point Arthur\u2019s father was still a citizen of the British Empire.<\/p>\n
The principal advocate of the \u201cborn in Canada\u201d theory was Arthur\u2019s fellow New York lawyer Arthur P. Hinman who was hired in 1880 by the Democratic Party to investigate Arthur\u2019s ancestry.\u00a0 Hinman initially undermined his owned credibility by embracing an argument that Arthur was himself born in Ireland and didn\u2019t come to the United States until he was fourteen years old.\u00a0 That story was patently false and easily disproven.<\/p>\n
However, Hinman later discovered acquaintances of the Arthur family in Canada who told him the story of Arthur\u2019s accidental Canadian birth.\u00a0 Convinced that he now had proof of Arthur\u2019s foreign citizenship, he published his findings in 1884 in a short book entitled How a Subject of the British Empire Became President of the United States.\u00a0 <\/em>Hinman\u2019s book appeared near the end of Arthur\u2019s presidency, and no official action was ever taken on the basic of his alleged evidence.<\/p>\n Arthur himself always insisted that he was born in Vermont, but he may not have known the place of his birth. By the time he was six years old, his family had left Vermont for New York, and he never lived in the Green Mountain State again.\u00a0 It is possible that his parents considered the circumstances of his Canadian birth to be personally embarrassing and never shared the details of the story with him.<\/p>\n