Article II — Section 1

When the delegates to the Constitutional Convention gathered in Philadelphia in 1787, one of their central anxieties was the vulnerability of the new republic's executive office to foreign manipulation. The presidency, as designed, would concentrate significant executive power in a single individual, and the framers feared that a person with deep loyalties or entanglements abroad — whether through birth, upbringing, or prolonged foreign residence — might act in a foreign power's interest rather than the nation's. This concern was not abstract. The American republic was young, diplomatically exposed, and surrounded by European monarchies with strong interests in the continent's political future. The natural born citizen requirement was conceived as a structural safeguard against what Alexander Hamilton, in Federalist No. 68, described as the danger of foreign intrigue corrupting the selection and conduct of the chief executive.