If the newly drafted Constitution wasn’t ratified, he warned in Federalist No. 8, a “War between the States,” fought by irregular armies across unfortified borders, was imminent. Large states would overrun small ones. “Plunder and devastation” would march across the landscape, reducing the citizenry to “a state of continual danger” that would nourish authoritarian, militarized institutions.

“If we should be disunited, and the integral parts should either remain separated, or … thrown together into two or three confederacies, we should be, in a short course of time, in the predicament of the continental powers of Europe,” he continued. “Our liberties would be a prey to the means of defending ourselves against the ambition and jealousy of each other.”

Hamilton’s 1787 plea was successful, of course, in that we adopted a new, stronger Constitution two years later. But Americans still didn’t agree on why it was we had come together and what defined us as a people.

Maintaining a shared sense of nationhood has always been a special challenge for the United States, arguably the world’s first civic nation, defined not by organic ties, but by a shared commitment to a set of ideals. The U.S. came into being not as a nation, but as a contractual agreement, a means to an end for 13 disparate rebel colonies facing a common enemy. Its people lacked a shared history, religion, or ethnicity. They didn’t speak a language uniquely their own. Most hadn’t occupied the continent long enough to imagine it as their mythic homeland. They had no shared story of who they were and what their purpose was. In short, they had none of the foundations of a nation-state.

The one unifying story Americans had told themselves—that they had all participated in the shared struggle of the American Revolution—lost its strength as the Founders’ generation passed from the scene, and had been shaken by secession movements in the Appalachian backcountry of Pennsylvania and Virginia in the 1790s and in New England during the war of 1812. By the 1830s, it had become increasingly clear that this identity crisis could no longer be papered over: Americans knew they needed a story of United States nationhood, if their experiment were to survive.

The first person to package and present such a national story for the United States was the historian-statesman George Bancroft. Bancroft, the son of a famous Unitarian preacher in Massachusetts, who graduated from Harvard in 1817 and was promptly sent by that college’s president on an epic study-abroad trip to the German Confederation, another federation of states contemplating its identity. In Europe, Bancroft studied under Arnold Heeren, Georg Hegel, and other intellectuals who were developing ideas of Germanic nationhood; chummed around with Lafayette, Washington Irving, Lord Byron, and Goethe; backpacked on foot from Paris to Rome; and returned home, doctorate in hand, with his head churning with ideas about his country’s place in the world. After failing in bids to be a poet, professor, prep school master, and preacher (who memorably evoked the image of “our pelican Jesus” in a sermon), Bancroft embarked upon what would prove to be his life’s work: giving his young nation a history that would answer those great questions: Who are we? Where did we come from? Where are we going?

Bancroft’s vision—laid out over four decades in his massive, 10-volume History of the United States—combined his Puritan intellectual birthright with his German mentors’ notion that nations developed like organisms, following a plan that history had laid out for them. Americans, Bancroft argued, would implement the next stage of the progressive development of human liberty, equality, and freedom. This promise was open to people everywhere: “The origin of the language we speak carries us to India; our religion is from Palestine,” Bancroft told the New York Historical Society in 1854. “Of the hymns sung in our churches, some were first heard in Italy, some in the deserts of Arabia, some on the banks of the Euphrates; our arts come from Greece; our jurisprudence from Rome.”

Bancroft’s expansive notion of American identity had questionable aspects, too. He claimed that the Founders were guided by God, that Americans were a chosen people destined to spread across the continent, that success was all but preordained—notions whose hubris and imperialist implications would become clear during his lifetime. But the core of it has remained with us to this day: a civic national vision that defined an American as one devoted to the ideals set down in the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence: equality, liberty, self-government, and the natural rights of all people to these things.

Bancroft’s draft of our national myth was taken up and refined by Abraham Lincoln. In the Gettysburg Address, the president presented the myth—“a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal”—not as our destiny, but as an ideal that had not yet been achieved and, if not fought for, could perish from the Earth. It’s no accident that the definitive copy of the Address is one Lincoln handwrote and sent to Bancroft, who months later was chosen by Congress to deliver the official eulogy for the assassinated president. One had influenced the other.

The abolitionist Frederick Douglass—who like Bancroft had traveled to the White House during the war to lobby Lincoln to take a stand for the Declaration’s ideals—carried this civic nationalist torch through the dark days of the 1870s and 1880s. It was a time when Northern and Southern whites agreed to put aside America’s commitments to human equality in favor of sectional unity, even when it meant tolerating death squads in the South and the effective nullification of the 14th and 15th Amendments. “I want a home here not only for the negro, the mulatto and the Latin races; but I want the Asiatic to find a home here in the United States, and feel at home here, both for his sake and for ours,” Douglass said in an 1869 speech that summarized U.S. civic nationalism as well as anyone ever has. “We shall spread the network of our science and civilization over all who seek their shelter … [and] all shall here bow to the same law, speak the same language, support the same Government, enjoy the same liberty, vibrate with the same national enthusiasm, and seek the same national ends.” Douglass, who had escaped from slavery, was, unlike Bancroft, well aware that America had not implemented its ideals and that it was not at all inevitable that it ever would. That made his framing of the task and its stakes far more compelling, accurate, and ultimately inspirational than the bookish and often oblivious historian’s.

But Bancroft’s vision of American civic cohesion was not the only national narrative on offer from the 1830s onward, or even the strongest one. From the moment Bancroft articulated his ideas, they met a vigorous challenge from the political and intellectual leaders of the Deep South and Chesapeake Country, who had a narrower vision of who could be an American and what the federation’s purpose was to be. People weren’t created equal, insisted William Gilmore Simms, the Antebellum South’s leading man of letters; the continent belonged to the superior Anglo-Saxon race. “The superior people, which conquers, also educates the inferior,” Simms proclaimed in 1837, “and their reward, for this good service, is derived from the labor of the latter.”

Slavery was endorsed by God, declared the leading light of the Presbyterian Church of the Confederacy, Joseph Ruggles Wilson, in 1861. It was one of many Anglo-Saxon supremacist ideas he imbued on his loyal son, Woodrow. The younger Wilson spent the 1880s and 1890s writing histories disparaging the racial fitness of Black people and Catholic immigrants. On becoming president in 1913, Wilson segregated the federal government. He screened The Birth of a Nation at the White House—a film that quoted his own history writings to celebrate the Ku Klux Klan’s reign of terror during Reconstruction.

Simms, the Wilsons, and Birth of a Nation producer D.W. Griffith offered a vision of a Herrenvolk democracy homeland by and for the dominant ethnic group, and in the 1910s and 1920s, this model reigned across the United States. Confederate monuments popped up across former Confederate and Union territory alike; Jim Crow laws cemented an apartheid system in Southern and border states. Directly inspired by the 1915 debut of The Birth of a Nation, a second Klan was established to restore “true Americanism” by intimidating, assaulting, or killing a wide range of non-Anglo Saxons; it grew to a million members by 1921 and possibly as many as 5 million by 1925, among them future leaders from governors to senators to big-city mayors, in addition to at least one Supreme Court Justice, Hugo Black. The Immigration Act of 1924 established racial and ethnic quotas devised to maintain Anglo-Saxon numerical and cultural supremacy.

This ethno-nationalist vision of our country was dethroned in the 1960s, but it remains with us, resurgent, today. Its strength can’t be underestimated: Simms’s vision is as old and as “American” as Bancroft’s, and it was the dominant paradigm in this country for nearly as many decades. It will not just slink off into the night. It must be smothered by a more compelling alternative.

The civic nationalist story of America that Bancroft envisioned still has the potential to unify the country. Its essential covenant is to ensure freedom and equality of opportunity for everyone: for African Americans and Native Americans—inheritors of the legacies of slavery and genocide—to be sure, but also for Americans with ancestors from Asia and Latin America, India and China, Poland, France, or Ireland. For rural and urban people; evangelicals, Jews, Muslims, and atheists; men, women, nonbinary people, and, most certainly, children.

It’s a coalition for Americans, a people defined by this quest, tasked by the preamble of the Constitution to promote the common good and individual liberty across generations. It’s a framework that could unite the Democratic Party with the non-Trumpist branch of the Republican Party, and most independents to boot. And over the past century, cultural, judicial, and demographic changes have strengthened its hand, ending white Christian control over the electorate in all the large states, not a few of the small ones, and in the federation as a whole. It’s not an off-the-shelf product, however. Its biggest failings—arrogance, messianic hubris, a self-regard so bright as to blind one to shortcomings—stem from the Puritan legacy Bancroft was so steeped in. The Puritans thought they had been chosen by God to build a New Zion. Bancroft believed the product of their mission was the United States, and that it was destined to spread its ideals across a continent and the world. This notion of American Exceptionalism—that the U.S. can walk on water when other nations cannot—needs to be jettisoned and replaced by the humility that comes with being mere mortals, able to recognize the failures of our past and the fragility of our present and future.

It’s a task that will take a generation, but could bring us together again, from one shining sea to the other.

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When Alexander Hamilton died in his 1804 duel with Aaron Burr, Eliza, then 47 years old, still had more than half her life, and a good part of the 19th century, ahead of her. She spent the years after her husband’s death performing good works. She raised their eight children as a single and financially strapped mother. She also raised the children of siblings and strangers when perils of the era left them without mothers. She famously co-founded an orphanage in New York City, which still exists today as Graham Windham, and she established the Hamilton Free School, among the first public schools in Harlem. She helped her old friend Dolley Madison plan the construction of the Washington Monument.

And even as an elderly woman, Hamilton continued writing her American story—by traveling west to Wisconsin alone, by the grueling path known as the northern steamboat route. When Hamilton set off on her journey in 1837, the steamboat route was an itinerary few men had dared to follow, and for a woman in her 80s to make the trip was astounding.

She had embarked on the journey to see one of her children. Being the child of Alexander Hamilton was a point of pride and a burden, and each of the Hamilton children responded differently to their father’s legacy. Some of the Hamilton boys stayed close and became stewards of the Hamilton legacy, working in business or as attorneys, writing their father’s long-delayed biography and helping their mother gather up his letters and mementos. One daughter, Angelica, had fallen into madness; Eliza and her other daughter cared for her.

Other children wanted to shake free—none more than the Hamiltons’ second youngest son, William, who made his home in far-off Illinois and Wisconsin as a soldier and backwoodsman. The frontier suited William Hamilton. Those who met him during the 1830s described him as intelligent and cultured, but notably rustic and weatherworn, with his deerskin dress, colorful language, and coarse manners. People said that no one would ever guess that he was the son of Alexander Hamilton—which was just how William wanted it. When older brother Alexander Jr., made the journey to see William in 1835, he came home with wild tales of his brother’s exploits in the so-called Black Hawk War of 1832 and talked of finding up-and-coming state senator Abraham Lincoln “lying upon the counter in midday telling stories.” No one should expect to see William back East anytime in the near future, Alexander Jr. told his mother.

By the time Eliza Hamilton approached her 80s, she hadn’t seen her wandering boy in more than 15 years, and she seized on the notion of making a journey west to see him. We don’t know if she ever talked about her motivations for making the trip. She may have wanted to deliver a long-awaited pension settlement to William, who was living a meager lifestyle in the woods. I like to think she had a hankering to see the American West, with its mighty rivers and broad, rolling prairies. Rivers and mountains had been in her blood since her girlhood on the Hudson, when she had wondered what lay on the far side of the Catskills.

Hamilton wrote home a handful of letters to her family, but the best glimpses into her journey— which swung wildly between luxury and hardship—come from the accounts of other travelers who made the river voyage in the 1830s.

Hamilton traveled the northern route to the Midwest, journeying from upstate New York, where the Erie Canal had opened only a few years earlier, to the network of rivers that crisscrossed the center of America. Springtime voyagers were advised to make the first and most tedious leg of the journey, which involved travel both by horse and by barge, when the ground was still firm but the water was not frozen. So Hamilton set off from her childhood home in Albany in the winter of 1837, making her way north by a combination of carriage and boat, up the Hudson River to Albany.

She brought her daughter Angelica to the home of her youngest son, Phil, who would care for his mentally ill sister in her mother’s absence. Hamilton spent several weeks in Albany visiting Phil and other family, departing in the first days of March to follow the Erie Canal—then a modern wonder of technology—westward. The spring of 1837 was warmer than usual, and muddy conditions slowed horse-drawn carriages. Accompanied by a maid, Hamilton bumped along for nearly three weeks, over rickety plank turnpikes and in commercial flat-bottomed boats dragged by horses across the shallows. America’s westward transportation system in the 1830s was a patchwork of local schedules and conveyances.

By mid-March, after turning to follow the Allegheny River, the travelers reached Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Hamilton wrote in a letter that she found “a considerable town on the junction of three rivers, no beauty but good Buildings, gloomy from the use of coal.” But setting off for Cincinnati, Ohio—she expected to arrive on March 19th—she was jubilant. The steamboat packets making their way down the Allegheny were grand floating hotels, with wood-paneled staterooms and chandeliers. The captain of her vessel warmly welcomed her when he discovered she was Mrs. General Hamilton. He insisted that she dine at the captain’s table and drink his Madeira.

Eliza Hamilton was on an adventure. The dangers were real: Steamships snagged on sunken logs and uneven river bottoms and sank with alarming regularity. Hamilton wrote letters home describing the muddy waters of the turbulent springtime river and difficult navigation. Fear of the wilderness kept most women and many men, too, confined to the steamboat’s salon and parlor, but Hamilton was having none of that. She was here, traveling to the West, in defiance of what anyone had said she should do at 80. She was still the same tomboy she had been when Alexander Hamilton met her—at least, in spirit.

Her letters home at each riverside village were filled with descriptions of the great beauty of the frontier and the awesome power of the river that carried her. By April, Hamilton had reached Louisville, Kentucky, on the southern bank of the Ohio River—a prosperous commercial center with banks, bookstores, breweries, and assorted other businesses. In May, Hamilton’s boat glided past forest wilderness and outpost steam-mills into St. Louis, Missouri. Here, as her journey west neared its destination, she wrote her son Philip on May 23rd:

My Dear Son,

I have passed the Ohio, the river is very spacious, but very difficult of navigation, the shores beautiful and the vessel approaching the shore at the distance of one dozen feet; no wharf, the water is so mixed with clay that it is not drinkable without wine. This evening we shall be at St. Louis on the Mississippi. Our passage will be tedious as we go against the stream. Let me hear from you, particularly respecting Angelica and all the family.

Your affectionate mother,

E. Hamilton.

Hamilton had been traveling against the stream, in one sense or another, for decades, and it would not trouble her now.

Two weeks later, in early June, she passed at last the great junction where the Ohio River meets the Mississippi, where the waters mixed green and brown at the mighty confluence. From there, she changed to a small local steamer named the Burlington heading upriver, where a chance meeting with her was recorded by a traveling British scientist named George Featherstonhaugh.

“On board the Burlington,” Featherstonhaugh recorded,

I found Mrs. Hamilton, the widow of the celebrated Alexander Hamilton. … This lively old lady, now about eighty years old, told me that, knowing she might not have a long time to see things of this world in, she had determined to avail herself of the great facilities for traveling, and pay a visit to her son; and having an inclination to see all she could, was determined to ascend the Mississippi to the St. Peter’s [Minnesota River]. I could not but admire her spirit and vivacity.

Most who met Eliza Hamilton would agree. What likely mattered most to Hamilton was that, when she stepped off the boat in Galena, her son, no longer the boy she remembered, was waiting to greet her.

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Despite efforts to unify the early United States around President George Washington, two factions quickly developed around his administration’s most articulate, forceful ideologues—Thomas Jefferson, who believed that the government governs best that governs least, and Alexander Hamilton, a Federalist who favored a robust national government that would have the power and revenues to do big things.

Hamilton and Jefferson realized that if they wanted their philosophies to have a practical impact, they would need political allies. But with no party system in the U.S., Hamilton and Jefferson turned to the only institutions that reached large numbers of men interested in public affairs: the newspapers.

Hamilton and Jefferson actively recruited newspaper editors who were sympathetic to their views. Those editors could not only spread the word, they could help readers figure out which candidates for office were on “their side.” In the absence of party labels, primaries, or advertising, the newspaper editors of the early Republic stepped into the vacuum and identified candidates who were “Jefferson men” or “Hamilton men.”

In this setting emerged one of the most vicious and dangerous of all the partisan writers and editors: the hard-drinking Scottish immigrant James Thomson Callender.

Callender seemed to have had a knack for finding trouble. Born in Scotland, he was charged with sedition and fled to America. He arrived in Philadelphia in May 1793—alone and nearly penniless. Within months he was offered a job reporting on the debates in Congress for the Philadelphia Gazette. He was quickly sacked, just around the time his family crossed the Atlantic and joined him. Struggling to make ends meet, he moved his wife and children onto Philadelphia’s docks and began drinking heavily. (At the time, most Americans drank what we would consider prodigious amounts of alcohol, from sunup to sunset. Even in that setting, those in the newspaper trade were known to have an especially strong thirst, and among them Callender’s was perhaps the most unquenchable of all.)

Callender fell in with Jefferson’s Anti-Federalists—they were called Republicans. In July 1797, Callender took on Hamilton, then the Treasury Secretary. In a lengthy pamphlet Callender revealed that Hamilton had transferred money to a convicted swindler named James Reynolds, insinuating that Hamilton and Reynolds were scheming to speculate in Treasury certificates, which were under Hamilton’s supervision.

Callender’s accusation forced Hamilton to reply, which he did, denying the charges of financial chicanery in hopes of preserving his public honor. But in order to explain the money transfers, Hamilton had to confess that he was having an affair with Reynolds’s wife, Maria. The money he was transferring to Mr. Reynolds was blackmail, intended to keep him from telling the story of Hamilton’s liaison with Mrs. Reynolds.

Callender didn’t think much of Hamilton’s explanation, and in a follow-up article he mocked Hamilton: “The whole proof … rests upon an illusion. ‘I am a rake, and for that reason I cannot be a swindler.’ ” Callender was prepared to believe that Hamilton was both a rake and a swindler. In any case, the damage was done. Politically, Hamilton was now ruined. Callender may have benefitted from a “leak” by one of Hamilton’s other rivals, James Monroe. But Callender was the messenger, the one who “broke” the story and made it a public scandal.

Hamilton’s disgrace naturally improved the standing of Jefferson, who encouraged Callender to pursue his slashing style of journalism. After all, Callender was laying waste to Federalists, which could only advance Jefferson’s political agenda. What could go wrong?

In the election of 1800, the Republican Jefferson defeated the Federalist John Adams (Washington’s successor as president), setting the stage for the first peaceful transfer of power between presidents who really disagreed with each other.

In the aftermath of victory, Jefferson faced many decisions, including the novel political question of how many positions on the federal payroll should be taken away from their Federalist occupants and turned over to Republicans. One of those who came calling on Jefferson after the election was none other than James Callender.

Callender must have felt that he had a strong claim to some of the spoils of office. After all, he had knee-capped Hamilton, the brightest star in the opposition camp, and he had even served time in jail for the Republican cause. Jefferson, however, was unmoved. Callender was hardly the well-born, talented sort that Jefferson thought should be serving in his administration, and the president sent him away empty-handed. Bad move.

Callender set out to get even. He promptly switched parties, revealing himself to be not a committed partisan but a hack, a mercenary who would attack either side—or both. In February 1802, Callender went into partnership with a Federalist editor in running the Richmond Recorder.

“The President, Again” published on September 1, 1802. By James Thomson Callender.

 
Callender assigned himself the job of bringing down Jefferson. Acting on the basis of rumors that he had picked up from anonymous sources, he let fly in print with the accusation that Jefferson had engaged in sexual relations with one of his slaves, later identified as Sally Hemings.

It is well known that the man, whom it delighteth the people to honor, [Jefferson] keeps and for many years has kept, as his concubine, one of his slaves. Her name is SALLY. The name of her eldest son is Tom. His features are said to bear a striking though sable resemblance to those of the president himself. … By this wench Sally, our president has had several children. There is not an individual in the neighbourhood of Charlottesville who does not believe the story, and not a few who know it.

Callender’s story was repeated in many Federalist papers, sometimes accompanied by lurid speculation about the “black Venus” at Monticello. In the two centuries since then, Callender’s assertion has become the focus of intense debate, both among Jefferson and Hemings family descendants and among historians. Recent DNA studies have tended to vindicate Callender’s reporting and indicate that the story is almost certainly true—that Jefferson was one founding father who found a way to father more than one branch of his family.

As for Callender, he was nearly finished. Having set the bar in the practice of scandal-mongering about the sex lives of presidents, his own life quickly went downhill. In December, he was the victim of a public beating and again succumbed to his great thirst. The following summer, in July 1803, during another of his periods of heavy drinking, Jimmy Callender was found in Virginia’s James River, floating facedown, dead at age 45.

From Examiner, July 27, 1803.

 
Meanwhile, Jefferson, burned by the partisan press he had helped develop, began having serious doubts about the virtues of a free press. In his private correspondence, Jefferson complained bitterly. By the time of his second inaugural address in March 1805, Jefferson was coming to view the press as a menace to decency itself.

“During the course of this administration,” he complained, “and in order to disturb it, the artillery of the press has been levelled against us, charged with whatsoever its licentiousness could devise or dare. These abuses of an institution so important to freedom and science, are deeply to be regretted.”

Plainly exasperated, he allowed himself the political luxury of speculating publicly about whether new state or federal laws might be needed to rein in the press. Like Donald Trump, he mused in public about the need to strengthen the libel laws.

No inference is here intended, that the laws, provided by the state against false and defamatory publications, should not be enforced; he who has the time, renders a service to public morals and public tranquility, in reforming these abuses by the salutary coercions of the law …

Even while still serving as president, Jefferson found time to engage in press criticism. In 1807, late in his second term, he corresponded with a Republican named John Norvell, who had written to the president to inquire about starting another new Republican newspaper. Jefferson saw the issue darkly:

Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. … I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them …

Clearly, Jefferson had abandoned his earlier hope that newspapers would serve the nation as the guardians of the people’s liberty. His comments radiate a sense of an immense sadness and regret, coming from a man who fought for a free press but perhaps later wished that he had not, and who fought to secure his good name only to find it constantly in jeopardy in such a putrid and mendacious vehicle as a newspaper.

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In the modern era, this phrase has been particularly contentious. There was the clamor over whether Canadian-born presidential candidate Rafael Edward “Ted” Cruz met that requirement; there were accusations that Barack Obama was born in Kenya. We can go back at least to 1968, when candidate George Romney had to explain his birth in Mexico.

The concerns appear to arise from a kinetic modern world that impels millions of people to cross political borders seeking refuge or opportunity, and then cross social borders, falling in love and having children. But the fluid nature of nationality and citizenship isn’t just a modern condition—it’s a defining feature of American identity that dates all the way back to the beginnings of the republic.

The idea of nationality and citizenship being fixed at birth derived from the feudal concept of fealty owed by vassals to their lords, according to William Blackstone, the preeminent authority on English law at the time of the American Revolution. “Natural-born citizens” were those “who are born within the dominions of the crown of England,” including its colonies. Then there were “aliens”—“such as are born out of it.” Birthplace mattered, Blackstone explained, because “immediately upon their birth” natural-born subjects “are under the king’s protection; at a time too, when (during their infancy) they are incapable of protecting themselves. Natural allegiance is therefore a debt of gratitude which cannot be forfeited, canceled, or altered,” at least not by the mere will of the individual.

Though Blackstone’s concept awarded citizenship to children of aliens born within the British Empire, it also posed obstinate impediments to immigrants wanting to enjoy the rights of freeborn Englishmen, not least the right to own land. The same principle of natural allegiance determined that an alien’s loyalty remained fastened to a foreign sovereign. Immigrants might become “naturalized” citizens only if they renounced old allegiances, swore new oaths of allegiance, and demonstrated over some designated number of years their loyalty to the adopted nation.

In the American environment, these rigid notions of national identity eroded amid the turbulent streams of migration pouring into the colonies. Outside New England, which remained an Anglo-American bastion restrictive to immigration, most American colonies competed with one another to draw immigrants. Some extended property rights to resident aliens, while others legislated their own naturalization laws, which were often more inclusive than English law. They tossed out religious barriers against Catholics, Jews, and Protestant dissenters and exempted Quakers and others from having to violate their faith by taking an oath of allegiance. South Carolina, among the most liberal, granted white Protestant immigrants who came into the colony all the rights and privileges “as if they had been born of English parents within the Province.” It even welcomed refugee debtors by prohibiting the collection of debts owed by aliens prior to migration.

By 1775, historians estimate that less than half the inhabitants of the 13 colonies were of English descent. British officials, wary of dissident aliens and fugitive debtors filling their American dominions, tried to inhibit immigration by restricting westward settlement and resisting permissive naturalization laws in the colonies. Among the grievances in the Declaration of Independence, one denounced the king for “obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners.”

But once they had a nation of their own, Americans worried about the dangers of aliens insinuating themselves into the highest reaches of power in the fragile young republic. In The Federalist Papers No. 68, Alexander Hamilton warned of foreign intrigue among those “deadly adversaries of republican government” who harbor desires “to gain an improper ascendant in our councils” and might raise “a creature of their own to the chief magistracy of the Union.” Hamilton held this belief even though he was himself an immigrant to New York born in the British West Indies (as those who have seen the current eponymous Broadway musical know). Even though it’s hard to find evidence of actual plots, Hamilton and his fellow Federalists were especially worried that America’s frail, young confederation would fall prey to foreign intrigue emanating from jealous European empires (Britain, Spain, and France) not ready to relinquish their ambitions in North America.

The idea that the president of the United States must be a natural-born citizen originated apparently with John Jay, a friend and collaborator with Hamilton on The Federalist Papers. As president of the Continental Congress and as a diplomat during and after the Revolution , Jay developed a healthy distrust of sinister European powers abroad. Jay wrote to George Washington in Philadelphia during the Constitutional Convention: “Permit me to hint, whether it would not be wise and seasonable to provide a strong check to the admission of Foreigners into the administration of our 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.”

Washington thanked him for his “hint,” but the convention adopted language that was far more elastic. Article II, Section 1, specifies:

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.

This language not only allowed immigrants such as Jay’s friend Hamilton to run for president, it also made George Washington eligible. Washington and Hamilton had been born British subjects; both became citizens of the United States on July 4, 1776, the day the nation was born.

How did that alchemical transformation happen on that specific day? As David Ramsay, a South Carolina historian, explained in the 1789 pamphlet, A Dissertation on the Manner of Acquiring the Character and Privileges of a Citizen of the United States, once King George cast Americans outside his protection and Parliament—in effect, declaring war on the colonies—the bond of natural allegiance between subject and sovereign was broken. The Declaration of Independence announced that the people of the United States, absolved of all allegiances to the British crown, were now citizens of new “Free and Independent states.” By this revolutionary stroke, nearly 3 million people “who had been subjects, became citizens,” though Ramsay took pains to clarify that “Negroes are inhabitants, not citizens,” that is, not among the “mass of free people, who collectively possess sovereignty.”

Ramsey was adamant that people could not claim American citizenship as a birthright unless they were born after the Declaration of Independence called the nation into existence. But he outlined additional paths to becoming an American that included residency within the United States. In a republic based on consent of the governed, he explained, simply living under the new government as a consenting adult demonstrated loyalty. This explains why the framers wanted American presidents not only to be natural-born citizens (or, for the time being, citizens at the time of adoption) but also to have lived 14 years as adults under the new government.

Ten of the first 12 presidents were born British subjects; for them and all future presidents the requirements of residency and citizenship would mitigate suspicion of lingering effects of “natural allegiance” to foreign sovereigns. The framers built into the Constitution an ingenious process of Americanization with proofs of birth, residency, and loyalty that expressed a new concept of citizenship in which individual consent and choice, as much as the “natural allegiance” derived from the accident of birth, determined one’s nationality.

Even if the framers were acting on genuine fears of foreign enemies, we should recognize they were also making room, even in the highest office of the land, for talented immigrants who threw themselves in with the revolutionary republic.Where and when people were born didn’t necessarily determine their national allegiance. Those “distinguished revolutionary patriots,” Constitutional scholar Joseph Story put it, “had entitled themselves to high honours in their adopted country.”

The framers did not allow their fears to close the door on the talent and ambition of immigrants who chose to shed old, and adopt new, allegiances—that is, they allowed newcomers to become American.

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