I conclude that “natural born citizen” is, to all purposes, simply an equivalent term to “born a citizen.”
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I think you are correct.
Thanks.
There's now LOTS of evidence out there as to what the Founding Fathers and their generation meant by the term.
The thing that really simplified it for me was reading James Bayard's comments on the matter in his Brief Exposition of the Constitution of the United States (1834), in which he described the term as being a "citizen by birth." He was talking about people in the exact situation as your son, and his specific point was that such people were eligible; one only had to be born a citizen.
His book was reviewed by Chief Justice John Marshall, who dominated the US Supreme Court for 34 years, starting just 13 years after the Constitution was ratified. Marshall basically said he found only one point in the whole book to correct - that Congress didn't seem to need permission from the States to build military and post roads, they already had it.
So it seems that Chief Justice John Marshall, "the Great Chief Justice," was of the opinion that whoever was a "citizen by birth" was a "natural born citizen," and eligible.
I figure if anybody ought to know, it would be him.
He has never been correct. If you listen to him, you will be misled. That is his only goal in these discussions; To confuse people as to what is the actual truth.
If you are serving the Military, your children are "natural born" even if born in a foreign country. As stated in the Law of Nations.