Our country’s first American-born president

||| BY LIN MCNULTY, EDITOR, theORCASONIAN |||

There were seven presidents elected in the United State before we elected our first American-born executive, and  English was not his first language.

The first U.S. citizen to run for president and be elected was Martin Van Buren in 1836, 60 years after the country was originally founded, was the first presidential candidate who was born after the Declaration of Independence (1776) and thus the first natural-born U.S. citizen to become president.

Before Van Buren, all U.S. presidents, from George Washington to Andrew Jackson, were born as British subjects before the United States existed.

Van Buren was born in Kinderhook, New York, where most residents were of Dutch descent and spoke Dutch as their primary language; he is the only president to have spoken English as a second language.

The first individual born after the Declaration of Independence to serve in the U.S. Congress was John Steele. Born on November 16, 1764, in Salisbury, North Carolina, Steele was elected to the House of Representatives, serving from 1790 to 1793. His tenure in the 1st Congress makes him the earliest-serving member born post-1776.

In the Senate, the first member born after July 4, 1776, was Armistead T. Mason. Born on August 4, 1787, in Louisa County, Virginia, Mason served as a senator from Virginia from 1816 to 1817. His service marks the earliest instance of a post-Independence-born individual in the Senate.

Regarding the Founding Fathers, none were born in the United States as an independent nation, since it did not exist prior to 1776. They were born as British subjects in the American colonies and became U.S. citizens after the nation’s founding.