James Monroe

James Monroe: The Last Founder in Power

In 1820 the American electorate returned a president to office with all but one vote in the Electoral College — a margin no one has matched since. Four years earlier James Monroe had won 183 of 217 electoral votes. He had opposed the Constitution he now executed, been shot leading a charge at Trenton, and been recalled in disgrace from Paris. The disgraced envoy ended as the man who told Europe to keep out of the Americas.

A Ward, a Schoolroom, a Looted Arsenal

Monroe was born on 28 April 1758 in Westmoreland County, Virginia, to Spence Monroe and Elizabeth Jones Monroe. His father died in 1774, leaving him land, slaves and a guardian in his uncle Joseph Jones. From the age of eleven he studied under the Reverend Archibald Campbell, in a schoolroom he shared with a boy named John Marshall, later Chief Justice of the United States. In 1774 he entered the College of William and Mary.

He did not finish quietly. As a student in Williamsburg he joined in stripping the arsenal at the Governor's Palace, carrying off muskets and swords for the Virginia militia. It was the beginning of a war and the end of his education.

Trenton

By the winter of 1776 Monroe had joined the Virginia infantry and become a Continental Army officer under Washington. He fought at Trenton, Brandywine, Germantown and Monmouth. At Trenton, leading a charge, he took what the Miller Center calls "a near fatal wound to his shoulder." He rose to major, served as a staff officer, and resigned his commission in 1779.

Jefferson's Student, the Constitution's Opponent

He read law under Thomas Jefferson and passed the Virginia bar in 1782, the same year he was elected to the Virginia Assembly; he served on the Council of State and, from 1783, in the Continental Congress, where he pressed the causes of western expansion and navigation rights on the Mississippi. On 16 February 1786 he married Elizabeth Kortright in New York, and the couple settled at Fredericksburg.

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Then came the act that complicates every simple account of him. As a delegate to Virginia's ratifying convention, Monroe voted against the Constitution. He wanted senators and the president chosen directly by the people and a strong bill of rights written in from the start. He lost a House race to James Madison by 300 votes, and in 1790 the Virginia legislature sent him to the United States Senate instead, where he lined up with Madison and Jefferson against Federalist policy.

Diplomat in Two Capitals

Washington sent him to France as minister in 1794. There he secured the release of Thomas Paine from a French prison and gave him rooms in the American minister's residence. But the Jay Treaty enraged the French government, Federalists at home blamed Monroe for the collapse in relations, and he was recalled in 1796.

He was elected governor of Virginia in 1799, backing public education and Jefferson's presidential campaign, and in 1803 Jefferson sent him back to Paris as special envoy to help close the Louisiana Purchase. From 1803 to 1807 he was minister to Britain, with a fruitless 1805 side mission to Spain. In London he wrestled with the impressment of American sailors and signed an 1806 treaty that failed to ban the practice; Jefferson refused even to lay it before the Senate. It cost the three Virginians a period of coldness. In 1808 dissident Republicans put his name up against Madison for the presidential nomination; he never pursued it, and Madison won handily.

The Man Who Warned Washington

Elected governor of Virginia again in January 1811, Monroe was Secretary of State by April. War with Britain came in June 1812, and he twice doubled as Secretary of War — December 1812 to February 1813, and August 1814 to March 1815 — reorganising the army and driving the war effort. In August 1814 he personally rode reconnaissance near the Potomac, warned Madison that the British were marching on Washington, and helped organise the capital's defence after they burned the government buildings. That performance, more than any treaty, made him the obvious Republican nominee in 1816.

The Era of Good Feelings

Monroe made three tours of the country between 1817 and 1819 — the northern states, the Chesapeake, the south and west — and the goodwill they generated gave his era its name. "I should be destitute of feeling if I was not deeply affected by the strong proof which my fellow-citizens have given me," he said in 1817. He appointed men without regard to party line, and he refurnished the White House, rebuilt after the burning of 1814, in a style his successors copied.

The calm was not total. In 1819 his Secretary of State, John Quincy Adams, negotiated the Adams-Onís Treaty with Spain, which brought Florida into the Union. In 1820 Monroe signed the Missouri Compromise, admitting Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a free one and barring slavery north and west of Missouri's southern border. He opposed slavery personally; he was also a slaveholder, and in office he placed the avoidance of immediate sectional rupture above any move towards abolition. Daniel Preston, editor of *The Papers of James Monroe*, credits him with steering the compromise through by patient backstage work.

December 2, 1823

In his seventh annual message to Congress, Monroe set out the doctrine that carries his name. The American continents, he declared, "by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintain, are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers." Any European attempt to control an independent American nation would be regarded as "dangerous to our peace and safety" and as evidence of "an unfriendly disposition toward the United States." In exchange, the United States would keep out of Europe's internal quarrels. The message was aimed at the newly independent republics of Latin America, at the interventionist ambitions of the Holy Alliance, and at Russian and British claims along the Pacific Northwest coast.

Why James Is Called a Genius

The honest case for Monroe is not a case about intellect, and his own scholarly editor says so. Preston notes that Monroe "occasionally suffers from comparison" with the other members of the Virginia Dynasty — Washington, Jefferson, Madison — and that, unlike Jefferson with his enormous intellectual range, Monroe's subject was politics and only politics. He wrote no *Notes on Virginia* and drafted no constitution.

What Preston does credit is a different faculty: Monroe was "a deliberate thinker," able to work a question through in the round and, crucially, to want argument around him rather than agreement. That produced the strongest cabinet of the era and a working partnership with John Quincy Adams that generated the Florida treaty, the British boundary settlements and the doctrine of 1823. The skill is executive rather than intellectual — judgment, temperament, and the confidence to employ men cleverer in particular fields than himself. Preston adds the qualities that made it work: "integrity, frankness, and affable personality," and an unpretentiousness that disarmed people.

The counter-case is real. Monroe's greatest achievements were collaborative, and the two most famous — Florida and the Doctrine — belong substantially to Adams's diplomacy as well as to Monroe's authority. He was recalled from Paris a failure and brought home a treaty from London that Jefferson would not even show the Senate. And on slavery, the defining American question, he balanced rather than led. If Monroe is a genius, it is in the unglamorous craft of governing: preparation, patience, and knowing exactly how much conflict a republic can survive.

Legacy

Preston's verdict is that Monroe's "aggressive and successful conduct of foreign policy undoubtedly strengthened the presidency itself," laying the ground for the expanded executive power Andrew Jackson would inherit. The doctrine of December 1823 outlived its author by two centuries and became the organising principle of American policy in the hemisphere — the durable work of a man who had voted against the Constitution.