Monroe, James

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MONROE, JAMES

James Monroe (1758–1831) was a soldier, lawyer, state legislator, ratification convention delegate, governor, diplomat, U.S. representative and senator, secretary of war, secretary of state, and fifth president of the United States. Monroe was born on 28 April 1758 in Tidewater Virginia's Westmoreland County to respectable but not prominent parents. He was fortunate, however, in his maternal uncle, Joseph Jones. This childless uncle stood alongside the other Patriot leaders of the colonial House of Burgesses and ultimately sat in the Continental Congress and on Virginia's highest court. He took young James under his wing and encouraged the nephew's political inclinations.

early political career

Monroe attended the finest school in the colony, Rev. Archibald Campbell's Campbelltown Academy, beginning at age eleven. He then became the first in his line to attend the College of William and Mary when he matriculated in 1774, but his schooling was interrupted by the Revolution. Monroe enlisted in the American forces along with many of his classmates.

Monroe's service in the Revolution earned him respect as a war hero. Particularly noteworthy was his role in the Battle of Trenton on 26 December 1776, during which he helped lead a cavalry charge that captured enemy guns well positioned to command the chief road into town. Monroe received a severe wound in helping to ensure one of the Americans' most conspicuous victories of the entire war.

Upon returning to the College of William and Mary in 1780, Monroe began to read law under Governor Thomas Jefferson. Their personal association would reach fruition in the late 1790s, when Monroe bought a plantation two miles from Monticello.

In 1782 Monroe entered the House of Delegates, which elected him to the Confederation Congress the

following year. Much of Monroe's attention in Congress was devoted to issues related to Virginia's western lands claims. Although he grew sympathetic to nationalists' demands that the Confederation government be strengthened, from early on his attachment to the United States included a tincture of the states' rights creed that he, Jefferson, and James Madison later would elevate into the centerpiece of their party's dogma.

Monroe's support for federal reform left him disappointed in the Virginia General Assembly's omission of his name from its distinguished roster of Constitutional Convention delegates at Philadelphia in 1787. Close attention to Virginia's interests, particularly in regard to the western lands and to the apportionment of the new U.S. Senate, drove him into opposition in the Virginia ratifying convention of 1788. It was Monroe who wrote after the state's convention that George Washington's influence had narrowly won the day for the Federalists. Attempting to secure membership in the first U.S. House of Representatives, Monroe lost a hard-fought election to his friend James Madison, the intellectual leader of the new Constitution's advocates in the Old Dominion.

becoming a republican

By the end of 1790, Monroe had been elected by the General Assembly to the U.S. Senate, where he soon became one of the leaders of the developing opposition to Alexander Hamilton's Federalist program. At the same time, Monroe staked out a position of strong support for the French Revolution. Thus, when the French government requested the recall of Gouverneur Morris, the U.S. minister to France, President Washington nominated Monroe to replace him in 1794.

In France, Monroe made notorious statements in support of a revolution that had become a bloody debacle. Secretary of State Timothy Pickering of Massachusetts finally insisted that he be recalled, and Washington did so in September 1796.

On his return, Monroe found himself quite popular among Republicans. Defensively, Monroe published a volume of official papers with a selfexculpatory introduction; he also took the opportunity to attack Federalist foreign policy.

In 1799 Monroe was requited for his dutiful Republicanism when, on Madison's nomination, the General Assembly elected him to the first of three consecutive one-year terms as governor. As governor, he presided over the delicate work of limiting the political impact of Gabriel's Rebellion, the largest known slave conspiracy in Virginia history until that time, which broke out in the capital of Richmond in the run-up to the pivotal election of 1800. Monroe also prepared the Virginia militia to intervene in case the presidential imbroglio of 1800 did not turn out in Jefferson's favor.

diplomat and cabinet member

In 1803 Monroe was one of two negotiators who exploited Napoléon Bonaparte's unexpected willingness to part with his North American empire by accepting the proffered region that became the Louisiana Territory. The resulting treaty is usually regarded as Jefferson's foremost achievement as president, but in actuality diplomatic brilliance had little to do with it. It simply fell into the Americans' lap.

Before his return to America in 1807, Monroe conducted fruitless negotiations with Spain in 1805; he and fellow negotiator William Pinkney concluded a treaty with Great Britain in 1806, but Secretary of State James Madison considered it inadequate (as did President Jefferson). Monroe believed that Madison and Jefferson's purpose was to deny Monroe the acclaim he believed the treaty would have brought him, and he allowed dissident Virginia Republicans to promote his presidential candidacy in preference to Madison in 1808; his candidacy, though, came to naught.

Early in his administration, Madison offered Monroe the governorship of Louisiana Territory, which Monroe refused. Instead, Monroe returned to the General Assembly in 1810 and was elevated to the governorship again in January 1811. In March 1811 Madison appointed Monroe secretary of state. When the War of 1812 broke out, Monroe and his political allies were certain that Madison's rejection of his treaty with Britain underlay most of America's diplomatic troubles, but Monroe soldiered on.

Secretary of State Monroe personally scouted the Chesapeake region to ascertain British troop movements in 1814, which symbolized the disaster that Republican foreign and defense policy had become. When the secretary of war resigned in the wake of Washington's capture by British forces, Monroe became secretary of war in 1814; soon thereafter, he was reappointed secretary of state as well. Resigning the secretary of war position in 1815, he considered himself Madison's logical successor.

presidency

Monroe took office in 1817 after carrying all but three states—Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Delaware—in the 1816 election. He appointed a very talented group of cabinet secretaries, headed by Secretary of State John Quincy Adams and, in time, Secretary of War John C. Calhoun. His administration was notable for five developments: the Missouri Crisis, the Monroe Doctrine, the Transcontinental Treaty of 1819, the Supreme Court's decision in the 1819 case of McCulloch v. Maryland, and the virtual demise of the Federalist Party.

The Missouri Crisis of 1819–1821 found Monroe and Calhoun playing the unusual role of southerners willing to compromise the issue of slavery in the territories. While southern members of Congress nearly unanimously opposed the eventual Missouri Compromise, Calhoun and Monroe both considered it a positive development. Their primary interest lay in ending the dispute over slavery in the western territories rather than in ensuring the prospects for slavery in the enormous Louisiana Territory that Monroe had helped to purchase from France.

The Monroe Doctrine, central to American foreign policy since it was proclaimed, warned European powers to keep their hands off New World territories. It was issued in response to assertions of independence by Spain's former colonies in mainland Latin America. The Monroe Doctrine demonstrated boldness and daring. The United States had first rejected a British proposal for a joint statement of policy. Then, although it had no power to enforce its position at the time, the United States issued the Monroe Doctrine alone. From that day onward, the United States would feel free to intervene in opposition to European involvement in American territory south of Canada.

Finally, Federalism, long in decline and extremely weak in the election of 1816, virtually disappeared from the national stage by 1820. Monroe secured reelection with all but one electoral vote, and it seems that that elector's anti-Monroe stance flowed rather more from personal animus than from political opposition. Little could Monroe have realized at the time that his second term would be marred by the contest for the presidency.

All of Monroe's cabinet secretaries, the Speaker of the House, and General Andrew Jackson—America's war hero du jour—fancied themselves his successor. Their political maneuvering went so far as coordinating obstruction of each other's policy proposals in Congress. Monroe, meanwhile, believed himself barely suited to his high charge, confiding at a private dinner at Jefferson's Monticello that he was not intellectually fit for the post.

retirement

When Monroe retired from the presidency, he returned to Virginia in relative poverty. Therefore, he became a symbol of republican rectitude for those, such as Calhoun, who thought that the succession in 1825 ultimately had been decided by what he and others called a "corrupt bargain." Monroe's political retirement was interrupted only when he served as the titular president of the Virginia Constitutional Convention in 1829–1830. There, in an echo of his performance during the Missouri Crisis, he stood for compromise between Virginia's warring democratic and aristocratic sections.

James Monroe's death on 4 July 1831 came on an appropriate day, exactly five years after that of his political mentor, Jefferson. Monroe was both the last president to have played a part in the American Revolution and the only anti-Federalist to serve as president. While he was always a more practical, less philosophically inclined man than either of his two immediate predecessors (and in this he resembled the other Revolutionary warrior who held the presidency, George Washington), he was certainly a more successful president.

bibliography

Ammon, Harry. James Monroe: The Quest for National Identity. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971.

Cunningham, Noble E., Jr. The Presidency of James Monroe. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1996.

Egerton, Douglas R. Gabriel's Rebellion: The Virginia Slave Conspiracies of 1800 and 1802. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993.

Horn, James, Jan Lewis, and Peter S. Onuf, eds. The Revolution of 1800: Democracy, Race, and the New Republic. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002.

Sutton, Robert P. Revolution to Secession: Constitution Making in the Old Dominion. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989.

Kevin R. C. Gutzman

Encyclopedia of the New American Nation