Book: James Monroe: A Life
Author: Tim McGrath
Review by: John Parkerson, attorney at Hall Booth Smith and honorary consul general of Hungary in Georgia
A visit this past summer to Highland — James Monroe’s home a short distance from Charlottesville, Va., and adjacent to Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello — spurred a desire to learn more about our fifth president (1817-25) and one of our country’s founding fathers. I did not expect to find anything nearly as comprehensive and relevant as Tim McGrath’s book.
Turn back to 1820: Missouri had recently been brought into the Union as a slave-holding state, and as part of the “Missouri Compromise” balancing act, Maine had just been carved out of Massachusetts as a free state. What was expected to be a prolonged “good-feelings” period of U.S. expansion and optimistic growth following Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase (which Monroe negotiated with France as Jefferson’s emissary) and President Madison’s success in the War of 1812, instead turned into a period in which deep divisions became more pronounced.
Those dividing issues, present already at the nation’s founding but effectively swept under the carpet, finally would tear it apart in civil war three decades following Monroe’s death. Ultimately, the country’s leaders were unsuccessful during Monroe’s presidency in finding anything near consensus on important Constitutional issues like slavery, preferring compromise instead, ostensibly to hold the nation together. National leaders focused their attention on easier and more appealing issues like the acquisition of Florida from Spain and national expansion westward at almost any cost. Monroe’s enthusiasm for protecting the nation’s territorial gains and keeping open options for future U.S. expansion led to the “Monroe Doctrine,” which warned the rest of the world to stay out of the Americas for territorial gain or risk U.S. intervention. That doctrine remains today a cornerstone of U.S. hegemony in our hemisphere.
Monroe’s contributions to presidential history were numerous, but some are simply interesting: by the time his two-term presidency ended, Monroe had served his country for 50 years, holding more elected public offices than any president before or after. At one point during the War of 1812, at the president’s insistence, Monroe held two positions in Madison’s cabinet at the same time (Secretary of State and Secretary of War) — the only person to have held two cabinet positions simultaneously.
Among the factoids that I find especially interesting are that his presidency was the last of the “Virginia dynasty.” Of the first five presidents, four were Virginians (John Adams was from Massachusetts). Monroe, also considered the last of the Founding Fathers, died, coincidentally, on July 4, 1831, 55 years after the U.S. declared independence. Jefferson and Adams also died on the same date five years earlier.
McGrath’s account paints an extremely complex picture of our nation’s early history, explaining the ideological differences that later became true dividing lines during the American civil war and afterwards, even to this day. This book helps one to understand better the personalities and ideological forces driving our nation’s complicated evolution.
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