James Monroe

James Monroe was the fifth president of the United States, from 1817 to 1825, and the last of the founding generation to hold the office. He left college to join the Continental Army at eighteen, was severely wounded at Trenton, and afterwards studied law under Thomas Jefferson. He was a delegate to the Continental Congress and then a senator, and opposed ratification of the Constitution as an Anti-Federalist on the grounds that it lacked a bill of rights. As minister to France he helped negotiate the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, doubling the size of the country for fifteen million dollars. He served as secretary of state and briefly as secretary of war simultaneously during the War of 1812, taking over the defence of Washington after the British burned it. His own presidency is called the Era of Good Feelings because the Federalist party had collapsed and he ran effectively unopposed in 1820. The period was less harmonious than the label suggests: it contained the panic of 1819 and the Missouri Compromise, which held the union together over slavery by drawing a line across the Louisiana territory and postponing the question. In December 1823 he set out in his annual message the principle that became the Monroe Doctrine, declaring the Americas closed to further European colonisation and any intervention there a hostile act. It was drafted largely by his secretary of state John Quincy Adams and rested on British naval power to be enforceable. He died on 4 July 1831, the third president to die on Independence Day.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history