James Monroe, the fifth president (1817-25), is most remembered for the Doctrine bearing his name and promulgated in his second term. The Monroe Doctrine laid the lines of America’s hemispheric and trans-Atlantic policy until World War I, and its spirit remains intermittently influential, long after its prescriptions have been superseded. Tim McGrath’s biography “James Monroe: A Life” shows how Monroe’s character and experiences over a long career shaped his doctrine: a worthy capstone of an interesting public life.
Monroe was born in 1758 to a planter family in Westmoreland County, Va. His early life was fashioned by patriotism and politics, Virginia style. He was a teen when commissioned as a lieutenant in the Continental Army, and was shot in the shoulder leading a charge at the Battle of Trenton in 1776. George Washington commended him as “a brave, active, and sensible officer.” During the war Monroe met an older man who would be an even more important figure in his life, Thomas Jefferson, then governor of Virginia. Jefferson added Monroe, 15 years his junior, to his collection of protégés, which also included James Madison. Jefferson guided Monroe’s reading, and gave him a French cook, Monsieur Partout. Monroe, impressionable, was impressed. There was some jostling in the Jeffersonian phalanx early on—Monroe, offended at not being chosen as a delegate to the 1787 convention that wrote the Constitution, opposed the document. The following year he ran against Madison, the Constitution’s champion, for a seat in the new House of Representatives, and lost soundly. A vacancy in Virginia’s Senate delegation allowed Monroe to move up to the higher chamber, however, and harmony was restored to Jefferson’s world.
