James Monroe: A Life from Beginning to End

What American president would not relish the thought of his time in office bearing the description “Era of Good Feeling”? That was the title given to the time when President James Monroe occupied the White House. Monroe was a Virginian, like better-known Founding Father Presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison. But his destiny was not defined solely by his loyalty to his state. He was an American, assured of a future destined to be grand because he lived in a nation where possibilities were probable.

Monroe grew up in the colony of Virginia as the son of a moderately prosperous plantation owner, but his career in service to his nation took him to the battlefields of the Revolutionary War, diplomacy in Europe, the governorship of Virginia, Cabinet posts in Washington D.C., and through it all, America’s future. By establishing the Monroe Doctrine, he warned other nations that trespassing in the Western Hemisphere would be taken as an attack upon the United States. That he made this proclamation at a time when the United States was a mere fledgling compared to the predators of Europe demonstrates his confident audacity in the country he governed. He was a nineteenth-century believer in the twenty-first American century.