The Presidency of James Monroe

Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1996. First Printing. Hardcover. Very good/Very good. 24 cm, 246 pages. Illustrations. pencil erasure on front endpaper. James Monroe (April 28, 1758 - July 4, 1831) was an American statesman who served from 1817 to 1825 as the fifth President of the United States. Monroe was the last president among the Founding Fathers of the United States. Monroe fought in the American Revolutionary War. He was wounded in the Battle of Trenton. He served as a delegate in the Continental Congress. He took an active part in the new government, and in 1790 he was elected to the Senate of the first United States Congress. He gained experience as an executive as the Governor of Virginia and he helped negotiate the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. During the War of 1812, Monroe served as Secretary of State and the Secretary of War. Monroe was easily elected president in 1816, winning over 80 percent of the electoral votes. As president, he sought to ease partisan tensions, embarking on a tour of the country that was well received. In addition to the acquisition of Florida, the 1819 Adams-Onís Treaty secured the westernmost section of the southern border of the United States along the 42nd Parallel to the Pacific Ocean. The "Era of Good Feelings" ensued. Monroe won near-unanimous reelection. In 1823, he announced the United States' opposition to any European intervention in the recently independent countries of the Americas with the Monroe Doctrine, which became a landmark in American foreign policy. Filled with new insights and fresh interpretations, this is the richest study yet published on the presidency of James Monroe, the last Revolutionary War hero to ascend to that august office. Noble Cunningham's history of the fifth presidency shows a young nation beset by growing pains and led by a cautious politician who had neither the learning nor the intellect of Jefferson or Madison, but whose actions strengthened both the United States and the presidency itself. Cunningham makes clear that the "era of good feelings" had more than its share of crises, including those resulting from revolutions in Latin America, Spanish possession of Florida, the depression of 1819, and the controversy over slavery in Missouri. Monroe, he shows, successfully defused these potentially explosive situations, most notably by negotiating the 1820 Missouri Compromise and announcing in 1823 what came to be known as the Monroe Doctrine, a document that still guides American policy in the western hemisphere. Cunningham effectively places these actions within the context of Monroe's life and times and sheds new light on the inner workings of his cabinet and his relations with Congress. In addition, he features the prominent roles of two future presidents: John Quincy Adams as secretary of state and Andrew Jackson as the controversial general whose actions in the Seminole War created a headache for the administration. Though substantially informed by previous scholarship, Cunningham writes largely from the abundant primary source materials of the era to provide an illuminating new look at a president and a nation on the brink of greatness.