George Washington was the father of our nation, a man seemingly cast from marble whose service, both in wartime and as president, made both its existence and survival possible. John Adams was his stubborn successor, celebrated years later for being a charming malcontent. Thomas Jefferson was the wordsmith of the Revolution. James Madison was its brain.Who exactly was James Monroe in the scheme of things? And, more importantly, does anyone even care to ask? They should.James Monroe has long been our most disrespected Founding Father. The last of the so-called Virginia dynasty that ruled America for a quarter century, Monroe was already an anachronism when he finally ascended to the presidency in 1817.
Monroe wore knee breeches, a powdered wig, long white stockings, and high-heeled buckled shoes long after it was cool. His penchant for the fashions of yesteryear earned him the nickname “the Last Cocked Hat.”Portrait of the 5th United States President James Monroe. On July 4, 1831, Monroe died in New York City, far from his home in Virginia. (Getty Images)
Monroe doesn’t jump off a historian’s pen. He wasn’t a walking bundle of contradictions like Jefferson, or a tiny philosopher king like Madison. He lacked their heft and gravitas. He was, one historian once quipped, “unoriginal to the very end,” even dying on July 4, just as his predecessors Adams and Jefferson had done five years before.They at least had the grace to stage manage their exits. Adams’s last words were famously “Jefferson still survives,” not knowing that his friend and former political foe had died hours earlier on the 50th anniversary of our nation’s founding.But even fate disrespected Monroe. While Adams and Jefferson expired from old age in grand old homes, surrounded by servants or slaves and debts that others would have to attend to, Monroe died from tuberculosis at 73, penniless and already forgotten, having been forced to move in with his daughter and her husband.Monroe wasn’t a rogue or rascal, like the peglegged womanizer Gouverneur Morris, who penned the preamble to the Declaration of Independence, or Aaron Burr, who, as vice president, shot and killed a former Cabinet secretary and was party to treasonous plots out west.In Emanuel Leutze’s 1851 painting, Washington Crossing the Delaware, Gen. George Washington stands on a flat-bottomed Durham boat with a young James Monroe crouched behind him, holding an American flag. (Heritage Images via Getty Images)
