James Monroe Totally Explained

Everything about James Monroe totally explained

Supreme Court appointments

Monroe appointed Smith Thompson to the Supreme Court of the United States.

States admitted to the Union

Mississippi – December 10, 1817
Illinois – December 3, 1818
Alabama – December 14, 1819
Maine – March 15, 1820
Missouri – August 11, 1821 When his presidency was over on March 4, 1825, James Monroe lived at Monroe Hill on the grounds of the University of Virginia. This university's modern campus was Monroe's family farm from 1788 to 1817, but he'd sold it in the first year of his presidency to the new college. He served on the college's Board of Visitors under Jefferson and then under the second rector and another former President James Madison, until his death.

Monroe had racked up many debts during his years of public life. As a result, he was forced to sell off his Highland Plantation (now called Ash Lawn-Highland; it's owned by his alma mater, the College of William and Mary, which has opened it to the public). Throughout his life, he wasn't financially solvent, and his wife's poor health made matters worse. (External Link

) For these reasons, he and his wife lived in Oak Hill, Virginia, until Elizabeth's death on 23 September 1830.

Death

Upon Elizabeth's death in 1830, Monroe moved to New York City to live with his daughter Maria Hester Monroe Gouverneur who had married Samuel L. Gouverneur in the first White House wedding. Monroe died there from heart failure and tuberculosis on 4 July 1831, becoming the third president to die on the 4th of July. His death came 55 years after the U.S. Declaration of Independence was proclaimed and 5 years after the death of the Presidents John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. He was originally buried in New York at the Gouverneur family's vault in the New York City Marble Cemetery. Twenty-seven years later in 1858 he was re-interred to the President's Circle at the Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond, Virginia.

Religious beliefs

"When it comes to Monroe's ...thoughts on religion", Bliss Isely comments in his The Presidents: Men of Faith, "less is known than that of any other President." He burned much of his correspondence with his wife, and no letters survive in which he might have discussed his religious beliefs. Nor did his friends, family or associates write about his beliefs. Letters that do survive, such as ones written on the occasion of the death of his son, contain no discussion of religion.
Monroe was raised in a family that belonged to the Church of England when it was the state church in Virginia, and as an adult frequently attended Episcopalian churches, though there's no record he ever took communion. He has been classified by some historians as a Deist, and he did use deistic language to refer to God. Jefferson had been attacked as an atheist and infidel for his deistic views, but never Monroe. Unlike Jefferson, Monroe wasn't anticlerical. [Holmes2003]

Famous Quotes by James Monroe

"It is only when the people become ignorant and corrupt, when they degenerate into a populace, that they're incapable of exercising their sovereignty. Usurpation is then an easy attainment, and an usurper soon found. The people themselves become the willing instruments of their own debasement and ruin."
   "The best form of government is that which is most likely to prevent the greatest sum of evil."
   "Never did a government commence under auspices so favorable, nor ever was success so complete. If we look to the history of other nations, ancient or modern, we find no example of a growth so rapid, so gigantic, of a people so prosperous and happy."
   "In this great nation there's but one order, that of the people, whose power, by a peculiarly happy improvement of the representative principle, is transferred from them, without impairing in the slightest degree their sovereignty, to bodies of their own creation, and to persons elected by themselves, in the full extent necessary for the purposes of free, enlightened, and efficient government."

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