s '>, ^t 2^^<7 « /S 7 ^ -*■ -Z- ;?" £ James Monroe (by Vanderlyn) • THE LIFE OF JAMES MONROE By GEORGE MORGAN Author of " The Life of Lafayette, " Patrick Henry," etc. >t BOSTON SMALL, MAYNARD AND COMPANY PUBLISHERS £37 2. Copyright, 1921 SMALL, MAYNARD AND COMPANY (Incorporated) ,/ «_> W v & A. t > Printed in the United States of America CLA630916 \ DEDICA TION To that sound democracy of the fathers which elevates statesmen and exacts from them masterful service for all the people, regardless of race, creed or condition PREFACE Readers will discern that there is an attempt here to re-create Monroe the Man, and so place him that he will stand out against the background of his own times. There are enough books about General Wash- ington to fill an ample alcove in any library; there is an Adams literature; and there is a Jefferson literature of considerable proportions; but neither Madison nor Monroe has fared so well. Madison wrote to Lyman C. Draper that a life like his, which had been so much a public life, "must, of course, be traced in the public transactions in which it was involved." This is just as true of Monroe's life; and it explains why we have endeavored to follow the flow of coincident events — to make the text full, accurate and consecutive, cover- ing the personal and social as well as political experi- ences of its subject. Luckily for Madison, his first biographer was inti- mately acquainted with him, but Monroe was unfor- tunate in that no one who lived in, or near to, his own epoch wrote an adequate account of his career. When a man serves his country as long and as well as Monroe did, his whole story ought to be told, not only for the satisfaction of a certain inborn intellectual curiosity — but because of the example conveyed in it for suc- ceeding generations. Especially is this true of one who, like Monroe, had the great good fortune to serve his fellows throughout the foundation period when prin- ciples were established, freedom achieved, the Con- stitutional cornerstone laid and the work of nation- building assured beyond peradventure. Monroe bore a part in so many undertakings during his fifty years of public life, his activities were so varied, his corre- spondence was so wide that he cannot but be classed as a chief participant in the vital beginnings — those blessed beginnings — of the great republic. VI 1 viii PREFACE Nevertheless one finds few books about him. His- torians and biographers, pursuing elusive truth along lines of their particular activities, are apt to realize when a thing is amiss; and we have their word for it that existing lives of Monroe, however useful, lack reach and comprehensiveness. Dr. Daniel C. Gilman's life (1883), dealing with the half -century between 1776 and 1826, is the best — a well-considered, brief, biogra- phy; but it is essentially an outline; and it is lacking alike in fullness of fact and in those Boswellian details that help to put back the breath of reality into a character of the past. While accurate and readable, it is altogether too thin a book, being amplified scarcely beyond the bounds of an article in an encyclopedia. What is there, between its covers, is good; what is not there is much missed by the student. No reflection is meant upon it, supplemented as it is by Prof. J. F. Jameson's scholarly bibliography of Monroe and the Monroe Doctrine, nor upon other careful sketches, such as Schouler's. What we would like to make clear is that in the course of a century much illuminating Monroe matter has appeared in some hundreds of letters, memoirs, journals, narratives and local his- tories and that here, for the first time, these unfamiliar details have been assembled in an annotative way and drawn upon to enliven, strengthen and complete the story of Monroe's career. We have, of course, relied largely upon the documents in the possession of the United States Government, the various historical societies and the private collec- tions mentioned in the footnotes accompanying the text. Under act of March 3, 1849, Congress bought the Monroe papers; and an alphabetically arranged Calendar of them was issued by the Bureau of Rolls, Department of State, 1893. Based upon the letters and documents thus listed are the seven volumes of the Writings of Monroe, edited by Stanislaus Murray Hamilton and issued by Putnam in a limited edition in 1898-1902. On March 9, 1903, President Roosevelt PREFACE ix transferred the Monroe papers from the Department of State to the Library of Congress and on June 27, 1904, Worthington C. Ford, then chief of the Division of Manuscripts, and Herbert Putnam, Librarian, gave out a compilation of the papers arranged chronologi- cally by Wilmer Ross Leech, of the Division of Manu- scripts. From English, French and Spanish sources, also, thanks to Henry Adams, have come numerous supplementary or confirmatory details bearing upon Monroe's diplomatic experiences. These, then, are a few of the many reasons for this volume; but there is a special reason, and this special reason we shall at once underscore. It has now been close upon one hundred years since the United States promulgated the Monroe Doctrine. Actually, as well as historically, this Doctrine is a part of the nation's creed. Its own centenary will be likely to find it much more in the public mind than hereto- fore. People wish to define it — to study it ab ovo — they wish to know the circumstances under which it was adopted, and wish to stand for a moment in the shoes of the man who promulgated it — the fifth President, the last of the Revolutionary Executives, James Monroe, a patriot soldier in his youth, a diplo- mat who underwent bitter experiences, a statesman in the formative period of the Union and the intimate associate of its founders. Where was he bred? Where schooled? What did he do to help win the first and second wars of independence? Why was he twice chosen President and why, especially, did he enunciate the rule, applicable to the whole western hemisphere, associated with his name? This study of James Monroe and his times will help, we hope, to commemorate the centenary of his presidency and the centenary of the Monroe Doctrine. CONTENTS CHAPTBB I. II. III. IV. V. VI. VII. VIII. IX. X. XI. XII. XIII. XIV. XV. The Monroes and Their Neighbors . Boyhood, College Life and Early Campaigning Times that Tried Men's Souls . Transition Time "No Hoop for the Barrel" . In the Congress of the Confederation Monroe and the Federal Constitution Marriage — Making His Way . Monroe in Paris Rise of a Great Party .... Monroe and the Louisiana Purchase Monroe in England and Spain . Monroe and the War of 1812 . President of the United States . Monroe Doctrine — Last Days . Index 1 15 38 67 89 103 124 142 165 195 216 255 289 348 394 459 ILLUSTRATIONS James Monroe, by Vanderlyn Frontisjrieoe nut James Monroe's Birthplace 14 Account of Monroe in Bursar's Book 26 Oath of Allegiance, Valley Forge 68 Mrs. Monroe, by Sene 142 Eliza Kortright Monroe (Mrs. Hay) 142 Queen Hortense in Girlhood 165 Mme. Campan, Gerard 256 Queen Hortense 262 Maria Hester Monroe (Mrs. Gouverneur) .... 286 Monroe, full length, Vanderlyn 320 Mrs. Monroe, Benjamin West 350 Oak Hill 370 Aquarelle Portrait of Monroe 390 House in which Monroe Died 410 Monroe's Tomb 430 The Monroe Peace and Friendship Medal . . . . 450 xv\ RECORD OF ACTIVITIES England, April 18, 1803. Commissioned Minister to Spain October 14, 1804. Left Spanish Court for London, May 21, 1805. Commissioned with William Pinkney, to negotiate treaty with England, May 12, 1806 British Treaty signed December 31, 1806 Left England for home October 29, 1807 Virginia Legislator, third time, 1810 Reelected Governor of Virginia, fourth time, 1811 Appointed by Madison Secretary of State (till 1817), 1811 Secretary of War, ad interim, September 26, 1814 to March 3, 1815 President, first term, March 4, 1817 Tour of East, June 2, September 17, 1817 Seminole War, 1818 Florida acquired, 1819 Missouri Compromise, 1820 President, second term, March 5, 1821 Message enunciating the Monroe Doctrine, 1823 Visit of La Fayette, 1824-1825 Retired to Oak Hill, Loudon County, Va., 1825 Regent of the University of Virginia, 1826 Member of the Virginia Constitutional Convention, 1829 Death of Monroe, 1831. Died in New York City, July 4, 1831 Reinterred at Richmond, Va., July 5, 1858 LIFE OF JAMES MONROE CHAPTER I The Monkoes and Their Neighbors in the Northern Neck Son of Spence Monroe and Elizabeth his wife, who were of the plain people, unrelated to the aristocratic Tuckahoes, James Monroe was born near the head of Monroe's Creek, in Westmoreland County, Northern Neck of Virginia, on the twenty-eighth of April, 1758. Young George Washington, who had long since buried Braddock at the foot of Laurel Mountain, was now writing an order for his wedding clothes to his own agent in London; Dinwiddie, Governor of Virginia, had gone back to that same London; and from it would soon come his gay and gambling successor, Francis Fauquier, who would give his name to one of the newer counties of the Northern Neck. As Accomac by the ocean is the lowermost, so this celebrated Northern Neck is the uppermost of the nine peninsulas of the Old Dominion. On one side, the Northern Neck follows the flow of the Potomac, border to border with Maryland, all the way to the mountains; on the other side, it follows the flow of the Rapidan from its springheads in the Blue Ridge all the way to the spot where the wide-mouthed Rappahannock enters the Chesapeake Bay. Most readers will readily and fondly recall the romantic story of young Washington, the Fairfaxes and the Northern Neck. One remembers, off hand, how the many millions of acres contained in this territory were granted by the British Crown to 1 2 THE LIFE OF JAMES MONROE Ralph Lord Hopton and others, sold by them to John Lord Culpeper and passed on to Lord Fairfax. 1 Now- adays there are more than twenty counties in this vast region, but in Spence Monroe's time (aside from a few, such as Culpeper, newly erected) there existed only the ancient lower, mother counties — Lancaster, North- umberland, Westmoreland, Richmond, King George, Prince William and Stafford, some of which will soon celebrate their tercentennial anniversaries. Many of the plantations were penetrated by salt- water creeks and coves, rich in foodfish and in those gustatory delicacies and delights dear to the palates of the proprietors. Choice estates fronted on the Potomac; others, just as advantageously placed, looked out upon the Rappahannock. By the latter, dwelt "King" Carter of Corotoman — Robert Carter, agent of the Fairfaxes — who, in the time of Spence Monroe's father, Andrew, "ruled the Northern Neck," though he probably did not quite succeed in ruling his family of fifteen children. It was he who was so impor- tant a person that the congregation of Old Christ Church, Lancaster, always waited outside until he had preceded them within. To some of the Tuckahoe people, Virginia was an outlying part of England. "The Virginia planter," says Robert A. Brock, 2 than whom there is no better authority, "was essentially a transplanted Englishman in tastes and convictions and emulated the social amenities and culture of the mother country." The tidewater gentry regarded themselves as adventurers 1 "The Northern Neck was granted at different times by King Charles I and II to Lord Hopton, the Earl of St. Albans and others, and subsequently by King James II to Lord Culpeper, who purchased the rights of other parties. Lord Fairfax, who married the daughter of Lord Culpeper, became the proprietor of this princely domain known as the Northern Neck." — Philip Slaughter, History of St. Mark's Parish. See also Jefferson's Notes on Virginia, where the various grants are listed. The last Fairfax grant was made in 1780. On November 15, 1786, Gov. Patrick Henry, by a grant recorded in the same book, assumed for the State the eminent domain of the Northern Neck. — William and Mary College Quarterly, Vol. VI, pp. 222-226. 2 Narrative and Critical History of America. Edited by Justin Winsor, Vol. IIL p. 153. THE LIFE OF JAMES MONROE 3 in a region unhappily far removed from the mother- land, yet blessed with black men to do the necessary work. They did not bethink them of the days on ahead when they would have deadly trouble with the British and still deadlier trouble with the blacks. Their peril, as it seemed to them, was the red peril that lurked in the wilderness; and the thought of it hardened some of them, especially those on the border. Down by the little havens, the oyster creeks, the rich bottoms that had once belonged to the Indians, they were so secure from massacre as to distress themselves less about the dispossessed redmen than about possible pirates, such as the well-remembered Blackbeard. Indeed, high living, with its pleasures and trains of evil, was the worst enemy of both gentry and clergy. "The common Planters leading easy Lives," wrote Hugh Jones, in "The State of Virginia," "don't much admire Labour, or any manly Exercise, except Horse-Racing, nor Diversion except Cock-Fighting in which some greatly delight. This easy way of Living, and the Heat of Summer, makes some very lazy, who are then said to be Climate-Struck!" Climate-struck, no doubt, was the Accomac man, neighbor of Colonel John Custis of epitaph fame, who when rebuked for his unending otium cum dignitate, replied: "What's the use to worry, when all you have to do is to fall overboard to find your dinner?" But, though lassitude might creep over one in summer, as the bay breezes blew softly in, it was different when frost came; then a fierce desire to hunt the fox, the coon, the 'possum might seize a man and carry him far afield. It was in reality a lively age — an outdoor age, a hard riding age, an age of. adventure, of thumb-biting, of duelling, much richer in activities than the student is apt to credit it with. It was also a ripe age in the sense that the peculiar Virginia civili- zation of which we have hinted had been developing for something like a century and a half. Master Fithian, a Princeton divinity student, who, as tutor, lived for a year at Nomini Hall, seat of another 4 THE LIFE OF JAMES MONROE Carter, known as Councillor Carter, left a diary full of illuminating pen-pictures descriptive of an aristo- cratic Virginia home quite as English as any to be found in cavalier England. Religion and the lack of it were equally to be noted at Nomini Hall. A dabster in theology, Councillor Carter swung first to one sect and then to another; a born musician, "his house resounded with the tinkling guitar, the silvery har- monicum (just invented by the all accomplished Benjamin Franklin), the violin, the flute, harpsichord, and organ." 1 Fithian, adds Professor Harrison, went down to Virginia a "blue" Presbyterian, "but after a year's residence at 'Nomini Hall' became almost a 'perverted' Episcopalian in point of reverence for dancing, ^horse-racing, cock-fighting, stepping the min- uet, toasting the ladies, and other genial amusements then prevalent in the Northern Neck. ' : There were six hundred negroes on the sixty thousand acre place; and some of them expected to be remembered with "bits" and "half -bits," rum-and-water and "pisim- mon" beer. The gentry rode from plantation to plan- tation forming house-parties, or giving balls, ladies in gorgeous quilted skirts, bodices and brocades of the period, with creped hair, fantastically wreathed with artificial flowers and strings of pearls, "danced until dawn glistened over the rosy Potomac." 2 Professor Harrison adds that "the old baronial style of living was in this decade in its full glory; the Byrds of West- over, the Harrisons and Carters of Brandon and Shirley, the Lewises of Kenmore, the Fairfaxes of Greenway Court and Belvoir, the Masons of Gunston Hall, the Calverts over the Potomac, as it swept grandly from its cataract to the Chesapeake, the Pages and Nelsons of Rose well, the Lees of Stratford and Chan- tilly — all kept up an easy-going, semi-feudal state, into which the Washingtons as easily fell by right of 1 George Washington: Patriot, Soldier, Statesman, by James A. Harrison, 1906. 2 Master Fithian, a gallant soldier, died of camp fever at Fort Washington, 1776. THE LIFE OF JAMES MONROE 5 lineage, as well as of wealth, and influential position in colonial circles. " * On the Rappahannock side, the year James Monroe was born, Colonel John Tayloe built Mt. Airy manor- house, still standing, "considered by many the hand- somest in Virginia. " Not far away is the equally noted "Sabine Hall." If in Monroe's boyhood days, the Northern Neck was still the country of the Fairfaxes, it was also that of the Balls, Beales, Brents, Brockenbroughs, Brookes, Bushrods, Con ways, Corbins, Fauntleroys, Graysons, Grymes, Lees, Marshalls, Masons, Masseys, Mercers, Mountjoys, Newtons, Peacheys, Pressleys, Seldens, Steptoes, Stiths, Taliaferros, Turbervilles, Traverses and Turners of "Smith's Mount." The old vestry-books contain these locally notable names and many besides. Some of Monroe's contem- poraries figure in the county chronicles and in traditions and anecdotes well remembered between the Potomac and Rappahannock rivers. One recalls " Jemmy ' : Steptoe. He was born at Hominy Hall, Westmoreland, studied at William and Mary College; migrated to Bedford, where "as a slip of gentility homesick in the wilderness," he sighed for a companion; married a daughter of Colonel James Callaway, she being one of twenty -two children; and served fifty-four years as County Clerk. Such was the significant record of one of Monroe's boyhood neighbors, whose Aunt Ann married a brother of Washington, and whose Aunt Elizabeth married Philip Ludwell Lee, becoming the mother of an illustrious line of Lees. In the days of Monroe's early manhood, the North- ern Neck was less and less a Fairfax land and more and more the historic home-country of Washington, Jeffer- son, Madison and Marshall. 1 Of Mary (Ball) Washington, at sixteen, a Williamsburg letter, October 7, 1724, addressed to "Dear Sukey," says: "Madam Ball of Lancaster and her sweet Molly have gone Horn. Mamma thinks Molly the Comliest Maiden she knows. Her hair is like unto Flax, Her eyes the color of yours and here Chekes are like May blossoms." 6 THE LIFE OF JAMES MONROE In Civil War times, the counties of Stafford, Prince William, Fairfax, Loudon, Fauquier, Culpeper and Orange were the scenes of constant manoeuvres, count- less skirmishes and those great battles between brother and brother so fascinatingly depicted on our historic scroll. But Westmoreland was the most celebrated of the colonial counties. So noteworthy was the culture of that south shore of the Potomac, and so numerous were the celebrities who lived in Westmoreland itself, that it was designated, in the classical hyperbole to which our grandfathers were prone, "The Athens of America." l Athens or no Athens, it is, indeed, a most noteworthy matter that Westmoreland should have given us so great a number of public characters — the Lee brothers of the Revolutionary period and the equally able Lees of more recent celebrity. "Within an hour's ride" are the birthplaces of three presidents of the United States. The man who proposed the Declaration of Independ- ence was born here; and the man who wrote it, another president, lived only a little way to the northwest in the upper part of the Northern Neck. Madison 2 too, was born in the Northern Neck — " at the house of his maternal grandmother, Mrs. Eleanor Conway, on the north bank of the Rappahannock, in the County of King George." Lightfoots, Ludwells and Fitzhughs lived their lives in these and other parts, intermarrying with the Lees and producing in each generation, men and women of uncommon spirit. For one example, we have, in the Revolutionary period, ' Light Horse Harry, " or 1 This is a favorite phrase. Writers on the Lees dwell upon the fine life at the Potomac and Rappahannock seats. Among R. E. Lee's biographers, John Esten Cooke tells especially of Stratford house; Philip Alexander Bruce of West- moreland's great men; and Dr. J. William Jones of Lee's forebears in Westmore- land. A notable book is "Westmoreland County, Virginia, 1653-1912," compiled by Judge T. R. B. Wright, of Montross. "Manors of Virginia in Colonial Times," by Edith Tunis Sale, dwells upon Westmoreland and its notabilities. 2 Son of James, son of Ambrose, son of John, son of John, first of the name in Virginia, James Madison, Jr., President, "was born at Port Conway at twelve o'clock (midnight) sixth of March, 1751." THE LIFE OF JAMES MONROE 7 "Legion Harry," or "Dragoon Harry," with whose mother, in her maidenhood, young Washington was in love, and, for another example, General R. E. Lee of the Civil War period, who, named after his uncles, Robert and Edward Carter, was related not only to the colonial celebrity, Governor Alexander Spots wood, chief of the Knights of the Golden Horseshoe, but to the world-famous Robert Bruce. We have here noted these ancestral connections with the purpose of indicating the character and quality of the neighborhood where Monroe was brought up, and not with any purpose of stressing his own gentility. Rather do we seek to suggest a contrast. He was not an armiger. Though, like Washington, who was "bred a man of honor in the free school of Virginian society" 1 it should be kept in mind that Monroe was less blue in his blood and grew to be a much plainer, a much more democratic man, than many of his contemporaries. Moreover, "it should be remembered," declares John T. Morse, Jr., "that, by good rights, neither Washing- ton, Jefferson, nor even Madison, before they became distinguished, would have been entitled to take rank in the exclusive coterie of the very best Virginia fami- lies." 2 When Washington applied to the aristocratic Colonel Wilson Cary for the hand of one of his daugh- ters — though not Mary Cary, it seems — 3 he was informed, with some loftiness, that the lady sought was accustomed to ride in her coach."* 1 George Washington, by Woodrow Wilson, 1897. 2 Life of Thomas Jefferson, by John T. Morse, Jr. 3 Moncure D. Conway says that the "Lowland Beauty" was Betsy Fauntleroy, afterwards the wife of the Hon. Thomas Adams. Mary Cary married Edward Ambler. Washington had at least two love affairs before he married Mrs. Martha Custis. See chapter V, infra. 4 In his address at Richmond, Va... October 18, 1891, on "The Colonial Vir- ginian," R. A. Brock said: "It is conclusively demonstrated in preserved record, printed and manuscript, the latter embracing the registry of land patents from 1020 and the records of several county courts, that the settlers were preponder- antly English. There was a considerable number of Welsh and a sprinkling of French, Italians, Irish and Dutch. . . . Welsh blood has been among the motive powers of many eminent sons of Virginia, and of their descendants in the South. . . . There were refugee Huguenots who found asylum desultorily in Virginia before 1700, but the chief influx was in that year, when more than five hundred 8 THE LIFE OF JAMES MONROE Not only so, but Monroe finally became a Loudon man; and the pioneering people of the middle counties and the piedmont certainly had less of the Anglican tincture than the Tuckahoes. The drop of Scotch, or Scotch-Irish, blood was big; and so was the Welsh drop; and the infusion made a difference. Moreover the "blue blood," so to say, turned red in contact with the real America — its open life, its hardships, its necessity of making common cause; and, finally, its sunny, homely sociabilities connected with the log cabin, the log school and the much-loved meeting- house in the wilderness. New types were developing. The Taylors of Orange were a strong and famous family. One of them, George, a great-uncle of Presi- dent Madison, had seven sons in the Revolutionary army. The celebrated Colonel John Taylor, of Caro- line, whom we shall meet later in these pages, was of this stock on his father's side and of Pendleton lineage on his mother's. Zachary Taylor, too, is another Presi- dent to be credited to these parts; for he was born just south of the Fairfax line — at Hare Forest, four miles from Orange Courthouse. Similarly, we take note of many families — the Dabneys, Maurys, Fon- taines, all of Huguenot stock; the Winstons, Henrys, Slaughters, Strothers from the Isle of Thanet, and their multitudinous kith and kin. There was many an old farmer with a crest on his snuff-box. Scotch penetration of Anglo-Saxon Virginia was pronounced came and settled chiefly at Manakintown. ... Of the Scotch but few immi- grants before the union of Scotland and England, in 1707, may be identified After the union 'Scotch Parsons' so potent as educators and merchants, who quite monopolized the trade of the country, pervaded Eastern Virginia. The list of families in the colony, who in vested right used coat-armor, as attested in examples of such use on tombstones, preserved book plates, and impressions of seals, is more than one hundred and fifty. The virtue of such family invest- ment by royal favor may appear somewhat in the fact that the Virginia rebels, Claiborne, Bacon, Washington and Lee were all armigers, and among others were the Amblers, Archers, Armisteads, Banisters, Barradalls, Beverlys, Blands, Boil- ings, Byrds, Carys, Carringtons, Cloptons, Claytons, Corbins, and so on through- out the alphabet in swelling numbers and comprehensive examples of ability and worth." Meade listed some 250 highly important Virginia families of the colonial period. In the matter of felon blood, Jefferson allowed it but a one- thousandth part. THE LIFE OF JAMES MONROE 9 from the time the tobacco traders settled at such places as Leeds, Dumfries and Falmouth. Scotch merchants grew rich. A street in Glasgow was called "Virginia Street." James Monroe and Patrick Henry were by no means the only celebrated Virginians of Scotch origin. The Barbours of Culpeper were well at the front in their days; especially is Justice Philip Pendleton Barbour, of the United States Supreme Court, to be credited with what Professor Tucker characterizes as his "severe and sustained logic." And the "Cohees" (Quoth-hes) certainly became a power in the Common- wealth. But the Monroes! The name in Gaelic means "red bog." It is a territorial surname. In Ireland, anciently, it was simply Ro. The first man in history to bear it was Occon Ro, "whose son Donald, born in Ireland, went to Scotland in the beginning of the eleventh century to assist King Malcolm II." Malcolm gave him the Barony of Fowlis. "His descendants added to the original name the syllable Mon." At subsequent periods, "this name was spelt variously: Monro, Mun- ro, Monroe, Munroe." Ro itself survives in such names as that of E. P. Roe. In Massachusetts 1 today, "Munroe" is the spelling ordinarily used; in Virginia, the name is "Monroe." 1 See the Munroe genealogy by John G. Locke, Boston and Cambridge, 1853; also the History of the Munros of Fowlis, with genealogies of the principal families of the name, to which are added those of Lexington and New England, by the late Alexander Mackenzie, Inverness, 1898; also a sketch of the Munro Clan, by James Phinney Munroe, Boston, 1900. There is a great deal about the Massa- chusetts Munroes in A. B. Muzzey's "Reminiscences and Memorials of the Men of the Revolution," as well as about the Scotch Munroes. George Munro, ninth baron of Fowlis, was slain at the battle of Bannockburn, under Robert Brute of Scotland, in 1314. Robert Munroe, twenty-first baron, was killed in the service of Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, defending the civil and religious liberties of Germany in 1633. Sir Robert, twenty-fifth baron, was a zealous Presbyterian and, being remarkable for size and corpulency — the same figure with Colonel Munroe of our Revolution — he was nicknamed "the Presbyterian mortar- piece." His grandson, Sir Robert, twenty-seventh baron, who succeeded his father in 1729, was greatly distinguished for his military services. He was in the battle of Fontenoy. "He was killed in the battle of Falkirk, as was his brother, Dr. Munroe." " Up to the year 1651, there had been three generals, eight colonels, eleven majors, thirty captains, and five lieutenants of the Munroe stock. At the battle of Worcester, where Cromwell was victorious, several Munroes were made prisoners, and some of them were bound out as apprentices to farmers in 10 THE LIFE OF JAMES MONROE It has been asserted that the Virginia Monroes "came from a family of Scotch cavaliers, descendants of Hector Monroe, an officer of Charles I." Thus President James Monroe is given cavalier ancestry. This somewhat misleading statement is repeated in many books. While the Monroes in Scotland were of the cavalier cut and quality, they were hardly so in Virginia. Dr. Lyon G. Tyler, who has gone more painstakingly into the subject than anyone else, says that "the family in the Northern Neck of Virginia seems to be totally different from a family of the name in Southside Virginia." There were Andrew Monroes, it appears, in the Southside family, as well as in the Northern Neck family. We hear of the Rev. Andrew Monroe of the upper parish, Isle of Wight. John Blair, President of the Council under Dinwiddie, and acting governor, married Mary Monroe, daughter of the Rev. John Monroe and his wife Christian. Whatever may have been the relationship of James Monroe; with the Southside Monroes, or the Massa- chusetts Munroes, we do not attempt to trace. As revised by Dr. Tyler for this book, President Monroe's pedigree, according to the records of Mary- land and Westmoreland County, Va., is as follows: "Andrew 1 Monroe, settled in Maryland in 1647. He took sides against Lord Baltimore; and, at the end of the troubles, fled across the Potomac to Mattox, where many of the Protestants sought refuge. He married Elizabeth , and died before 1668, when a deed from his widow Elizabeth to his children names them America." Among these'was William, the ancestor of the Massachusetts Mun- roes. There were eleven of these in the old French war, and fourteen in the Revolution. They lived around Lexington and Concord, and were descendants of the clannish William's six sons. All fourteen were in the Lexington com- pany of Theodore Parker's grandfather, Captain John Parker. Ensign Robert was killed at Lexington; and Captain Edmund Munroe, by a cannon ball at Mon- mouth. Another Lexington Munroe was the stalwart Colonel William, Wash- ington's host on the Lexington battleground, in 1789. F. B. Sanborn, in his "Life of Thoreau," says: "The Munroes of Lexington are descended from a Scotch soldier of Charles IPs army, captured by Cromwell at the battle of Worcester in 1651, and allowed to go into exile in America. His powerful kinsman, General George Monroe, who commanded for Charles at the battle of Worcester, was, at the Restoration, made Commander-in-Chief for Scotland." " THE LIFE OF JAMES MONROE 11 as Elizabeth, who married Bunch Roe, Susan, Andrew 2 , George and William. "Andrew 2 Monroe (Andrew), born about 1664, married Elinor Spence, daughter of Captain Patrick Spence (died in 1685) and had issue Elizabeth, married Arrington, Andrew Spence, and Susannah who married Charles Tyler. This Andrew died 1713- 1714. "Andrew 3 Monroe, (Andrew 2 , Andrew 1 ,) died in 1735, leaving a wife Christian, and children Elinor, who married Dr. James Bankhead, Sarah, Spence 4 , and Andrew. "Spence 4 Monroe (Andrew 3 , Andrew 2 , Andrew 1 ,) married Elizabeth Jones, sister of Hon. Joseph Jones, who died in Fred- ericksburg in 1806, and had James 5 , President of the United States, Andrew, Joseph Jones and Elizabeth who married William Buckner. As the first Washington in Westmoreland, John, brother of Laurence, was master of a ship, so the first Monroe, Andrew, was a mariner. He commanded a pinnace under Cuthbert Fenwick, general agent for Lord Baltimore. He was with Richard Ingle in 1644, and "was evidently a Protestant." 1 WTien Ingle declared for parliament, Monroe took sides against Lord Baltimore. "Like many other men in that day he could not write." He settled first on Kent Island close by the Eastern Shore, where William Claiborne started a colony, about 1630. Claiborne's quarrel with Lord Baltimore caused many of the English settlers to sail across the bay and up the Potomac. Numbers of them planted at Chickacoan, in the Northern Neck. Our sea-captain, Andrew, settled at Appomattox — not the Appomattox so celebrated in the annals of the Civil War, but what is now Mattox, Westmoreland. Charles Tyler, founder of the Tyler family of the Northern Neck, whose descendants intermarried with the Monroes and Spences, probably left Maryland at the same time and for the same reason. The Virginia Archives show that successive grants of land were made to Andrew Monroe from 1650-1662, 1 William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. IV, p. 272. Two old books that deal with early Maryland are Alsop's "Character of the Province of Maryland," by George Alsop, reprinted in 1869 and "The Day Star of American Freedom," by George Lynn-Lachlan Davis. 1855. 12 THE LIFE OF JAMES MONROE and to John Monroe from 1695 to 1719. James Monroe, the President, "was born on land of which his ancestor who first migrated to this country was the original grantee. " 1 There are numerous references in the Archives at Richmond to a later Andrew Monroe, of the Virginia House of Burgesses. He sat in the Assembly from 1742 to 1747. Quaint enough, surely, is the old Westmoreland document in which Andrew Monroe and others report upon the death of a man- servant who threw himself into a creek and was drowned. They caused him to be "buried at ye next Cross-roads," and a stake to be "driven through the middle of him in his grave, he having wilfully cast himself away." Another document mentions the "pernicious vermin wolves," which the Washingtons and Monroes and others hunted to extermination. Hugh Blair Grigsby speaks of James Monroe's father, Spence, as a "carpenter"; and it is a fact, as the records prove, that, in 1743, "Spence Monroe appren- ticed himself to Robert Walker of King George, Joiner." "But," comments Dr. Lyon G. Tyler (in William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. IV, p. 274), "the inference which he (Mr. Grigsby) draws that James Monroe was of low social scale is incorrect. His fathers and his ancestors were justices and officers in the militia, and had respectable estates and owned many slaves. It must be remembered that Virginia was settled chiefly by the people of the English cities, in which the dignity of the trades was stoutly maintained. The gentlemen of the counties of England apprenticed their sons to the grocers, the weavers, and the tailors, and they did not for that reason cease to be gentlemen. A premium was put upon the trades by inhibiting the right of voting or of office-holding to any but a member of one of the merchant guilds. I have found that many of the old leading Virginians apprenticed their sons to some tradesman, and that merchandizing was 1 Virginia Calendar of State Papers. THE LIFE OF JAMES MONROE 13 very popular. The carpenter's trade was especially honorable. 1 No family was more honorable or more influential than the Cary family of Elizabeth City and Warwick Counties; and yet both the father and grand- father of Colonel Archibald Cary, of the Revolution, called themselves, 'carpenters' as well as 'gentlemen.' They, no doubt, served first as apprentices, as the custom required a regular probation of five years; but afterwards they performed the part of directors and contractors, leaving the manual labor to slaves. . . . These are the facts from the records, but it is also true that, however respectable, the Monroes never held the same state in society as the Lees, Washingtons, Allertons, Ashtons, and a few other great families of Westmoreland and King George counties — a fact which is shown by the absence of intermarriage and the inferiority of their estates and offices compared with these powerful neighbors. " Let it be noted here that James Monroe was not the only celebrated American statesman of the old Captain Andrew stock. Andrew, second, had a fourth child Susannah, named in his will (1713). One of Susannah's sons by her third husband, Captain Benjamin Grayson, was the celebrated Colonel William Grayson, who mar- ried General William Smallwood's sister Eleanor. He was a brother of Spence Grayson and as we have shown of blood-kin to Spence Monroe. Colonel Grayson distin- guished himself in the Revolution, especially at Monmouth where he was at the head of one of the fighting regiments; in public life prior to the adoption of the Constitution, which he opposed, and as one of the first United States Senators from Virginia. He died at Dumfries, March 12, 1790, on his way to Congress. 1 As witness the Worshipful Carpenters' Company of London; and the Carpenters' Company, which built Carpenters' Hall, in Philadelphia, meeting- place of the First Continental Congress. In this connection William G. Stanard writes to the author: "Most sons of Virginia planters and farmers farmed them- selves; but occasionally one was a mechanic. Larkin Chew, of Spotsylvania County, head of a large and quite prominent family, sometimes styles himself 'gentleman' and sometimes 'carpenter' or 'builder'. One-sof the Carys was a builder." 14 THE LIFE OF JAMES MONROE He was conspicuously able in an age of brilliant men. We come finally to Monroe's mother, who brought good Welsh blood to the blending. In the main, as we have seen, English was the stock of the Northern Neck, and both the Monroe family of Westmoreland and the Jones family of King George had intermarried with families of English lineage. Still, as was said by the biographer of the Hon. David S. Jones, of New York, common as the name is 'the characteristics of the Welsh race are plainly discernible in almost every member of the family, and are very marked in almost all who have become prominent in any walk of life — almost to a man choleric, sanguine, social, hospitable, independent and honorable. " Hospitable, independent and honorable, the Joneses of King George certainly were; and it may be added that no man influenced James Monroe more than did his mother's affectionate and attentive brother, Judge Joseph Jones, whose solicitude for his nephew's welfare and advancement was unending. This Virginia worthy was a judicious- minded man of high character and qualifications, who left his impress not only upon James Monroe but upon the affairs of the continent. He was twice a delegate to the Continental Congress, and for many years served as a Judge of the District Court. As one learns from R. A. Brock (who insists that "genealogy is now admitted to be one of the chief supports of history"), the King George family to which Elizabeth Monroe belonged "was the same with that of Adjutant-General Robert Jones, Commodore Catesby Jones and General Walker Jones " each of note in the history of his country. We have little direct testimony concerning Monroe's mother; but there are numerous letters extant written by Judge Jones 1 ; and, if she were like her brother, as she seems to have been, she must have possessed sterling qualities that served her well in the rearing of her son. 1 The letters of Judge Joseph Jones have been published by Worthington C. Ford. Judge Jones' father, James Jones, kept an ordinary in King George, which his widow, Esther, continued to keep after his death. 2 V I. CHAPTER II Boyhood, College Life and Early Campaigning We know less than we would like to know about the boyhood of Monroe. He never wrote the story of his own early experiences; nor did he have any such admirer as Parson Weems to go around among the old people of Westmoreland, Richmond and King George Counties, gathering up the anecdotal matter that might now serve us in lieu of fragmentary data. No doubt our Westmoreland lad was busy enough. He sailed, he fished, he rode, he followed the hounds and bird dogs. Probably he was out and about with the black boys much of the time. It was the custom. For instance, it is on record that the youngest of Thomas Lee's six sons, Arthur, the unhappy diplomat, had a happy youth among the negroes of his own age in this same West- moreland country. Here bob white whistled in the upland fields, and the red bird in the briers down along the branches. Westmoreland was a great place for sheltering pines and cedars; and, where cedar berries grew, there birds were sure to be found, winter as well as summer. Waterfowl fed in the creeks; or passed honking overhead, in V-shaped squadrons. To imag- inative boys like "Legion Harry" Lee and other lads of the Northern Neck, the "V" was Virginia's initial on wing. And, as for the Potomac fish, whole schools of them flashed their silvery sides within sight of the watchful boys on the banks of the creeks and coves. All must have been familiar with the London ships that moored at the landings. At Hobbs' Hole in the Rappahannock, as Jefferson tells us in his "Notes on Virginia," the water was four fathoms deep; and at Nomini Bay on the Potomac, four and a half fathoms. Monroe's Creek was about the best on the shore — 15 16 THE LIFE OF JAMES MONROE navigable for vessels four miles from its mouth, and for small boats another mile. No doubt grain was sent down in scows. If there were no mill at the head of the creek, then there was something lacking in the Monroe neighborhood. If there were no mill pond in which the Monroe sky mirrored itself, then the boy of the house missed much indeed. Probably both mill and pond were there. Mattox, the next creek, was three miles long. Historic Pope's was but two. Lower Machodac resembled Monroe's. It was healthier back from the creeks on the high ground. As yet the alluvial bottoms retained their fertility; and great quantities of tobacco, as well as cargoes of wheat, passed out at the mouths of the two rivers. It was when the soil had lost its magic quality and the waters their bounty that the old order perished in Westmoreland. "Chantilly, Mount Pleas- ant, Wakefield," sighs Bishop Meade, "are now no more. Stratford alone remains. Where now are the venerable churches? Pope's Creek, Round Hill, Nomini, Leeds, where are they? Yeocomico only survives the general wreck. Of the old men, mansions, churches, etc., we are tempted to say Fuit Ilium, et ingens gloria Dardanium!" Leeds, or Leedstown, on the Rappahannock, must have been well known to young Monroe. "It was doubtless named, either by the Fairfaxes or Wash- ington, after the town of Leeds, in Yorkshire, near which both of their ancestral families lived. " * So says Bishop Meade, who adds: "For one thing, it deserves to retain a lasting place in the history of the American Revolution. As Boston was the Northern, so Leeds may be called the Southern cradle of American Inde- pendence. This was the place where, with Richard Henry Lee as their leader, the patriots of Westmoreland met, before any and all others, to enter their protests against the incipient steps of British usurpation. At 1 The Virginia Historical Magazine, Vol. XXI, p. 335, says that the name of John Monroe's house in Richmond County, "Fowlis," "showed that the Virginia family remembered the old home in Scotland." THE LIFE OF JAMES MONROE 17 this place did they resolve to oppose the Stamp Act, nor allow any citizen of Westmoreland to deal in stamps. " Spence Monroe, as well as John Monroe, joined in the movement. Their signatures are among the one hundred and fifteen appended to the famous resolutions. It is a distinguished roll, comparable to any other in America. Doubtless James Monroe, now nine, heard the talk about the hated stamps, and bristled, as boys do, in defiance of the foe. It must have cost a man like Richard Henry Lee downright compunctions thus to help nullify a Crown measure. It is true, as Bishop Meade says, that "Virginia had been fighting the battles of the Revolution for 150 years before the Declaration." Her Masons, Lees and Henrys were transplanted John Hampdens. Nevertheless, Lee seems to have welcomed the repeal, in spite of the ominous declaratory act accompanying it. He led a movement to raise a fund of seventy-six pounds, eight shillings, and sent it to Edmund Jennings, Lincoln's Inn, London, with the request that the money be expended for a Reynolds portrait of Lord Camden, "as a token of admiration for his opposition to the Stamp Act." But his lordship "forgot" to sit for the portrait; and, instead, a fine one of Lord Chatham, by Benjamin West, was copied and sent to Virginia. Such were the early amenities of an age destined to develop acute and bloody differences. And, "under influences like these," says Dr. Daniel C. Gilman, "the young Monroe was trained in the love of civil liberty. ' : At any rate, it is clear that he breathed in American- ism with his first conscious breath. He sprang from stock that was native to American soil at least a hun- dred years before the War of the Revolution. What- ever was foreign in him had been bred out; he was truly a son of the western world, altogether rid of alien preconceptions, and quite ready to take on the plan- tation democracy of the seventeen-seventies and the new doctrines of his age. 18 THE LIFE OF JAMES MONROE The old Monroe house near Monroe's Creek no longer stands; luckily there is a good print of it. Unmarked even by a heap of chimney -bricks, its site is no great distance from Washington's birthplace, Wakefield, between Pope's Creek and Bridge's Creek, where, a hundred years ago, George Washington Parke Custis placed a slab of freestone, but where one now sees a plain shaft, encircled by a fence of iron pickets. So narrow is this part of the Northern Neck that, when one looks south, he at times may see the smoke of the Rappahannock river steamers; or, when he looks north, the smoke of the boats on the Potomac. Those on board the Potomac steamers, if bound upstream, might well be in Washington within a few hours. On the left they would pass the site of Richard Henry Lee's Chantilly, as well as Stratford, ancestral home of the Lee family. Nor could they do better, perhaps, than recall what Bishop Meade says of Richard Henry Lee who, with one incapacitated hand, wrapped in a black silk bandage, worked harder for America with the other hand than any of his contem- poraries : "Was there a man in the Union who did more in his own county and State and country, by action at home and correspondence abroad, to prepare the people of the United States for opposition to English usurpation, and the assertion of American indepen- dence? Was there a man in America who toiled and endured more than he, both in body and mind, in the American cause? Was there a man in the Legislature of Virginia, and in the Congress of the Union, who had the pen of a ready writer in his hand, and to which so many papers may be so justly ascribed, and by whom so much hard work in committee rooms was performed?" Similar thoughts occur, as one passes George Mason's Gunston Hall, farther upstream, and then again arise other like thoughts with a glow to them, and gratitude in them, as one recognizes glorified Mt. Vernon on the cliffs of the Fairfax shore. But, away down below, broad, indeed, is the Potomac and far off are the wooded hills — dim at times and misty, quite unreachable, even with a sailor's eye. THE LIFE OF JAMES MONROE 19 Spyglass or no, the old halls fail to come out of the distance; how could they, since some crumbled long ago, and others were burned, and still others were seized upon by the "hants," who liked to quit the old churchyards now and then for cannier quarters? Yet, if one but use those little reconstructing faculties with which the mind is blessed, he may readily replace the old seats and repeople the whole region. One might thus ride in the same coach with the writer of the "Journal of a Young Lady of Virginia in 1781," as she passed from seat to seat, visiting for a while at each — "Belleview," home of Thomas Ludwell Lee; "Selving- ton," home of Thomas Seldon; "Chatham," home of William Fitzhugh; and so on from house to house for many a mile. Thus in Bishop Payne's day might a wayfarer in Westmoreland, traveling on the ridge between the Potomac and the Rappahanock, have come upon the Parson's Road, leading from Pine Forest glebe to Round Hill Church. This kinsman of Dolly Payne Madison (also of William Payne, who felled General Washington with his fist, during a political dispute at Alexandria, receiving thereafter not a challenge but an apology) declares that the Parson's Road was one of the most pleasing he ever saw. "It led for several miles in a direction perfectly straight, under an avenue of beautiful oaks." It was cut through the forest for the Rev. Archibald Campbell — a character of particular concern to us because of the part he played in Monroe's development. How education was regarded in the Monroe family is shown by the fact that, about 1750, it brought over from Scotland, as a teacher, the Rev. William Douglas, a truly excellent man. It was he who taught Thomas Jefferson for four years. Good teachers were not easy to procure in Virginia in those days. George Wythe's own mother taught him Latin and Greek. Patrick Henry's family sent to Scotland and engaged Thomas Campbell, the poet, to come to Virginia, as tutor; but he was obliged to forego his voyage hither. Archibald 20 THE LIFE OF JAMES MONROE Campbell was his uncle. One of the most interesting Virginia schoolmasters of the period was Charles O'Niel, of Orange County. He taught at the Pine Stake, near Raccoon Ford. He played whist for silver, and "took his julep regularly." 1 His method of flogging bespoke the devicefulness of true genius. Let us who, in this humane age, are too soft to use the gad, remem- ber that Dominie O'Niel merely did as others were accustomed to do when he thrashed his unruly pupils. Mark Twain may be said to have died before his time if he left this world without hearing of O'Niel's ingenuity in the matter of enforcing discipline on Raccoon Creek. He used to mount a culprit "on the back of an athletic negro, who seems to have been kept for the purpose.' 1 Thereupon, the negro, who probably enjoyed the performance, quickly, dexterously and unyieldingly pinioned his rider, clamping him hand and foot; and thus held him while O'Niel laid on. A Westmoreland worthy, well known to the Monroes, was John Marshall's father, Colonel Thomas, "grand- son of Thomas Marshall, carpenter." So said Wilson Miles Cary, the genealogist. There was something of a Marshall-Monroe parallel in lineage. The Marshalls were Welsh. Thomas Marshall's wife was Mary Isham Keith, daughter of a Scotch clergyman, i>ut descended on the mother's side from the Turkey Island Randolphs. The Randolphs had seven seats on the James, Turkey Island being the original one. Both James Monroe and John Marshall, therefore, were of Scotch- Welsh blood, intermingled with seventeenth century Vir- ginian. Colonel Thomas, mathematician, astronomer, soldier, was also a surveyor under Washington, whose close comrade he was throughout life. He was two years older than Washington, and is said to have been his classmate in Westmoreland. "Washington's field- note^ at sixteen," says Justice James T. Mitchell, 2 1 Old Churches, Ministers and Families of Virginia, by Bishop Meade, 2 vols.; vol. II, p. 90. 2 Commemorative address by Mr. Justice James T. Mitchell, in Musical Fund Hall, Philadelphia, Pa., on John Marshall Day, February 4, 1901. THE LIFE OF JAMES MONROE 21 "show his precocity; and the youthful Washington was but primus inter pares with his associates." Colonel Thomas moved from "the Forest," "a few hundred acres of poor land in Westmoreland," to Germantown, now Midland, south of Manassas. There, "in a little log cabin," almost within spyglass sight of the dome of the Capitol at Washington, was born John Marshall, oldest of fifteen children, September 24, 1755, year of Braddock's defeat. James Bradley Thayer 1 says: "At Midland all they can show you now, relating to Marshall, is a small, rude heap of bricks and rubbish — what is left of the house where he was born." The Marshalls moved on west to a six-thousand acre tract in the mountain region of Fauquier. Their house there, Oak Hill, "an unpre- tending frame building," still stands. Chief Justice Marshall used to say: "My father was a far abler man than any of his sons. To him I owe the solid foun- dation of all my success in life. " John Marshall was in Westmoreland a great deal when a boy. At fourteen, he attended Archibald Campbell's school, where James Monroe, two and a half years younger, was a pupil; and they were together there for one year. Parson Campbell was a power in Washington parish, Westmoreland. His glebe was near Johnsville. He had two residences, one called Pomona, the other, Campbell- ton. He had been long in Virginia — since 1730; and his "scanty school" is said to have been the one attended by Washington and the elder Marshall. If so, it must have been a good school for mathematics, as well as for Latin. In any event, it is certain that Parson Campbell taught his own sons Archibald and Alexander, and at the same time prepared John Mar- shall and James Monroe for college. Madison also appears to have attended the school at Campbellton. There it was that both Marshall and Monroe were well- i John Marshall, by James B. Thayer; the Life of John Marshall, by Albert J. Beveridge, 4 vols.. Vol. I, p. 7. 22 THE LIFE OF JAMES MONROE grounded in Latin. To Marshall the frontier youth, the skill in philology thus acquired was of the greatest use when he became the first interpreter of the Constitution of the United States. As for Monroe, he not only acquired a sense of the root-meaning of words, but obtained something more than a smattering of a tongue he would need when he should go to live in France and Spain Thus, at sixteen, Monroe, tall and strong, left home for college. He now quit one neck of land for another — a very similar neck, this time between the York River, six miles to the north, and the James, or " Jeems," as every one called it, six miles to the south. Lie was at an exceedingly romantic and historically fruitful spot — the Powhatan-Pocahontas-John Smith country. Most likely the romance, the fascination of history, got into his blood; and along with it that Lafayette-like love of liberty which ever after characterized him. From the time (1683) Bruton church was built of brick "on the horse-path in Middle Plantations old-fields," and from the time (1693) the "free school and college" was put up near by, this spot on the high watershed of the York-James peninsula gave promise of becoming the most important place in Virginia. And it did so become ; for just after that, when the province-house at James- town was burned, Governor Francis Nicholson removed the capital to the Middle Plantations, where there were fewer mosquitoes and where the soil, the springs and the air were as kindly and wholesome as could be. Nicholson was an impulsive man, hot and peppery; and so much in love with Martha Burwell, daughter of Major Lewis Burwell, of King's Creek, that he swore nobody else should have her. If her father should let her marry, he would cut the throats of "the bridegroom, the minister who should perforin the ceremony, and the justice who should give the license." She did marry — Colonel Henry Armistead, being the happy man; but not until Nicholson, a good soul really, founder of King William School, now St. John's College, THE LIFE OF JAMES MONROE 23 Annapolis, had gone away, to be governor somewhere else. To the unsophisticated and impressionable Monroe, Williamsburg seemed to be a place of very great con- sequence. Josiah Quincy, fresh from Boston, New York and Philadelphia, had in mind larger capitals with which to compare the Virginia city when he visited it not long before Monroe entered college; but such young men as those from Campbellton school had no colonial criterion wherewith to gauge it. Quincy found excellent farms around it, and whole fields of peach trees in bloom. The soil was sandy; the streets were unpaved and dusty; and the houses were mostly wooden. It had two ports, each a mile away - - one to the south, Princess Anne's port on Archer Hope Creek, James River side; and Queen Mary's Port on Queen's Creek, York River side. Oddly enough, the road to this landing was sometimes called "Gallows Road," some- times "Lovers* Lane," as though the man who was to marry and the man who was to hang trod the same path. What is called the Old Capitol (built in 1751, burnt in 1832) was then new — a charming structure on colonial lines, of which Independence Hall in Phila- delphia is so familiar an example. It stood at the east end of Duke of Gloucester Street, which was seven- eighths of a mile long and ninety-nine feet wide; and the college stood at the west end. At the college, the street forked into encircling roads, and the grounds and group of buildings thus set off, with a statue of Nor- borne Berkeley, Lord Botetourt, in front, made an impressive and pleasing show. For, at the time of which we tell, the courtly and amiable Botetourt, who on state occasions rode from palace to capitol behind his six milk-white horses, was in his grave under the college chapel; and Dunmore, a coarser man, of the royal Stuart blood, was governor. Had not the free colonial idea already possessed them, Monroe, Marshall and other matriculates of the time might have regarded William and Mary as the gate- 24 THE LIFE OF JAMES MONROE way to some higher British institution. It was the custom of certain Virginia gentlemen to import blooded horses, such as Colonel John Baylor's celebrated "Fearnought," and send their sons to schools in England or Scotland. Col. John Baylor, Sr., was him- self a Cambridge University man. Ten Lees were educated in England — Arthur at Eton, Edinburgh, Lincoln's Inn and Middle Temple^ Of one hundred and seventeen Virginia boys sent abroad prior to 1800, nineteen were from Monroe's county of Westmoreland. 1 William and Mary was then the richest college in America, with an annual income of $20,000. It is a pi- quant, if minor, fact that a tax on peddlers who peddled in Virginia, went to the college. Again one is interested to note that from 1700 to 1776, through the donation of Robert Boyle, eight or ten Indians were annually maintained and educated at the college. George and Reuben Sampson were the Indians whom Monroe knew there in 1775. Monroe also probably knew the three Murray boys, sons of the Earl of Dunmore, who, with other young royalists were students in 1774. Porto Bello, Dunmore's hunting-lodge, was but six miles away, over by the York. Almost every distinguished Vir- ginian of the time made it a point to visit Williamsburg 2 ; and many of them belonged in the college circle. Wash- ington was appointed surveyor by William and Mary in 1749; Peyton Randolph, first president of the Con- tinental Congress, was an alumnus of forty years standing; George Wythe was schooled there in 1740; John Tyler, Sr., Governor of Virginia, in 1754; John Tyler, Jr., President of the United States, in, 1802-07; Edmund Randolph, in 1766; Judge Spencer Roane, in 1779, and General Winfield Scott in 1804. Of the 1 Virginia Historical Magazine, Vol. XXI, pp. 196,197. William G. Stanard investigated the subject. See also article by R. H. Greene, New England His- torical and Genealogical Register, Vol. XLI1, pp. 359-362. 2 Lewis Hallam, of the American Company of Comedians, had made the Williams- burg playhouse, back of the capitol, quite famous as the American home of Shakespearean plays. Sarah Hallam, a cousin of Lewis, lived afterwards for many years at Williamsburg. THE LIFE OF JAMES MONROE" 25 Committee of Thirty-One who framed the Virginia Declaration of Rights and the State Constitution, at least eleven, if not eighteen, were William and Mary men. So were four out of Virginia's seven Signers of the Declaration of Independence; and so were fifteen out of the thirty-three members of the Continental Congress. Three out of Virginia's seven Presidents of the United States — Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, William Henry Harrison, John Tyler, and Zachary Taylor — attended William and Mary. Jefferson, a freckled, red-haired William and Mary College youth, was fifteen years older than Monroe. He had come and gone before Monroe shied away from the gay Sukeys of the Apollo room, or the girls who came in coaches to Bruton church. From the day Patrick Henry's Stamp-Act oration stirred his soul till the day on which both he and John Adams died, July 4, 1826, fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson was consistently and per- sistently a liberty man against privilege and human exploitation. WTien he was in the Virginia Legislature, he tried to overturn slavery. Himself the eldest of eleven children, he did overturn primogeniture. What he did for democracy is best measured by the enmity he provoked among the multitudes who opposed him. Many of his contemporaries hated him with extreme bitterness. Writers of a certain school make it a point to minimize his merits and magnify his faults, which indeed were numerous and of a piece with the pro- nounced qualities of his ardent nature. 'Long Tom." people called him. "His shoulders were unusually square, his neck long and scrawny, the skin of his face adust, as if scorched, and of a brick-dust red, his hair foxy and bushy at the temples. Once seen, he never could be forgotten." As for his voice, it was "very peculiar, very pleasant, seldom raised to a loud tone and his words came 'trippingly off his tongue.' "For so gaunt a man his step was light.' 1 His carriage presented "the very curious and unusual contrast of a 26 THE LIFE OF JAMES MONROE rapid graceful movement, with a long, awkward, bony- frame. " x Jefferson's father, Colonel Peter, a regular Samson who could up-end two one thousand pound hogsheads of tobacco at once, frequented Raleigh Tavern, "the most famous hostlery in the colonies. ' : In fact there is a "curious deed on record in Goochland County of a sale of two hundred acres of land by William Ran- dolph of Tuckahoe to Peter Jefferson for Henry Wetherburn's biggest bowl of arrack punch." Henry Wetherburn kept the Raleigh, in a portico over the door of which was a leaden bust of the Elizabethan hero in whose honor the tavern was named. It was an old frame building with entrances on both fronts. An owner of the Raleigh who comes, with fitness, into these pages was Anthony Hay (died, 1772), father of George Hay, who married Eliza, daughter of James Monroe. It was George Hay who prosecuted Aaron Burr in the great treason trial at Richmond. The Apollo was the main, or banqueting, room of the Raleigh. Here Jefferson, who called Williamsburg " Devilsburg, " danced with his Belinda. Monroe's accounts are still to be seen in the bursar's books. A recorded incident shows his immaturity. With other students he signed a petition to the presi- dent and masters against the extravagance, partiality and unwarrantable insolence of the Mistress of the college, Miss Maria Digges; but when up before the Board he admitted that he had never read what he signed. In Monroe's time there were about sixty students at the college. In his own class was another Westmoreland 1 Tactful, slow to anger, lie nevertheless upon occasion went headlong into things untried and untested. John Randolph told A. J. Stansbury how Jefferson had urged upon his planter friends a plough with a new mould-board — "the mould-board of least resistance." When the ploughs were cast, the teams could not draw them through the soil. Again, he was carried away with a plan of his own to establish a saw-mill on a wind-swept hilltop near Monticello. The power was to be obtained out of the air by means of vertical sails. Not until the mill was almost built did his engineer say: "I have been wondering in my own mind how you are to get up your sawlogs?" Jefferson was aghast. "I never thought of that!" said he. 8 n o3 CO ■■^Cfl t- ** 00 s» o r-l OS CO 1-1 CO . CO CD a 9 1-3 O CM a o H «w H cS O g-M d o O «H cs t> cs CM