Charles Wetzel - James Monroe

On December 25, 1776, General George Washington led a suprise attack at Trenton, New Jersey. Washington and his troops crossed the Delaware River during the night and attacked at dawn. The American army defeated the British forces while suffering few losses.

Source: National Archives and Records Administration. Special Media Archives Services Division.

Without immediate attention, Monroe would have bled to death on the spot, but a surgeon who, providentially, had voluntarily attached himself to Captain Washington's outfit before the battle hastened to stem the flow of blood. The doctors aiding the American army that day could not know that they served the future first president of the United States and key members of his administration. As for the young Virginia lieutenant whose life was saved, they had no reason to imagine that after serving the fledgling republic in many important positions, he would become the fifth president of the United States and promulgate one of the most famous foreign policy declarations in American historythe Monroe Doctrine.

James Monroe was born on April 28, 1758, in Westmoreland County, Virginia, the county that had been birthplace to two men who would precede him as president, George Washington and James Madison. The largest and oldest of the colonies that would form the original United States, Virginia held great prominence, dictated by its size and history and by the political and intellectual brilliance of many of its foremost citizens. Like leaders in other parts of America, distinguished Virginians turned to men of their own class when they thought in terms of friendships and political offices. Fortunately for James Monroe's future, his father, Spence Monroe, though not one of the Old Dominion's wealthiest citizens, had property sufficient to qualify him as a respectable landed gentleman. Monroe's mother, Elizabeth Jones, the daughter of a Welsh immigrant, inherited additional property in King George County, which helped increase the Monroe family's standing.

The Monroe lineage was a worthy one by Virginia standards. According to family legend, Andrew Monroe, a Scottish highlander, had been an officer in King Charles I's army in 1648, when it fought Oliver Cromwell's Puritan forces in the Battle of Preston. With Charles's subsequent defeat and execution, Andrew Monroe had emigrated to the Chesapeake Bay region and settled in Virginia. As descendants of this founder of one of the "Cavalier" familiesthe distinguished royalist refugees from Charles I's servicethe Monroes enjoyed a special status in Virginia society.

James Monroe's credentials further improved because his wealthy uncle on his mother's side, Judge Joseph Jones, sat firmly with the colony's ruling elite. Trained in the law in England, a noted member of the Virginia House of Burgesses (the colony's legislative assembly), a man who would distinguish himself in the revolutionary cause, represent Virginia in the Continental Congress, and end his life as a state supreme court justice, Jones would earn much more space in the autobiography James Monroe wrote late in life than would James's own father. When Spence Monroe died in 1774, Judge Jones arranged for James to be enrolled at William and Mary College, the first of the Monroes to be afforded that opportunity. James, who had begun his formal education at age 11 at the best local school available to him, entered the college with such a mastery of Latin and mathematics that he was placed in the upper division.

Having grown up in the rural tidewater with a love for the land, for farming, and for such country pleasures as riding and hunting (which remained with him throughout his life), James Monroe found Williamsburg, Virginia's capital and site of the college, delightful and stimulating. In the summer of 1774, however, the political atmosphere was perhaps a bit too stimulating for Monroe to concentrate on his studies.

The House of Burgesses had its activities suspended by Virginia's royal governor, Lord Dunmore, because of its radical sympathies with rebellious colonists. So, it met illegally in the Raleigh Tavern to continue "governing." When Dunmore impounded the town's gunpowder to deprive the radicals of potential arms, his act incited Patrick Henry, a rebel whose oratory would fire the country, to march on Williamsburg with a following of irate colonists to persuade Dunmore to change his mind.