Monroe, JAMES, fifth president of the United States, was born in Westmoreland county, Virginia, April 28, 1758, the descendant of a family of Scottish extraction which had emigrated to Virginia a century before. He entered William and Mary College at the age of eighteen, but soon threw aside his books, with a number of his fellow-students, to join the army under Washington. He was present at several battles, and was wounded at Trenton; he afterwards attained the rank of lieutenant-colonel as an aide-de-camp and military commissioner, but was disappointed in his efforts to obtain a commission in a Virginia regiment, and attached himself to Jefferson, with whom he studied law. In 1782 he was elected to the assembly of Virginia and appointed one of the executive council. Next year he was returned to congress, where he sat for three years, and in 1785 was chairman of a committee whose report ultimately led to the conventions at Annapolis and Philadelphia in 1786 and 1787, at which the constitution of the United States was framed. Monroe himself was a member of the Virginia convention held to consider the ratification of the proposed constitution, which, along with Patrick Henry and other States' Rights men, he opposed, fearing the power and encroachment of the Federal government. He was a member of the United States senate from 1790 to 1794, and offered a determined opposition to Washington and the Federalists; yet the government appointed him to succeed Gouverneur Morris as minister to France, where he made himself very popular with the revolutionary government, until he was recalled in 1796 for displaying too decided French sympathies. On his return he published (1797) an attack on the executive for their treatment of him, and, although Washington himself, who had then retired, took no notice of it, the book brought on a bitter controversy and made Monroe the darling of the Democrats. He was governor of Virginia from 1799 to 1802, and then Jefferson sent him as an extra plenipotentiary to France, where in 1803 he and Robert R. Livingston effected the purchase of Louisiana (q.v.). The next four years were spent in less successful diplomacy at London and Madrid; he failed in his negotiations with Spain for the cession of Florida, whilst a treaty which he finally concluded with Great Britain provided neither against the impressment of American seamen nor for an indemnity for American losses by seizures at sea, and Jefferson refused to refer it to the senate. Monroe promptly returned home and drew up another defence, and the Virginians endorsed his conduct and policy by a third time electing him to the assembly. In 1811 he was again chosen governor of Virginia. In the same year Madison made him secretary of state; this post he retained till 1817, and during 1814-15 he acted also as secretary of war.
In 1816 Monroe was elected president of the United States, and four years later he was re-elected almost unanimously; the acquisition of Florida from Spain (1819), and the settlement of the vexed question respecting the extension of slavery by the Missouri Compromise, by which, after the reception of Missouri as a slave-state, the institution was prohibited above the line of latitude 36° 30', helped to secure this result. His most popular acts, perhaps, were the recognition of the independence of the Spanish American republics, and the promulgation in a message to congress (1823) of what has since been called the 'Monroe Doctrine.' This utterance embodied the principle, 'in which the rights and interests of the United States are involved, that the American continents . . . are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonisation by any European power. . . . With the existing colonies or dependencies of any European power we have not interfered, and shall not interfere. But with the governments who have declared their independence and maintained it, and whose independence we have . . . acknowledged, we could not view any interposition for the purpose of oppressing them, or controlling in any other manner their destiny, by any European power, in any other light than as the manifestation of an unfriendly disposition towards the United States.' In 1825 Monroe retired to his seat at Oak Hill, Loudon county, Virginia, where he acted as justice of the peace, a regent of the university of Virginia, and member of the state convention; but a profuse generosity and hospitality caused him to be overwhelmed with debt, and he found refuge with his relations in New York, where he died in 1831—like his predecessors, Adams and Jefferson, on the 4th of July. In 1858 his remains were removed to Richmond. Monroe was an upright and consistent statesman, and a faithful servant of his country, though he had not the brilliant talents of some of his great contemporaries.
See the Lives by J. Q. Adams (1850) and D. C. Gilman (1883); G. F. Tucker, History of the Monroe Doctrine (1885)—really formulated by J. Q. Adams (q.v.); W. F. Reddaway, The Monroe Doctrine (1898).