James Monroe was the last founder to serve as president of the United States.  He fought in the Continental Army against Britain, was at Valley Forge and appears in Emanuel Leutze’s painting of Washington Crossing the Delaware bearing the Union flag behind the General.

He practiced law in Fredericksburg, Virginia, became a U.S. Senator, was American Minister to France and helped the Jefferson administration negotiate the Louisiana Purchase with Napoleon.  He later served as Minister to Great Britain and as Secretary of War during the War of 1812.

During Monroe’s tenure as president concern increased over colonization by European powers. The Monroe Doctrine (which was in fact written by John Quincy Adams) opposed Spain’s efforts to regain her Latin American colonies.   Florida, under Spain’s control, was a nest of pirates and Seminole tribesmen who were raiding white settlements in Georgia. Monroe sent Andrew Jackson to invade the territory and Spain ceded it to the United States in 1821 without a fight. The Doctrine also demanded that Russia not encroach southward from Alaska and warned that the western hemisphere should not be considered subject to future colonization by any European power.

Monroe called for the end of slavery, which he described in an 1829 letter as “one of the evils still remaining, incident to our colonial system.”  His opinion, however, was that abolition should be gradual to avoid the disruption of the social order and the economy.  Monroe believed freed blacks would “become a publick burden, if considered and treated a portion of the community.”  He advocated for the resettlement of newly freed blacks in Africa (In 1821 Liberia, a country in West Africa, was chosen as a destination for an American effort to “repatriate” newly freed slaves and freeborn black people to Africa. This resettlement named its capital Monrovia, after the president).

Nevertheless, there were 53 enslaved people on Monroe’s Virginia plantation, known at various times as Ashland or Highland, and historical records show that 178 individuals were enslaved by Monroe during his adulthood.  In 1819 Missouri’s application for admission to the Union as a slave state failed and the struggle was resolved two years later when Monroe signed what became known as the Missouri Compromise; Missouri was admitted as a slave state, Maine as a free state, and slavery was barred north and west of Missouri forever.  The Compromise was repealed in 1820 by the Dred Scott decision, in which the Supreme Court ruled that enslaved people were not citizens, were not entitled to government protection and, therefore, that Congress had no authority to ban slavery from a Federal territory.  As America expanded, the debate about extending slavery into new territories became increasingly strident.

The South’s economy shifted to cotton by the 1820s, and Ashland/Highland’s profitability, which came largely from growing grain, plummeted.  Cotton wouldn’t grow in the Virginia Piedmont, so Monroe was forced to sell the property in 1826 to pay his debts.