[On December 4th,
2016, James Monroe was elected the
fifth president of the United States. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy five
histories and contexts linked to Monroe’s life and presidency.]
On two ways
Monroe’s story expands and amplifies an originating American truth.
I’ve written a
good deal about the complex interconnections between slavery
and the Revolutionary era and its
framing documents, including in my second-most-viewed
piece on Talking Points Memo. As I’ve tried to argue throughout those
posts, and would reiterate at the start of this one, the point and goal of such
analyses aren’t simply or centrally to highlight hypocrisy, nor to critique or tear
down iconic images of the Founding Fathers. Instead, such revisionist (in
the best sense) historical efforts are meant to help us better understand
the kinds of complex, dark, and inescapable histories out of which the United
States was born, and which have continued to influence and shape our identity
for the subsequent 240 years. Slavery wasn’t the only historical reality of the
founding era, of course; but besides its own multifaceted and nation-wide
presence, it was also inextricably bound to many of the period’s other
histories and stories, including the lives and identities of a great many of
the Founding Fathers and four of the first five presidents.
James Monroe was
one of those presidents, a slaveowner throughout his adult life who owned multiple Virginia
plantations at the height of his success. (He did also advocate late in
life for the
resettlement of freed slaves in Africa, a complex history about which I’ll
write more in tomorrow’s post.) Monroe’s biography also helps us engage with
two other histories to which slavery and the Revolution must be connected. For
one thing, Monroe inherited his first plantation at the age of 16 in 1774, when
his father (Virginia planter Spence Monroe) passed away. That’s how many
slavers and plantation owners—and, even more overtly and tragically, slaves—became
part of the system, of course: by being born into it. Indeed, while there were
moral and philosophical considerations as well, the Framers could write an ambiguous legal
end to the slave trade into the Constitution precisely because reproduction
had become a sufficient method through which to ensure the continuation of
slavery. But Monroe’s story also reminds us that, while the Revolution
certainly changed a good deal in America, in many ways the society and
structures that were in place by the 1770s remained in place after the war. The
landed, slaveowning Virginia community that helped usher in the Revolution,
drafted its most famous documents, and produced 80% of our first presidents
represent one particularly clear continuity between 18th and 19th
century America.
Monroe sold that
small family plantation when he entered Congress in 1783, but over the course
of his life would own a number of other, larger plantations around the state. Yet
because he spent most of that subsequent life living elsewhere—as a Congressman
in the 1780s, as the Minister to France in the 1790s, as Governor of Virginia
in the first decade of the 1800s, and then in James Madison’s administration
before his own two-term presidency—Monroe delegated the running of those plantations
to a group of overseers. The website for Monroe’s home
Highland works to highlight the ways in which Monroe and his family would
have been personally connected to at least some of the plantation’s slaves, but
the straightforward reality is that for most of his life, Monroe was a public
servant, and his slaves, like his plantations, existed as business ventures,
not homes or personal communities. The same was true, of course, for all of the
slaveowning founders and presidents; our collective memories tend (for
understandable if frustrating reasons) to focus on more humanizing moments such
as Washington’s
complex final freeing of at least some of his slaves, but in most ways these
men were related to their plantations much like the CEO of Nike is to the company’s
sweatshops around the world. That’s not an analogy that quite comports with
many of our narratives of the founders, but it’s one we need to grapple with,
and James Monroe offers a place to start.
Next
MonroeStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Monroe histories or contexts you’d highlight?
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