James Monroe: Trenton Wound, Louisiana Purchase and the Monroe Doctrine

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James Monroe enrolled at the College of William and Mary at 16, then left and joined classmates in raiding the royal governor's palace in Williamsburg for muskets and swords for the Virginia militia. At 18, as a Continental Army lieutenant at the Battle of Trenton on December 26, 1776, he took a musket ball that severed an artery and survived. He wintered at Valley Forge sharing a hut with John Marshall, befriended the Marquis de Lafayette, and became the last president to have fought in the Revolution. Mentored by Thomas Jefferson, he opposed ratifying the Constitution in Virginia, objecting to the missing Bill of Rights and to the Electoral College.

As minister to France from 1794 he secured the release of Lafayette's wife and Thomas Paine from prison, but his pro-French stance led George Washington to recall him, and he answered with a book attacking the administration. In 1803 he and Robert Livingston, sent to spend up to $9 million on New Orleans, bought all of Louisiana for $15 million. After Jefferson and Madison shelved his British treaty, he ran against Madison in 1808, then served as his Secretary of State and, after Washington burned in 1814, also as Secretary of War. Elected president in 1816, he signed the Missouri Compromise, gained Florida in the Adams-Onís Treaty of 1819 and issued the Monroe Doctrine in 1823.

• In 1814 he rode out with a small cavalry troop to scout the British advance and warned Madison in time to evacuate the White House.
• He defended Andrew Jackson's invasion of Spanish Florida and used it to push Spain into selling.
• He issued the 1823 warning unilaterally after John Quincy Adams advised against a joint declaration with Britain.
• He called slavery a blight while owning and selling enslaved people, and backed the American Colonization Society, whose Liberian capital Monrovia bears his name.
• Deep in debt, he sold his Highland estate and died in New York City on July 4, 1831.