America at 250 Series
James Monroe was born in 1758 in tidewater Virginia, the son of a modest planter. He left college at eighteen to join the Continental Army, and at Trenton he took a musket ball through the shoulder that nearly killed him. The scar stayed with him for life.
He studied law under Jefferson, served in the Senate, and crossed the Atlantic as a diplomat — where, almost by accident, he helped negotiate the Louisiana Purchase, doubling the country in a single bargain.
He was the fifth president, and the last of the Revolutionary generation to hold the office. His years were called the Era of Good Feelings, though the feelings were not always good. In 1823, he warned the empires of Europe to stay out of the Americas — a sentence that would echo for two centuries as the Monroe Doctrine.
He died on July 4, 1831. The third president to go on that day.
