James Monroe(1758–1831)

James Monroe was born in Westmoreland County, Virginia, on 28 April 1758, descended in the male line from the Scottish Munros, his forebear having emigrated from Scotland to Virginia in the seventeenth century. He left the College of William and Mary to fight in the Revolutionary War, served with distinction and was wounded at the Battle of Trenton, and then trained in law under Thomas Jefferson.

He served the young republic as senator, as Governor of Virginia, and as a diplomat. As envoy to France in 1803 he helped negotiate the Louisiana Purchase, which doubled the territory of the United States, and he later served as Secretary of State and Secretary of War before being elected President in 1816.

His two terms, from 1817 to 1825, were known as the Era of Good Feelings, a period of national confidence and the easing of party division. His administration secured Florida through the Adams-Onis Treaty of 1819 and steered the Missouri settlement that held the federal union together for a further generation.

In 1823 he set out the principle that has carried his name ever since: that the Americas were no longer open to European colonisation. The Monroe Doctrine became one of the longest-standing foundations of United States foreign policy. He died on 4 July 1831, the third president to die on Independence Day.

The Munro name comes from the Gaelic Mac an Rothaich and the clan seat at Foulis on the Cromarty Firth in Easter Ross. In its American spelling, Monroe, the family carried it to the presidency of the United States and into the name of a doctrine known across the world.