The life of James Monroe

Preface

Readers will discern that there is an attempt here to re-create Monroe the Man, and so place him that he will stand out against the background of his own times. There are enough books about General Washington to fill an ample alcove in any library; there is an Adams literature; and there is a Jefferson literature of considerable proportions; but neither Madison nor Monroe has fared so well. Madison wrote to Lyman C. Draper that a life like his, which had been so much a public life, "must, of course, be traced in the public transactions in which it was involved." This is just as true of Monroe's life; and it explains why we have endeavored to follow the flow of coincident events — to make the text full, accurate and consecutive, covering the personal and social as well as political experiences of its subject.

Luckily for iladison, his first biographer was intimately acquainted with him, but Monroe was unfortunate in that no one who lived in, or near to, his own epoch wrote an adequate account of his career. When a man serves his country as long and as well as Monroe did, his whole story ought to be told, not only for the satisfaction of a certain inborn intellectual curiosity — but because of the example conveyed in it for succeeding generations. Especially is this true of one who, like Monroe, had the great good fortune to serve his fellows throughout the foundation period when principles were established, freedom achieved, the Constitutional cornerstone laid and the work of nationbuilding assured beyond peradventure. Monroe bore a part in so many undertakings during his fifty years of public life, his activities were so varied, his correspondence was so wide that he cannot but be classed as a chief participant in the vital beginnings — those blessed beginnings — of the great republic.

vii viii PREFACE

Nevertheless one finds few books about him. Historians and biographers, pursuing elusive truth along Hues of their particular activities, are apt to realize when a thing is amiss; and we have their word for it that existing lives of Monroe, however useful, lack reach and comprehensiveness. Dr. Daniel C. Gilman's life (1883), dealing with the half -century between 1776 and 1826, is the best — a well-considered, brief, biography; but it is essentially an outline; and it is lacking alike in fullness of fact and in those Boswellian details that help to put back the breath of reality into a character of the past. While accurate and readable, it is altogether too thin a book, being amplified scarcely beyond the bounds of an article in an encyclopedia. What is there, between its covers, is good; what is not there is much missed by the student. No reflection is meant upon it, supplemented as it is by Prof. J. F. Jameson's scholarly bibliography of Monroe and the Monroe Doctrine, nor upon other careful sketches, such as Schouler's. What we would like to make clear is that in the course of a century much illuminating Monroe matter has appeared in some hundreds of letters, memoirs, journals, narratives and local histories and that here, for the first time, these unfamiliar details have been assembled in an annotative way and drawn upon to enliven, strengthen and complete the story of Monroe's career.

We have, of course, relied largely upon the documents in the possession of the United States Government, the various historical societies and the private collections mentioned in the footnotes accompanying the text. Under act of March 3, 1849, Congress bought the Monroe papers; and an alphabetically arranged Calendar of them was issued by the Bureau of Rolls, Department of State, 1893. Based upon the letters and documents thus listed are the seven volumes of the Writings of Monroe, edited by Stanislaus Murray Hamilton and issued by Putnam in a limited edition in 1898-1902. On March 9, 1903, President Roosevelt

PREFACE ix

transferred the Monroe papers from the Department of State to the Library of Congress and on June 27, 1904, Worthington C. Ford, then chief of the Division of Manuscripts, and Herbert Putnam, Librarian, gave out a compilation of the papers arranged chronologically by Wilmer Ross Leech, of the Division of Manuscripts. From English, French and Spanish sources, also, thanks to Henry Adams, have come numerous supplementary or confirmatory details bearing upon Monroe's diplomatic experiences.

These, then, are a few of the many reasons for this volume; but there is a special reason, and this special reason we shall at once underscore.

It has now been close upon one hundred years since the United States promulgated the Monroe Doctrine. Actually, as well as historically, this Doctrine is a part of the nation's creed. Its own centenary will be likely to find it much more in the public mind than heretofore. People wish to define it — to study it ab ovo — they wish to know the circumstances under which it was adopted, and wish to stand for a moment in the shoes of the man who promulgated it — the fifth President, the last of the Revolutionary Executives, James Monroe, a patriot soldier in his youth, a diplomat who underwent bitter experiences, a statesman in the formative period of the Union and the intimate associate of its founders. Where was he bred.? Where schooled? What did he do to help win the first and second wars of independence.^ Why was he twice chosen President and why, especially, did he enunciate the rule, applicable to the whole western hemisphere, associated with his name.^ This study of James Monroe and his times will help, we hope, to commemorate the centenary of his presidency and the centenary of the Monroe Doctrine.

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Contents

CHA.PTEB PAOB

I. The Monroes and Their Neighbors .... 1

II. Boyhood, College Life and Early Campaigning 15

CHAPTER I The Monroes and Their Neighbors in the Northern Neck

Son of Spence Monroe and Elizabeth his wife, who were of the plain people, unrelated to the aristocratic Tuckahoes, James Monroe was born near the head of Monroe's Creek, in Westmoreland County, Northern Neck of Virginia, on the twenty-eighth of April, 1758. Young George Washington, who had long since buried Braddock at the foot of Laurel Mountain, was now writing an order for his wedding clothes to his own agent in London; Dinwiddie, Governor of Virginia, had gone back to that same London; and from it would soon come his gay and gambling successor, Francis Fauquier, who would give his name to one of the newer counties of the Northern Neck.

As Accomac by the ocean is the lowermost, so this celebrated Northern Neck is the uppermost of the nine peninsulas of the Old Dominion. On one side, the Northern Neck follows the flow of the Potomac, border to border with Maryland, all the way to the mountains; on the other side, it follows the flow of the Rapidan from its springheads in the Blue Ridge all the way to the spot where the wide-mouthed Rappahannock enters the Chesapeake Bay. Most readers will readily and fondly recall the romantic story of young Washington, the Fairfaxes and the Northern Neck. One remembers, off hand, how the many millions of acres contained in this territory were granted by the British Crown to

Ralph Lord Hop ton and others, sold by them to John Lord Culpeper and passed on to Lord Fairfax.^ Nowadays there are more than twenty counties in this vast region, but in Spence Monroe's time (aside from a few, such as Culpeper, newly erected) there existed only the ancient lower, mother counties — Lancaster, Northumberland, Westmoreland, Richmond, King George, Prince William and Stafford, some of which will soon celebrate their tercentennial anniversaries.

^lany of the plantations were penetrated by saltwater creeks and coves, rich in foodfish and in those gustatory delicacies and delights dear to the palates of the proprietors. Choice estates fronted on the Potomac; others, just as advantageously placed, looked out upon the Rappahannock. By the latter, dwelt "King" Carter of Corotoman — Robert Carter, agent of the Fairfaxes — who, in the time of Spence Monroe's father, Andrew, "ruled the Northern Neck," though he probably did not quite succeed in ruling his family of fifteen children. It was he who was so important a person that the congregation of Old Christ Church, Lancaster, always waited outside until he had preceded them within.

To some of the Tuckahoe people, Virginia was an outlying part of England. "The Virginia planter," says Robert A. Brock,^ than whom there is no better authority, "was essentially a transplanted Englishman in tastes and convictions and emulated the social amenities and culture of the mother country." The tidewater gentry regarded themselves as adventurers

1 "The Northern Neck was granted at different times by King Charles I and II to Lord Hopton, the Earl of St. Albans and others, and subsequently by King James II to Lord Culpeper, who purchased the rights of other parties. Lord Fairfax, who married the daughter of Lord Culpeper, became the proprietor of this princely domain known as the Northern Neck." — Philip Slaughter, History of St. Mark's Parish. See also Jefferson's Notes on Virginia, where the various grants are listed. The last Fairfax grant was made in 1780. On November 15, 1786, Gov. Patrick Henry, by a grant recorded in the same book, assumed for the State the eminent domain of the Northern Neck. — William and Mary College Quarterly, Vol. VI, pp. 222-226.

2 Narrative and Critical History of America. Edited by Justin Winsor, Vol. HI, p. 153.

THE LIFE OF JAIMES MONROE 3

in a region unhappily far removed from the motherland, yet blessed with black men to do the necessary work. They did not bethink them of the days on ahead when they would have deadly trouble with the British and still deadlier trouble with the blacks. Their peril, as it seemed to them, was the red peril that lurked in the wilderness; and the thought of it hardened some of them, especially those on the border. Down by the little havens, the oyster creeks, the rich bottoms that had once belonged to the Indians, they were so secure from massacre as to distress themselves less about the dispossessed redmen than about possible pirates, such as the well-remembered Blackbeard. Indeed, high living, with its pleasures and trains of evil, was the worst enemy of both gentry and clergy. "The common Planters leading easy Lives," wrote Hugh Jones, in "The State of Virginia," "don't much admire Labour, or any manly Exercise, except Horse-Racing, nor Diversion except Cock-Fighting in which some greatly delight. This easy way of Living, and the Heat of Summer, makes some very lazy, who are then said to be Climate-Struck!" Climate-struck, no doubt, was the Accomac man, neighbor of Colonel John Custis of epitaph fame, who when rebuked for his unending othim cum dignitate, replied: "What's the use to worry, when all you have to do is to fall overboard to find your dinner.^" But, though lassitude might creep over one in summer, as the bay breezes blew softly in, it was different when frost came; then a fierce desire to hunt the fox, the coon, the 'possum might seize a man and carry him far afield. It was in reality a lively age — an outdoor age, a hard riding age, an age of adventure, of thumb-biting, of duelling, much richer in activities than the student is apt to credit it with. It was also a ripe age in the sense that the peculiar Virginia civilization of which we have hinted had been developing for something like a century and a half.

Master Fithian, a Princeton divinity student, who, as tutor, lived for a year at Nomini Hall, seat of another

Carter, known as Councillor Carter, left a diary full of illuminating pen-pictures descriptive of an aristocratic Virginia home quite as English as any to be found in cavalier England. Religion and the lack of it were equally to be noted at Nomini Hall. A dabster in theology, Councillor Carter swung first to one sect and then to another; a born musician, "his house resounded with the tinkling guitar, the silvery harmonicum (just invented by the all accomplished Benjamin Franklin), the violin, the flute, harpsichord, and organ. "^ Fithian, adds Professor Harrison, went down to Virginia a "blue" Presbyterian, "but after a year's residence at 'Nomini Hall' became almost a 'perverted' Episcopalian in point of reverence for dancing,|horse-racing, cock-fighting, stepping the minuet, toasting the ladies, and other genial amusements then prevalent in the Northern Neck." There were six hundred negroes on the sixty thousand acre place; and some of them expected to be remembered with "bits" and "half -bits," rum-and-water and "pisimmon" beer. The gentry rode from plantation to plantation forming house-parties, or giving balls, ladies in gorgeous quilted skirts, bodices and brocades of the period, with creped hair, fantastically wreathed with artificial flowers and strings of pearls, "danced until dawn glistened over the rosy Potomac. "^ Professor Harrison adds that "the old baronial style of living was in this decade in its full glory; the Byrds of Westover, the Harrisons and Carters of Brandon and Shirley, the Lewises of Kenmore, the Fairfaxes of Greenway Court and Belvoir, the Masons of Gunston Hall, the Calverts over the Potomac, as it swept grandly from its cataract to the Chesapeake, the Pages and Nelsons of Rose well, the Lees of Stratford and Chantilly — all kept up an easy-going, semi-feudal state, into which the Washingtons as easily feU by right of

1 George Washington: Patriot, Soldier, Statesman, by James A. Harrison, 1906. ^ Master Fithian, a gallant soldier, died of camp fever at Fort Washington, 1776.

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lineage, as well as of wealth, and influential position in colonial circles. " ^

On the Rappahannock side, the year James Monroe was born, Colonel John Tayloe built Mt. Airy manorhouse, still standing, "considered by many the handsomest in Virginia. " Not far away is the equally noted "Sabine Hall."

If in Monroe's boyhood days, the Northern Neck was still the country of the Fairfaxes, it was also that of the Balls, Beales, Brents, Brockenbroughs, Brookes, Bushrods, Conways, Corbins, Fauntleroys, Graysons, Grymes, Lees, Marshalls, Masons, Masseys, Mercers, Mountjoys, Newtons, Peacheys, Pressleys, Seldens, Steptoes, Stiths, Taliaferros, Turbervilles, Traverses and Turners of " Smith's Mount. "

The old vestry-books contain these locally notable names and many besides. Some of Monroe's contemporaries figure in the county chronicles and in traditions and anecdotes well remembered between the Potomac and Rappahannock rivers. One recalls "Jemmy" Steptoe. He was born at Hominy Hall, Westmoreland, studied at William and Mary College; migrated to Bedford, where "as a slip of gentility homesick in the wilderness," he sighed for a companion; married a daughter of Colonel James Callaway, she being one of twenty-two children; and served fifty-four years as County Clerk. Such was the significant record of one of Monroe's boyhood neighbors, whose Aunt Ann married a brother of Washington, and whose Aunt Elizabeth married Philip Ludwell Lee, becoming the mother of an illustrious line of Lees.

In the days of Monroe's early manhood, the Northern Neck was less and less a Fairfax land and more and more the historic home-country of Washington, Jefferson, Madison and Marshall.

1 Of Mary (Ball) Washington, at sixteen, a Williamsburg letter, October 7, 1722, addressed to "Dear Sukey," says: "Madam Ball of Lancaster and her sweet Molly have gone Horn. Mamma thinks Molly the Comliest Maiden she knows. Her hair is like unto Flax, Her eyes the color of yours and here Chekes are like May blossoms."

6 THE LIFE OP JAMES MONROE

In Civil War times, the counties of Stafford, Prince William, Fairfax, Loudon, Fauquier, Culpeper and Orange were the scenes of constant manoeuvres, countless skirmishes and those great battles between brother and brother so fascinatingly depicted on our historic scroll.

But Westmoreland was the most celebrated of the colonial counties. So noteworthy was the culture of that south shore of the Potomac, and so numerous were the celebrities who lived in Westmoreland itself, that it was designated, in the classical hyperbole to which our grandfathers were prone, "The Athens of America." ^ Athens or no Athens, it is, indeed, a most noteworthy matter that Westmoreland should have given us so great a number of public characters — the Lee brothers of the Revolutionary period and the equally able Lees of more recent celebrity. "Within an hour's ride" are the birthplaces of three presidents of the United States. The man who proposed the Declaration of Independence was born here; and the man who wrote it, another president, lived only a little way to the northwest in the upper part of the Northern Neck. Madison^ too, was born in the Northern Neck — "at the house of his maternal grandmother, Mrs. Eleanor Conway, on the north bank of the Rappahannock, in the County of King George."

Lightfoots, Ludwells and Fitzhughs lived their lives in these and other parts, intermarrying with the Lees and producing in each generation, men and women of uncommon spirit. For one example, we have, in the Revolutionary period, "Light Horse Harry," or

1 This is a favorite phrase. Writers on the Lees dwell upon the fine life at the Potomac and Rappahannock seats. Among R. E. Lee's biographers, John Esten Cooke tells especially of Stratford house; Philip Alexander Bruce of Westmoreland's great men; and Dr. J. William Jones of Lee's forebears in Westmoreland. A notable book is "Westmoreland County, Virginia, 1653-1912," compiled by Judge T. R. B. Wright, of Montross. "Manors of Virginia in Colonial Times," by Edith Tunis Sale, dwells upon Westmoreland and its notabilities.

2 Son of James, son of Ambrose, son of John, son of John, first of the name in Virginia, James Madison, Jr., President, "was born at Port Conway at twelve o'clock (midnight) sLxth of March, 1751."

"Legion Harry," or "Dragoon Harry," with whose mother, in her maidenhood, young Washington was in love, and, for another example, General R. E. Lee of the Civil War period, who, named after his uncles, Robert and Edward Carter, was related not only to the colonial celebrity, Governor Alexander Spotswood, chief of the Knights of the Golden Horseshoe, but to the world-famous Robert Bruce.

We have here noted these ancestral connections with the purpose of indicating the character and quality of the neighborhood where Monroe was brought up, and not with any purpose of stressing his own gentility. Rather do we seek to suggest a contrast. He was not an armiger. Though, like Washington, who was "bred a man of honor in the free school of Virginian society "^ it should be kept in mind that Monroe was less blue in his blood and grew to be a much plainer, a much more democratic man, than many of his contemporaries. Moreover, "it should be remembered," declares John T. Morse, Jr., "that, by good rights, neither Washington, Jefferson, nor even Madison, before they became distinguished, would have been entitled to take rank in the exclusive coterie of the very best Virginia families. "^ When Washington applied to the aristocratic Colonel Wilson Cary for the hand of one of his daughters — though not Mary Cary, it seems — ^ he was informed, with some loftiness, that the lady sought was accustomed to ride in her coach."*

1 George Washington, by Woodrow Wilson, 1897.

^ Life of Thomas Jefferson, by John T. Morse, Jr.

' Moncure D. Conway says that the "Lowland Beauty" was Betsy Fauntleroy, afterwards the wife of the Hon. Thomas Adams. Mary Cary married Edward Ambler. Washington had at least two love affairs before he married Mrs. Martha Custis. See chapter V, infra.

* In his address at Richmond, Va.,. October 13, 1891, on "The Colonial Virginian," R. A. Brock said: "It is conclusively demonstrated in preserved record, printed and manuscript, the latter embracing the registry of land patents from 1G20 and the records of several county courts, that the settlers were preponderantly English. There was a considerable number of Welsh and a sprinkling of French, Italians, Irish and Dutch. . . . Welsh blood has been among the motive powers of many eminent sons of Virginia, and of their descendants in the South. . . . There were refugee Huguenots who found asylum desultorily in Virginia before 1700, but the chief influx was in that year, when more than five hundred

Not only so, but Monroe finally became a Loudon man; and the pioneering people of the middle counties and the piedmont certainly had less of the Anglican tincture than the Tuckahoes. The drop of Scotch, or Scotch-Irish, blood was big; and so was the Welsh drop; and the infusion made a difference. Moreover the "blue blood," so to say, turned red in contact with the real America — its open life, its hardships, its necessity of making common cause; and, finally, its sunny, homely sociabilities connected with the log cabin, the log school and the much-loved meetinghouse in the wilderness. New types were developing. The Taylors of Orange were a strong and famous family. One of them, George, a great-uncle of President Madison, had seven sons in the Revolutionary army. The celebrated Colonel John Taylor, of Caroline, whom we shall meet later in these pages, was of this stock on his father's side and of Pendleton lineage on his mother's. Zachary Taylor, too, is another President to be credited to these parts; for he was born just south of the Fairfax line — at Hare Forest, four miles from Orange Courthouse. Similarly, we take note of many families — - the Dabneys, Maurys, Fontaines, all of Huguenot stock; the Winstons, Henrys, Slaughters, Strothers from the Isle of Thanet, and their multitudinous kith and kin. There was many an old farmer with a crest on his snuff-box. Scotch penetration of Anglo-Saxon Virginia was pronounced came and settled chiefly at Manakintown. ... Of the Scotch but few immigrants before the union of Scotland and England, in 1707, may be identified After the union 'Scotch Parsons' so potent as educators and merchants, who quite monopolized the trade of the country, pervaded Eastern Virginia. The list of families in the colony, who in vested right used coat-armor, as attested in examples of such use on tombstones, preserved book plates, and impressions of seals, is more than one hundred and fifty. The virtue of such family investment by royal favor may appear somewhat in the fact that the Virginia rebels, Claiborne, Bacon, Washington and Lee were all armigers, and among others were the Amblers, Archers, Armisteads, Banisters, Barradalls, Beverlys, Blands, Boilings, Byrds, Carys, Carringtons, Cloptons, Claytons, Corbins, and so on throughout the alphabet in swelling numbers and comprehensive examples of ability and worth." Meade listed some 250 highly important Virginia families of the colonial period. In the matter of felon blood, Jefferson allowed it but a onethousandth part.

from the time the tobacco traders settled at such places as Leeds, Dumfries and Falmouth. Scotch merchants grew rich. A street in Glasgow was called "Virginia Street." James Monroe and Patrick Henry were by no means the only celebrated Virginians of Scotch origin. The Barbours of Culpeper were well at the front in their days; especially is Justice Philip Pendleton Barbour, of the United States Supreme Court, to be credited with what Professor Tucker characterizes as his "severe and sustained logic." And the "Cohees" (Quoth-hes) certainly became a power in the Commonwealth.

But the Monroes! The name in Gaelic means "red bog." It is a territorial surname. In Ireland, anciently, it was simply Ro. The first man in history to bear it was Occon Ro, "whose son Donald, born in Ireland, went to Scotland in the beginning of the eleventh century to assist King Malcolm II." Malcolm gave him the Barony of Fowlis. "His descendants added to the original name the syllable Mon." At subsequent periods, "this name was spelt variously: Monro, Munro, Monroe, Munroe." Ro itself survives in such names as that of E. P. Roe. In Massachusetts^ today, "Munroe" is the spelling ordinarily used; in Virginia, the name is "Monroe."

1 See the Munroe genealogy by John G. Locke, Boston and Cambridge, 1853; also the History of the Munros of FowUs, with genealogies of the principal families of the name, to which are added those of Lexington and New England, by the late Alexander Mackenzie, Inverness, 1898; also a sketch of the Munro Clan, by James Phinney Munroe, Boston, 1900. There is a great deal about the Massachusetts Munroes in A. B. Muzzey's "Reminiscences and Memorials of the Men of the Revolution," as well as about the Scotch Munroes. George Munro, ninth baron of Fowlis, was slain at the battle of Bannockburn, under Robert Bruce of Scotland, in 1314. Robert Munroe, twenty-first baron, was killed in the service of Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, defending the civil and religious liberties of Germany in 1633. Sir Robert, twenty-fifth baron, was a zealous Presbyterian and, being remarkable for si/,e and corpulency — the same figure with Colonel Munroe of our Revolution — he was nicknamed "the Presbyterian mortarpiece." His grandson, Sir Robert, twenty-seventh baron, who succeeded his father in 1729, was greatly distinguished for his military services. He was in the battle of Fontenoy. "He was killed in the battle of Falkirk, as was his brother. Dr. Munroe." "Up to the year 1G51, there had been three generals, eight colonels, eleven majors, thirty captains, and five lieutenants of the Munroe stock. At the battle of Worcester, where Cromwell was victorious, several Munroes were made prisoners, and some of them were bound out as apprentices to farmers ia

It has been asserted that the Virginia Monroes "came from a family of Scotch cavahers, descendants of Hector Monroe, an officer of Charles I." Thus President James Monroe is given cavalier ancestry. This somewhat misleading statement is repeated in many books. While the Monroes in Scotland were of the cavalier cut and quality, they were hardly so in Virginia. Dr. Lyon G. Tyler, who has gone more painstakingly into the subject than anyone else, says that "the family in the Northern Neck of Virginia seems to be totally different from a family of the name in Southside Virginia." There were Andrew Monroes, it appears, in the Southside family, as well as in the Northern Neck family. We hear of the Rev. Andrew Monroe of the upper parish. Isle of Wight. John Blair, President of the Council under Dinwiddie, and acting governor, married Mary Monroe, daughter of the Rev. John Monroe and his wife Christian.

Whatever may have been the relationship of James Monroe; with the Southside Monroes, or the Massachusetts Munroes, we do not attempt to trace.

As revised by Dr. Tyler for this book, President Monroe's pedigree, according to the records of Maryland and Westmoreland County, Va., is as follows:

"Andrew^ Monroe, settled in Maryland in 1647. He took sides against Lord Baltimore; and, at the end of the troubles, fled across the Potomac to Mattox, where many of the Protestants sought

refuge. He married Elizabeth , and died before 1668,

when a deed from his widow Elizabeth to his children names them

America." Among these was William, the ancestor of the Massachusetts Monroes. There were eleven of these in the old French war, and fourteen in the Revolution. They lived around Lexington and Concord, and were descendants of the clannish William's six sons. All fourteen were in the Lexington company of Theodore Parker's grandfather. Captain John Parker. Ensign Robert was killed at Lexington; and Captain Edmund Munroe, by a cannon ball at Monmouth. Another Lexington Munroe was the stalwart Colonel William, Washington's host on the Lexington battleground, in 1789.

F. B. Sanborn, in his "Life of Thoreau," says: "The Munroes of Lexington are descended from a Scotch soldier of Charles II's army, captured by Cromwell at the battle of Worcester in 1651, and allowed to go into exile in America. His powerful kinsman, General George Monroe, who commanded for Charles at the battle of Worcester, was, at the Restoration, made Commander-in-Chief for Scotland." '

as Elizabeth, who married Bunch Roe, Susan, Andrew', George and William.

"Andrew^ Monroe (Andrew), born about 1664, married Elinor Spence, daughter of Captain Patrick Spence (died in 1685) and had issue Elizabeth, married Arrington, Andrew Spence, and Susannah who married Charles Tyler. This Andrew died 1713- 1714.

"Andrew^ Monroe, (Andrew^, Andrew^) died in 1735, leaving a wife Christian, and children Elinor, who married Dr. James Bankhead, Sarah, Spence^, and Andrew, [y "Spence* Monroe (Andrew', Andrew'^, Andrew^) married Elizabeth Jones, sister of Hon. Joseph Jones, who died in Fredericksburg in 1806, and had James^, President of the United States, Andrew, Joseph Jones and Elizabeth who married William Buckner.

As the first Washington in Westmoreland, John, brother of Laurence, was master of a ship, so the first Monroe, Andrew, was a mariner. He commanded a pinnace under Cuthbert Fenwick, general agent for Lord Baltimore. He was with Richard Ingle in 1644, and "was evidently a Protestant."^ When Ingle declared for parliament, Monroe took sides against Lord Baltimore. "Like many other men in that day he could not write." He settled first on Kent Island close by the Eastern Shore, where William Claiborne started a colony, about 1630. Claiborne's quarrel with Lord Baltimore caused many of the English settlers to sail across the bay and up the Potomac. Numbers of them planted at Chickacoan, in the Northern Neck. Our sea-captain, Andrew, settled at Appomattox — not the Appomattox so celebrated in the annals of the Civil War, but what is now Mattox, Westmoreland. Charles Tyler, founder of the Tyler family of the Northern Neck, whose descendants intermarried with the Monroes and Spences, probably left Maryland at the same time and for the same reason.

The Virginia Archives show that successive grants of land were made to Andrew !Monroe from 1650-1662,

1 William and Mary Quarterly, Vol. IV, p. 272. Two old books that deal with early Maryland are Alsop's "Character of the Province of Man'land," by George Alsop, reprinted in 1869 and "The Day Star of American Freedom," by George Lynn-Lachlan Davis. 1855.