Virginia - Day 26 - James Monroe's Highland

Charlottesville KOA
Tuesday, 26 March 2019

today's route

I chose the road less traveled to get to James Monroe's home - a long road full of s-curves and vineyards.  Lots of vineyards, including one belonging to our current president (Virginia's largest, it proclaims).  From this point on is another history lesson.  Skip to tomorrow if you're not interested

James Monroe, our 5th president, was born near the birthplaces of Washington and Madison.  You may remember when I visited the site a week ago I was a little frustrated that it left so many questions unanswered.  Today I got some of those answers.

Monroe and his wife Elizabeth met when Monroe was a delegate to the Continental Congress in 1783 and were married for 42 years.  They moved here to Highland Plantation in 1799 and raised their 3 children here. 

Jefferson was born near here at Shadwell.  (I passed the historical marker as I was driving to the campground a couple of days ago, and found this photo of the historical marker online.)  Jefferson loved the area and talked his good friends into moving closer to him.  This house isn't far from Madison's Montpelier, and it's only a 20-minute horse ride to Thomas Jefferson's Monticello.

Although Monroe later had a falling out with Madison, he stayed friends with Jefferson until their deaths - Jefferson in 1826 and Monroe in 1831 (both on July 4th).  Incidentally, John Adams died the same day Jefferson did.

One of the odd things about Monroe's house is that, until just a few years ago, everyone was convinced that the house that's still on this site was Monroe's house.  It wasn't and, in fact, wasn't built until more than 40 years after his death. 

The College of William and Mary owns Highland and, not long ago, they hired as Highland's executive director the woman who had been archaeologist at Monticello.  She took a good look at the house - the yellow one in these 2 photos - and thought something was off.  She had scientific tests done of the rafters and whatnot and learned it had been built in the 1870s.  (Monroe died in 1831.)  After more tests, she conducted an archaeological dig in 2015-16 and found what they've confirmed to be the foundation for the original house. 

The outline of that foundation is marked in these photos by the paving stones.  The scientists re-covered the dig site to preserve the remains until they are able to conduct a full dig.  The problem is that, as far as they can tell, a wing of the original house is underneath that yellow house which, as a part of the history of this place, they don't want to get rid of, but it's not easy or cheap to move an historic building.  They're working on plans to do that now.

Behind the yellow house and attached to it is the original Guest House that

Guest House

Monroe built in 1818.  It is now believed, based on the archaeological findings, that the original main house burned down in the 1830s, some years after the Monroes sold it.  The new owners moved into the Guest House and, in the 1850s, added a wing.  When later owners moved in, they built a house (the yellow one) attached to the 1850s wing.  Apparently, they believed the Guest House had been Monroe's house, and that's the story passed down.  No one questioned it until the current executive director brought her scientific training to bear on the site.  (And I can't help wondering what other mangled history is still sitting out there, waiting for people to literally uncover the truth.)

Okay, that's his house.  Now about Monroe himself.

At his birthsite, markers said he left home at age 16 but didn't say why.  Today I was told it was because both his parents died, so he went off to William and Mary.  Although he'd been well-educated, he was just a farm boy and wasn't nearly as well prepared for college as the other students.  For example, John Marshall, later Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court, was one of his classmates.  He spent the next summer studying to try to catch up and, by the fall term, his professors were very impressed.  Monroe interrupted his education to serve in the Revolutionary War.

Remember this painting?  The young man standing behind Washington, holding the flag, is an 18-year-old Lt. James Monroe.  In the subsequent Battle of Trenton, which was a turning point in the war, a musket ball hit an artery in Monroe's chest.  He would have bled to death almost instantly if it weren't for a doctor, who had just volunteered the previous day, sticking his finger in the hole onto the artery and stopping the bleeding.  That bullet stayed in Monroe's chest for the rest of his life.

After the war, Monroe went back to college and later studied law under Thomas Jefferson, having met him during the war.  And like Jefferson, Monroe would later serve as the governor of Virginia.

Incidentally, while he was whiling away the winter in Valley Forge, Monroe struck up a friendship with Lafayette and learned French from him.  This came in handy when Pres. Washington sent him to France as the US ambassador, one of 3 ambassador posts Monroe would hold.

It came in handy again when Pres. Jefferson sent him back to France to negotiate the Louisiana Purchase.  Jefferson had previously sent a man named Robert Livingston with orders to try to buy the Port of New Orleans to guarantee access to the Mississippi River.  France, needing money at the time, offered instead to sell the entire LA Territory for an additional amount.  Livingston refused, insisting all the US needed was the Port, and negotiations were stalled.  When Monroe arrived, he quickly said sure, we'll take the whole thing, and got an agreement within hours.  And we now have a whole lot more US than we did.

During the War of 1812, Monroe served as Secretary of War and Secretary of State at the same time.  In the presidential election a few years later, he won in the Electoral College by a margin of 6-1.  He was unopposed in the election for his second term.  He served as president 1817-1825.

He's said to have been easy to like, to have the ability to put people at ease, to have a good sense of humor and the ability to laugh at himself.  His time as president was known even then as the Era of Good Feelings.  (Which leads to the obvious question: where's James Monroe when his country really needs him?)

Monroe is, of course, best known for the Monroe Doctrine.  He had been ambassador to Spain, and early in his presidency he acquired Florida from Spain, but he was concerned with the newly independent Latin American colonies in the rest of our hemisphere.  In 1823, he issued the Monroe Doctrine, putting Europe on notice that the US wouldn't interfere with existing European colonies or with the European countries themselves, but would regard it as a hostile act if Europe didn't do the same in Latin America.  It signaled the US as a geopolitical power.  This statue now standing on the grounds of Highland was commissioned in his memory by Venezuela in the 1890s.

Madison believed black people and white people would and should never mix.  Jefferson believed slavery was a problem for the next generation to solve.  Monroe had a more conflicted attitude.  He believed throughout his life that slavery was a blight on the country, yet he owned enslaved people himself and didn't interfere when the overseers of his plantation treated them harshly.  Yet Monroe supported colonizing Africa with freed slaves and helped send thousands to Liberia.  Monrovia, Liberia's capital, is named for Monroe.

At Madison's and Jefferson's homes it's possible to see how slavery was part of the plantation life, but not at Monroe's.  This is partly because none of the buildings survived, but mostly because Monroe eventually sold those people to a plantation in Florida (once the US acquired it) and historians believed there were no descendants living in the Highland area.  However, recent efforts involving thousands of hours of research, have begun to locate them.  They've even found an entire community a few hours away that's known as Monroeville, made up almost entirely of descendants of the former enslaved people from Highland.  As more information is unearthed, a fuller picture of life on the plantation will surely become clear.

This is an avenue of ash trees that leads from the road up to the house.  I wish I could see it when there're leaves on those trees - it must be magnificent.  I'm told the trees are inoculated every 2 years for emerald ash borer, which is a pest from Asia that has wiped out many millions of ash in the US.  (Amazing what you learn when you ask.)

The Monroes were the first First Family to own a set of White House china - and that set can be seen at Highland.  Their 3rd child Maria was the first president's child to be married inside the White House.  Highway 40, created during Monroe's presidency, was the first federally-funded interstate road.  Monroe, like Madison and Jefferson, faced old age deeply in debt; unlike the other two, Monroe sold most of his possessions, including Highland, and paid off the debts before he died.

And that's what I learned at Highland.

A different road back to the campground took me by Monticello, but it's on top of a hill that rises so steeply from the road I couldn't see anything up there.  I decided not to visit Monticello for 2 reasons: one is that the 30-minute tour (which seems pretty dadgummed short for somebody like Jefferson) is mainly focused on daily life there, while I'm more interested in his mind and creativity; the other reason is that they charge $30 for that 30-minutes, which includes only the 1st floor of the house!  I paid $21 at Montpelier for an hour-long tour that was packed with information about the things I'm interested in, and $14 at Highland for ditto.  In comparison, Monticello just didn't seem like a good use of my time or money.  Maybe later after I win the lottery.