James Monroe

James Monroe surfaces in two of Kyle’s Adams/Jefferson-era biographies as a figure defined more by temperament than brilliance. In American Sphinx he appears as the American minister in Paris to whom Thomas Jefferson apologized for the infrequency of his letters, blaming “that sort of procrastination which so often takes place when no circumstance fixes a business to a particular time.”

In John Quincy Adams he is rendered at greater length as the president John Quincy Adams served under as secretary of state. James Traub’s portrait, quoted in the book, calls Monroe “an extraordinarily good man, but… not a brilliant man” — a mind “neither rapid nor rich” who moved slowly and warily, made few important decisions without consulting Madison and Jefferson, and laid every issue before his cabinet to wait patiently for consensus. That deliberateness frustrated his decisive secretary of state, who complained in his journal of “slowness, want of decision and a Spirit of procrastination in the President.” Monroe’s cabinet was also notably rancorous in its second term — a contrast the book draws against the smoother Adams administration that followed his 1820 reelection.

Context: James Monroe (1758–1831) was the fifth President of the United States, the last of the Virginia dynasty and the “Era of Good Feelings,” remembered for the Monroe Doctrine and the Missouri Compromise during his two terms (1817–1825).

Where this appears

• American Sphinx — the minister in Paris to whom Jefferson apologized for his epistolary silences
• John Quincy Adams — the deliberate, consensus-seeking president Adams served as secretary of state, whose “spirit of procrastination” frustrated him