John Quincy Adams was correct. Far less dramatically than predecessors John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, who died not only on the same day but on the 50th anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence they had brought into being, James Monroe (in the image accompanying this post) died on Independence Day 1831, in the New York home of daughter Maria, a little more than only two months after John Quincy Adams visited him in New York City.
The “claims” that Adams noted arose from Monroe’s dire financial straits. Like his two immediate predecessors among the “Virginia Dynasty” in the White House, Jefferson and James Madison, Monroe found himself caught in a perfect storm: an agricultural recession in the state caused by the erosion value of the chief crop, tobacco; the rise of Kentucky as a competitor; the enormous expenses of maintaining the hospitality expected of a plantation owner; and the expenses required as an American diplomat.
Before it became known in the late-1950s that Harry Truman was living off his Army pension and Congress passed legislation providing former Presidents with pensions, the nation did nothing to help its ex-chief executives when out of office. Monroe was caught in a vise that Adams, with his parsimonious Yankee habits, but little understood.
Quite a bit different from today's world, when ex-Presidents not only have their own pensions, but can, if they wish, write memoirs that will net him them a nice bundle, not to mention deliver speeches at hundreds of thousands of dollars a shot....
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