Quote of the Day (John Quincy Adams on Dying Ex-Boss James Monroe)

"I paid a visit to the ex-President [James], Monroe, at the home of his son-in-law, Mr. Samuel Gouverneur. He was confined to his chamber, and extremely emaciated and feeble. Congress passed, at their last session, an act making further allowance to him for his claims, of thirty thousand dollars, which have been paid to him. He has advertised for sale his estate in Loudoun County, Virginia, and proposes to go there in a few weeks; but it is doubtful whether he will ever be able to leave his chamber. Mr. Monroe is a very remarkable instance of a man whose life has been a continued series of the most extraordinary good fortune, who has never met with any known disaster, has gone through a splendid career of public service, has received more pecuniary reward from the public than any other man since the existence of the nation, and is now dying, at the age of seventy-two, in wretchedness and beggary…I did not protract my visit,, and took leave of him, in all probability, for the last time."—Former President John Quincy Adams, on the man he served eight years as Secretary of State, James Monroe, in his diary entry for April 27, 1831, in Memoirs of John Quincy Adams, Comprising Portions of His Diary, Vol. 8, edited by Charles Francis Adams (1876)

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....