This Day in Southern History (‘Gabriel’s Insurrection’ Foiled at Last Minute)

Aug. 30, 1800—At 2 in the afternoon, Virginia Gov. James Monroe (pictured)—just returned to Richmond because of a yellow fever quarantine emergency—received a visit from slaveowner Mosby Shepherd, confirming rumors circulating at least since spring: that a massive slave uprising was in the offing just outside Richmond in the town of Henrico.

This time, though, specific details provided by two of Shepherd’s slaves endowed the reports with a grim new certainty: that the rebellious slaves would kill their masters that night, move on to Richmond and set fire to the state capital, capitalizing on the ensuing confusion to seize ammunition from the penitentiary.

Immediately, Monroe—in his first executive position in the young United States, and two months from a tumultuous national election—moved to quash the insurrection, taking the unprecedented step of stationing militia in Henrico, Richmond and the penitentiary. A torrential downpour that night scotched the revolt before it could be launched.

Capitalizing on this respite, the militia broke into slave quarters in the area, producing a round of confessions or finger-pointing from the terrified inhabitants. Within two days, approximately 70 were arrested and charged.

The ringleader was quickly identified: a 24-year-old blacksmith named Gabriel, the property of plantation owner Thomas Henry Prosser. The incident has been sometimes been referred to as “Gabriel Prosser’s Revolt”—a misnomer, as Gabriel never took his master’s surname during his lifetime.

But, though the name was misleading, the fears that the uprising brought to the surface were real enough. The Virginia gentry did not have to look far for the possibility of violence at the hands of slaves: Ambrose Madison, the paternal grandfather of Congressman James Madison, was allegedly poisoned by two of his slaves and a neighboring one.

An insurrection—quicker than a slow-acting poison, perpetrated by slaves who often outnumbered whites on plantations—was even more terrifying. And it was more worrisome still when led by someone like Gabriel—a commanding physical presence (over six feet tall, well above the average size for that era) who, because of his literacy, also possessed a heightened ability to receive intelligence and communicate with followers.

The year 1800 was already shaping up to be one of unusual tension, with the United States and France trying to back away from a full-scale war; with the Democratic-Republican Party, headed by Monroe’s mentor Thomas Jefferson, attempting to win the Presidency that fall from the Federalists; and with the continuing repercussions of the successful Haitian revolt against their former French masters, led by Toussaint Louverture. But Gabriel’s Insurrection gave more tangible form to this unease.

The man at the center of it had been seething for over a year over the unequal treatment of slaves within the Virginia legal system, especially as it affected him. 

The charge facing Gabriel in 1799—“maiming” (an overseer, in a scuffle arising from another slave’s theft of a pig)—would not have been unusual in the society of his master. Indeed, “eye-gouging, ear-biting, and even more devastating forms of physical combat were common among equals in late eighteenth-century Virginia,” according to a 1982 article by historian Philip J. Schwarz. “It was the rare slave, however, who attacked whites openly and physically.”
 

Gabriel only escaped the death penalty through a quirk of the law called “benefit of clergy” (i.e., he would only be branded rather than executed if he could recite a Bible verse).

Whites had used that same legal system to bust his conspiracy, offering a full pardon to any slaves willing to testify against fellow conspirators.

Although a full pardon was one means of resolving the case, Gov. Monroe had to weigh to what extent any other form of mercy was possible among the multiple cases now filling the Virginia courts. He outlined the courses open to him in a letter to Jefferson:

“When to avert the hand of the Executioner, is a question of great importance. It is hardly to be presumed, [that] a rebel who avows it was his intention to assassinate his master etc. if pardoned will ever become a useful servant, and we have no power to transport him abroad—Nor is it less difficult to say whether mercy or severity is the better policy in this case, tho' where there is cause for doubt it is best to incline to the former council.”

Perhaps better than any whites, Monroe knew that extenuating circumstances existed for mercy. Though there was little doubt that Gabriel  led the conspiracy, the early investigation had already established that Presser had, even in a system favorable to a slaveholder, treated his slaves with “great barbarity.” Moreover, as a careful onetime lawyer, Monroe realized that confessions extracted under torture or its threat were not reliable guides to determining innocence.

In determining the varying fates of the accused, however, Monroe was not merely guided by public safety or questions of guilt and innocence, but also by his own self-interest. He would own as many as 250 slaves in his lifetime, making him one of the largest slaveowners in his county. He was a direct beneficiary of the system he was being tasked to protect.

In the end, with Monroe himself attempting to interrogate the captured leader, Gabriel refused to make a statement without a promise to mitigate his punishment. Gabriel would be one of 26 hanged for their complicity in the rebellion, with another dying in custody while awaiting execution. Among the remaining 38 originally arrested, some were transported out of state; some were found not guilty; and a few were pardoned.

As for Gabriel: 207 years after his hanging, then-Gov. Tim Kaine granted him a full pardon, commending his “courage and devotion to the fundamental Virginia values of freedom and equality.”

Those “values” perplexed Monroe, as it did fellow Virginia Presidents George Washington, Jefferson and James Madison, to his dying day. Although Washington arranged to manumit his slaves following the death of his wife Martha, Jefferson, Madison and Monroe, fatally entrapped in the lavish, debt-inducing lifestyle of the plantation  aristocracy, freed no more than a handful of their own, despite their grave misgivings about “the peculiar institution.”

If anything, Gabriel’s Insurrection convinced Monroe that ultimately, slavery could not exist in the United States without raising tensions between North and South and posing a danger to the lives of slaveholders (a fear realized 31 years later in Nat Turner's Rebellion and in 1859 in another led by John Brown).

He came around to gradually moving slaves back to Africa as an ultimate solution to the practice, even endorsing the American Colonization Society. During his Presidency, Liberia was established on the African continent for this purpose, even naming its capital, Monrovia, after him.

Flashback, August 1814: ‘Bladensburg Races’ Imperil DC

“The rockets’ red glare/The bombs bursting in air” represents the climax of “The Star-Spangled Banner” as well as the principal image that many Americans have of the War of 1812. But the image that so inspired eyewitness Francis Scott Key at the successful defense of Baltimore in September 1814 had struck such terror into American soldiers a few weeks before that they fled the battlefield in droves, opening Baltimore to bombardment –and, more immediately, Washington, D.C. to burning by British forces.

The Battle of Bladensburg, occurring on August 24, 1814, was nicknamed the “Bladensburg Races” for the disgraceful manner in which American militia fled the field. It left the nation's capital vulnerable within hours--and that's exactly what happened. (I described that process in an earlier post.) That’s one reason why the United States government over the years has allowed it to be overrun by suburban residences, a cemetery, parkland, and commercial developments.

It deserves to be better known. Americans would then understand that our military history is more rife with disaster than they could ever imagine. In other words, it didn’t start with Afghanistan or Iraq, or even Vietnam, folks. Nearly all of the political and military figures on the American side failed to distinguish themselves.

The British had nearly all the advantages on their side as their invasion force landed in Maryland in early August 1814: top commanders with more than 20 years in the field; a tough force, continually battle-tested by the Napoleonic Wars; and a desire to avenge the burning of government buildings in York (today’s Toronto) in the American campaign to take Canada the year before.

With Napoleon exiled (albeit, as it turned out, only temporarily), the British government thought it could spare a few troops to fight in North America. The total allotted—a mere 4,000—was only a fraction of the hundreds of thousands committed to the titanic struggle against the French emperor, but it was still more than the number of regulars that United States could muster.

The instructions for Major-General Robert Ross, a key subordinate in the Duke of Wellington’s Peninsular Campaign, were merely that he create a diversion along the U.S. coast to relieve the pressure by American forces against Canada. That it turned into a great deal more owed much to the spectacular unpreparedness of American civil and military authorities.

Secretary of War John Armstrong bore particular responsibility for the American failure in this campaign. Henry Adams, in his History of the United States During the Administrations of James Madison, is properly scathing about the monumental irresponsibility of this “indolent man, negligent of detail”:

“Armstrong's management of the Northern campaign caused severe criticism; but his neglect of the city of Washington exhausted the public patience. For two years Washington stood unprotected; not a battery or a breastwork was to be found on the river bank except the old and untenable Fort Washington, or Warburton. A thousand determined men might reach the town in thirty-six hours and destroy it before any general alarm could be given. Yet no city was more easily protected than Washington, at that day, from attack on its eastern side; any good engineer could have thrown up works in a week that would have made approach by a small force impossible. Armstrong neglected to fortify.”

The commander chosen by President James Madison to defend the Chesapeake, Brigadier General William Winder, was not much better. A fine, even brilliant, lawyer before the war, he had only a year of soldiering under his belt, and that had not been terribly distinguished, ending with his capture in the Canadian campaign. His chief qualifications were, in fact, familial rather than political: his Federalist uncle, the governor of Maryland, would be far better disposed toward providingmilitia for the defense of this region with a close relative in charge, Madison figured.

It was an appointment as disastrous as Armstrong’s. Preoccupied with paperwork and with riding around the region to get a better sense of the terrain, Winder merely grumbled that he didn’t have enough militia. He made no effort during the six weeks between his appointment and Bladensburg to select lines of defense or erect entrenchments.

Part of the problem was utter confusion about British intentions. Winder didn’t know if the invaders would assault Washington (via the Potomac River) or Baltimore (then the nation’s third-largest city), via the Patuxent River—or if they simply wanted to clear out the harassing flotilla of gunboats expertly put together by Joshua Barney. Eventually, with intelligence gleaned in raids over the last year by Admiral George Cockburn, the cautious Ross was persuaded that he would find little resistance if he attacked Washington.

The British had better intelligence (courtesy of escaped slaves) than the Americans. Knowing nothing except that British ships were rumored to be in the Potomac area, Secretary of State James Monroe rode out of Washington to scout the countryside. What he saw at Benedict, Md., convinced him that the British were making a thrust at DC. He wrote to the President, advising him to secure important government documents and records.

When it was finally determined what the British intentions were, Madison and Monroe hurried to Bladensburg. Monroe, conferring with one of Winder’s subordinates, adjusted the placement of troops. Nobody seemed bothered by the fact that Monroe was a civilian—he had, actually, more combat experience, by virtue of his Revolutionary War record, than either Winder or Armstrong. But he made the change without telling Winder, thus worsening coordination of troop movements.

Officially, the Battle of Bladensburg lasted between three and four hours, but for all effects and purposes it might as well have been five minutes—the point at which iron-tube canisters fired by the British, the so-called “Congreve rockets,” began to rain terror over the Americans. Winder was supposed to have 6,900 men at his disposal, but they were as inconstant as summer fireflies.

One after another American line of militia broke and fled. Historian Daniel Walker Howe called the panic that followed "the greatest disgrace ever dealt to American arms.” Among those who escaped: Francis Scott Key, serving as an aide to Gen. Samuel Smith.

My prior post on General Henry Hull and the fall of Detroit discussed some of the difficulties attendant on the Madison administration’s reliance on the militia. The disastrous reaction of these provisional, inexperienced, undisciplined soldiers began a slow but decisive turn away from militia on the part of subsequent Presidents. For all their fears of what a standing army could mean to civil liberties and fiscal prudence, Americans increasingly came to believe that such soldiers could not be depended on.

One serviceman who proved that he could be was Barney. The Revolutionary War seadog was the one American who recognized the danger from the British forces early on, concocted an inventive plan to ward off the threat, then did not buckle when the odds were against him. The flotilla of barges that he had built and assembled had continually harassed the British until, faced with that navy’s overwhelming force, he had reluctantly scuttled the vessels just before Bladensburg lest they fall into the wrong hands.

On the morning of battle, Barney convinced Madison to allow him to take most of his men away from guarding a bridge to forming another line of defense, near a road the British would take. Even after the rest of the American forces melted away in the face of the Congreve rockets, Barney and his men poured fire into the enemy. Grievously wounded and finally overwhelmed by superior British numbers, Barney was visited by Ross and Vice Admiral Alexander Cockrane, commander in chief of the Royal Navy's ships on the North American Station. The “flotillaman” and his crew “have given us the only fighting we have had," Cochrane told Ross.

A comparison of casualties bears out Cockrane’s statement. American losses totaled approximately 25 killed and 41 wounded. But the British left 64 men killed and 185 wounded on the battlefield. In other words, if the other American units had put up anywhere close to the resistance that Barney and his men had, Ross might have thought twice about any further offensive maneuvers against the Americans, let alone the devastating one he was about to unleash on Washington.

The will to fight was not the only example provided by Barney that was lost on his countrymen. Another was the willingness to use and reward anyone who backed American arms, even if they happened to be slaves. A crucial part of Barney’s mixed group of sailors and Marines consisted of African-Americans. (Opportunities to serve were better in the Navy because of the need to fill positions; the result was that roughly 15% to 20% of all posts were manned by African-Americans.)

One of the key figures in Barney’s force was an escaped slave, Charles Ball, a cook and seaman. When the fighting in the battle had turned hottest, Ball had manned the cannon to Barney’s left until his the latter’s bad wound had ended the resistance of the U.S. forces.

An American republic committed to freedom, however, did not realize until way too late—if it ever really did—how self-destructive its policy on slavery was. During the Chesapeake campaign, a regiment of ex-slaves known as the Colonial Marines had trained under Cockburn. According to an estimate by Harper’s contributing editor Andrew Cockburn, his naval ancestor might have been responsible for the liberation of approximately 6,000 slaves in the conflict.

A half-century later, Union commanders, at least partly from necessity, came to see the wisdom of British use of African-Americans. Emancipated slaves provided vital intelligence to the North in the Civil War, and their courage under fire was celebrated in Glory.

Flashback, April 1812: George Clinton Death Starts VP Melee

The greatest gift Mitt Romney may have received by sewing up the GOP primaries at this point is time—not merely time to build fences to his party’s restless right wing, but to vet his potential Vice-Presidential running mate. His overriding rule should be to observe the Hippocratic dictum, “First, do no harm.”

The Democratic-Republican Party of Thomas Jefferson and his allies did not adhere to this precept. Even the “Father of the Constitution,” James Madison, Jefferson’s lieutenant and eventual successor in the White House, disregarded it to his peril, paying no attention to the necessity of stability in the Vice-Presidency, and 200 years ago this month he experienced some of the consequences of that failure.

The death of 72-year-old George Clinton on April 20, 1812 removed one headache for Madison—what to do with a running mate, once a workhorse of the party, now more of a broken-down nag, who could not be counted to take his side. At the same time, this first Vice-President to die in office opened another issue: how to avoid another running mate too old/unfit/unsuited for the job, let alone succeeding to the Presidency in an emergency.

It’s one of the ironies of American history that a politician who figured in every national election from 1788 to 1808 is now nearly entirely forgotten by the public. (Quick: Did Trivial Pursuit ever feature him as the subject of a question? Jeopardy? Cash Cab?)  Say the name “George Clinton”—heck, even type it into Google—and you’re likely to get all the information you want about a certain musician, but comparatively less on the man who who inaugurated a tradition: New York governors who looked in their mirror and glimpsed a future President. (Maybe a few names will give you the idea: DeWitt Clinton--George's nephew--William H. Seward, Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, Thomas Dewey, Nelson Rockefeller, Mario and Andrew Cuomo...)

It’s a further irony that, because of the pathological fear of a repetition of the election of 1800—a Vice-Presidential candidate with enough appeal of his own to constitute a threat to the ticket’s head in a disputed contest—Jefferson and his party helped mold a system in which the running mate became a toothless, superannuated nonentity.

The politician who had given Jefferson such a bad scare, Aaron Burr, could not have presented a more vivid contrast with his successor. He might have been a rogue who shot Alexander Hamilton in a duel, but when he bid farewell to the Senate over which he had presided in his single term as Vice-President, the urbane Burr left hardly a dry eye in the chamber with his vigor and eloquence.

The Senate couldn’t have been more disappointed by his successor. There was, for one thing, Clinton's voice—which might have been  readily audible on Revolutionary War battlefields he commanded 30 years before, or in the New York legislatures he dominated as a governor—but had diminished in volume in the Senate. Moreover, his social and listening skills were poor, as noted by the inveterate diarist of the Senate, the Federalist William Plumer of New Hampshire:

“The Vice President preserves very little order in the Senate. If he ever had, he certainly has not now, the requisite qualifications of a presiding officer. Age has impaired his mental powers. The conversation and noise to day in our lobby was greater than I ever suffered when moderator of a town meeting. It prevented us from hearing the arguments of the Speaker. He frequently, at least he has more than once, declared bills at the third reading when they had been read but once—Puts questions without any motion being made—Sometimes declares it a vote before any vote has been taken.  And sometimes before one bill is decided proceeds to another.  From want of authority, and attention to order he has prostrated the dignity of the Senate. His disposition appears good,—but he wants mind and nerve.”

As the election of 1808 approached, Clinton made no secret that he wanted the Presidency itself. He had gone alone with the greatest grumpiness in accepting the consolation prize of the Vice-Presidency when the popular Jefferson ran for reelection in 1804. No such compunctions stood  in his path in 1808. 

Jefferson himself, however, would not allow his faithful friend, Madison, now Secretary of State, to be bypassed. The caucus of Democratic-Republicans meeting in early 1808 chose Madison for the Presidency. Clinton, not liking this at all, allowed a boomlet for himself to rise in New York. With his usual highly amused eye for the spectacle of history, Henry Adams (great-grandson of the first, comically frustrated Vice-President, John Adams) related  the resulting scene in his History of the United States During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson:

“Before long, the public was treated to a curious spectacle. The regular party candidate for the Vice-presidency became the open rival of the regular candidate for the Presidency. Clinton’s newspapers attacked Madison without mercy,  while Madison’s friends were electing Clinton as Madison’s Vice-president.”

Clinton was an even worse fit for Madison than he had been for Jefferson. In 1811, Madison  requested congressional approval for renewing the Bank of the United States. The vote ended up tied, one of those rare but constitutionally mandated instances when the Vice-President could vote. Madison was annoyed by Clinton’s vote against the measure, and that frustration grew worse when the nation found itself  in severe difficulties the following year, when the War of 1812 required massive expenditures.

With Clinton unable to attend any Congressional sessions in early 1812, the possibility loomed larger that his office would be vacant. Candidates began jockeying for position, and Clinton’s death removed the need for any subtlety in such maneuvers.

At first, the Democratic-Republicans turned to John Langdon, a former Senator from New Hampshire, but he declined on the sensible grounds that, at age 70, he was too old and ill. The caucus then turned to a comparative spring chicken, 67-year-old Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts.

This was not the office Gerry had wanted. Collector of the port of Boston was what he had in mind, as it would help him retire the debts dogging him. 

Madison, however, saw not a potential tax collector but a potential V-P, for several reasons:

1    1)  He had been involved in politics all the way back to the 1770s, when he served on the Continental Congress;

2    2) Clinton notwithstanding, Madison thought that Gerry’s advancing years would make it unlikely he’d want the Presidency himself at this point in his career, thereby ensuring that the Presidency would pass to another  Virginian, James Monroe;

3    3) Again unlike Clinton, Gerry was sure to provide a favorable vote for the administration. In fact, he was perceived as so partisan that, when he signed off on an electoral reapportionment scheme that, some suggested, resembled a salamander, the “gerrymander” was suggested as an alternative--thus giving rise to an eternal neologism.

Gerry did not help Madison secure Massachusetts in the election—a fact that the Virginia Dynasty should have anticipated since Gerry had lost his own re-election bid as governor, necessitating his need for a different job. But far worse was about to happen. 

By the summer of 1813, not only was Gerry seriously ill, but so, under the pressure of waging a war, was Madison. The distinct possibility loomed that, with the nation in a struggle for survival against its old British enemy, both the President and Vice-President would be either physically incapacitated or dead. 

Fortunately, Madison rallied. Gerry, however, continued to weaken, and in November 1814 he died, just as Clinton had, while in office.

James Monroe had only marginally better luck with his running mate. Daniel Tompkins, another former New York governor (see what I just saying a few minutes ago about seeing a future President in the mirror), hounded by debt like Gerry, began to drink heavily. Tompkins was out of the Vice-Presidency for only a few months when he, too, perished.

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....

This Day in Presidential History (British Torch D.C.)

August 24, 1814—In a day of terror and destruction that would not be repeated in the nation’s capital until September 11, 2001, British troops easily defeated an American force at the Battle of Bladensburg, then reached Washington, D.C., putting the torch to the White House, the Capitol, and other federal buildings.

Only a violent storm that was the worst in memory—a hurricane, actually, that blew the roofs off houses—finally tamped down the fires.

Despite what some historians think about responsibility for the burning of Washington (e.g., Henry Adams, claiming that the two British commanders, “alone among military officers, during more than twenty years of war, considered their duty to involve personal incendiarism”), the real crime lay in lack of preparedness, fostered by an American administration that went to war believing it would be a cinch to make Canada an American state, that staffed its highest military ranks with superannuated veterans of a conflict nearly 40 years before, and that passed on the opportunity to fortify Washington while it still had the chance.

In the Maryland town of Bladensburg, James Madison, wielding two borrowed dueling pistols, became the only American President to personally command troops in battle while he was in office. But with a weak voice and a stature that made him the shortest Chief Executive in our history, the image he presented, I’m afraid, would have sparked more ridicule than Michael Dukakis in a tank.

When the day was over, Madison groaned: “I could never have believed that so great a difference existed between regular troops and a militia force had I not seen the events of this day.”

Yet the President had nobody but himself and his Democratic-Republican Party to blame. They had believed you could fight the world’s greatest navy with not much more than riverine gunboats, and that militia called together with barely a moment’s notice would stand against exhaustively trained professional troops.

Most of all, Madison had only to look in the mirror to glimpse the man responsible for disastrous personnel decisions that made the Bladensburg defeat and the grand DC fire inevitable.

The most disastrous appointment was John Armstrong, a Revolutionary War veteran who became Secretary of War. Indolence hadn’t proved fatal in Armstrong’s prior stints as U.S. Senator from New York and minister to France, but in his new job, that weakness—combined with a refusal to believe that the British would strike Washington rather than Baltimore—proved catastrophic.

Further hampering the cabinet officer was his fraught relationship to James Monroe, the Secretary of State. Monroe would not have minded at all assuming a military post that would have given him even greater renown than his rank of colonel during the American Revolution. But Armstrong would have none of it, and Monroe would, when the opportunity presented itself, force Armstrong’s ouster.

From August 19 through the 23rd, the British expeditionary force, having landed on the Chesapeake Bay, took their sweet time (a summer heat wave was on) heading toward Washington. Armstrong’s adamant insistence to Madison for the last several weeks that the nation’s capital need not be strengthened left the city wide-open and vulnerable.

If Madison didn’t particularly distinguish himself, either in planning or personal command, then the First Lady, Dolley Madison, did—or at least the public did, judging by the popularity she enjoyed for rescuing Gilbert Stuart’s portrait of George Washington before she fled the White House.

More recently, the possibility has emerged that even this feather in the Madisons’ cap was not quite what happened at the time. It depends on who you believe—Dolley or a family slave who adored his master but resented the First Lady for breaking a promise to free him.

The slave, Paul Jennings, would, in a 19-page memoir, claim that the story that made Dolley beloved with the American people was false:

“She had no time for doing it. It would have required a ladder to get it down. All she carried off was the silver in her reticule, as the British were thought to be but a few squares off, and were expected every moment. John Susè [Jean-Pierre Sioussat] (a Frenchman, then door-keeper, and still living) and Magraw, the President’s gardener, took it [the Washington portrait] down and sent it off on a wagon, with some large silver urns and such other valuables as could be hastily got hold of.”

For a long time, historians tended to side with Dolley rather than her slave, for three reasons: a) his account had the distinct tone of sour grapes; b) while Dolley was white, her slave was an African-American and, in the racist view of the time, not worth taking into account; and c) Dolley’s account, a letter to a sister, was written contemporaneously, while Jennings’ was written in old age, when memories tend to be less reliable.

Though the first of these reasons remains intact, the second has come under heavy attack since the civil-rights era. Even the third is now at issue. It turns out that Dolley didn’t write the latter after all at the time of the fire, but instead copied out the message 20 years later. The letter is also far less chatty than her usual style, perhaps because she expected it would reach a wide audience.

Perhaps, as Jennings indicated, Dolley did not take down the portrait herself. There seems no reason to think, however, that she didn't direct that it be properly disposed of. She certainly possessed more foresight than her husband and his commanders on the same day.

This Day in Presidential History (Birth of James Monroe, "National Security President")

April 28, 1758—James Monroe—fifth President of the United States and, according to former Presidential candidate and Monroe biographer Gary Hart, our "first national-security President" —was born the second of five children of a small planter in Westmoreland County, in what was then the colony of Virginia.

Two and a half years ago, on the same trip to the piedmont section of the state in which I visited the mansions of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, Monticello and Montpelier, I also stopped at what their protégé, Monroe, called his "cabin castle": Ash Lawn-Highland. I have to admit that, having just come from Jefferson's iconic hilltop home-turned temple of democracy, I was surprised, even let down, by the Monroe's comparatively simple farmhouse.

Yet, as my eyes swept over Monroe's rolling 535 acres in the mountains of western Virginia, I was reminded that he was, after all, a plantation owner requiring many resources to sustain the lifestyle he desired as a man and required as a politician. Moreover, a longer look afforded some surprises.

Instead of one story high, which was how it looked from the north side, the house was, I soon noticed, tucked into a hillside that concealed a basement. Once past the modest exterior, I saw evidence of a man with a taste for sophisticated, even costly foreign furniture, usually French. Clearly, there was more to Monroe than a first glance suggested.

An Underestimated Chief Executive

For all the inevitable comparisons with Monticello and Montpelier, then, Ash Lawn-Highland should not be overlooked, anymore than Monroe's political legacy should be. The last of the "Virginia Dynasty" that dominated the Presidency at the start of the American Republic, Monroe was, like other Presidents down to the present day, used to being "misunderestimated."

Nobody—but nobody —thought he was smarter than his fellow Democratic-Republicans, Jefferson and Madison. Even his Cabinet doubted him. His Secretary of War, John C. Calhoun, regarded him as "slow." His Secretary of the Treasury, William Crawford, thought Monroe was so indecisive that he threatened his chief with a cane.

Yet Monroe, though still not placed among the great Presidents, has achieved greater stature among historians, even making the top 10 on occasion. The doctrine named for him has dominated American policy in the Western Hemisphere for nearly two centuries. He won two terms, the second in such near-unanimous fashion that his administration was dubbed, somewhat misleadingly, the "Era of Good Feelings."

Just as Monroe rebuilt the White House after its burning by the British in the War of 1812, so he led the United States to a new era of peace and prosperity. After two wars involving its mother country in its first 40 years, the United States would never experience a British invasion again — not unless you count a quartet of moptops singing on "The Ed Sullivan Show" in 1964.

Early in his career, Monroe would have been voted one of the least likely to be called a consensus-builder. His advocacy of the French Revolution while serving as America's envoy to the country led George Washington to recall him, and Monroe's self-justifying pamphlet upon his return further annoyed the President (who, incidentally, had been his commanding officer at the Battle of Trenton, where 18-year-old Monroe had been wounded). In December 1799, Monroe's election as Virginia's governor so enraged his old boss that Washington discussed it for an hour without taking off his snow-covered cloak – triggering the pneumonia that killed him a few days later.

Nor was Washington the only Federalist that Monroe angered during his time in Washington. Thoroughly convinced that Monroe was behind the exposure of his affair with Maria Reynolds, Alexander Hamilton challenged the Democratic-Republican to a duel. Only cooler heads prevented a Weehawken-style duel that, like Hamilton's a few years later with Aaron Burr, might have resulted in loss of a political career or a life. (As I noted earlier this year, the most likely culprit in the leak was an associate of the Virginia Dynasty, John James Beckley, who went on to become the first librarian of Congress.)

The Tales This House Could Tell

Like its longtime master, Ash Lawn-Highland has passed in and out and back into fashion. Dire financial straits forced Monroe to put the house up for sale only a year after he left the White House, and even to sue the government he once headed for reimbursement of expenses from a lifetime of public service.

In 1974, the home was bequeathed by its then-owner to Monroe's alma mater, the College of William and Mary. Income from admissions, shop sales, grants, and tax-deductible contributions go not only toward maintenance of the house, but also to merit scholarship recipients at William and Mary.

Guides at Ash Lawn-Highland were quick to point out to me and the other visitors on this golden autumn afternoon that Monroe had more executive experience than any prior American President – U.S. senator, four-term Governor of Virginia, Minister to Great Britain, Spain, and France, Secretary of State and Secretary of War.

How could a man with such accomplishments be overlooked? This property is a good place to start for an answer.

Like so much else in Monroe's life, it was influenced by Jefferson – from the location (only two and a half miles from Jefferson's estate in Charlottesville, personally selected by the great man himself), to the gardeners who started the orchards, even to the placement of the kitchen underneath the house.

Having taught the young Monroe the law and taken him under his wing as the new republic formed, Jefferson could be forgiven for offering a little architectural advice, too.

Some of his other counsel was not as benign. Upon inspecting Monroe's slave quarters, Jefferson told his protégé that they were too good for their occupants: even white guests, he noted, barely enjoyed better accommodations than the "servants" (the preferred euphemism for the "peculiar institution"). Perhaps he wasn't blessed with Jefferson's often stunning farsightedness, but Monroe was also not plagued by the stunning moral blindness that made the Sage of Monticello so maddening to posterity.

A Beloved But Aloof Beauty

The house interior also reflects another difference between the two: the presence of a wife. There is virtually no trace at Monticello of Martha Jefferson, who died when her husband was only halfway through his life. The sensibility of Elizabeth Kortright Monroe, on the other hand, comes through as strongly as that of her husband in virtually every room at Ash Lawn-Highland.

In the parlor, I scrutinized the portrait of Elizabeth as a young woman. You could see why Monroe was devoted to her throughout their married life, and why her death hastened his own a year later.

She retained much of her youthful beauty all the way into her fifties in the White House, with some observers even comparing her to a goddess. But that description also hints at unapproachability – a distinct disadvantage for a plantation owner and politician expected to lavish hospitality on an epic scale. Elizabeth was utterly without the genius for small talk that distinguished Dolley Madison, and she used her mounting illnesses to evade social engagements she dreaded.

“The Last of the Cocked Hats”

The "last of the cocked hats" (i.e., the last President to have fought in the American Revolution), James Monroe favored knee-buckled breeches and three-cornered Revolutionary hats, even during his Presidency. This identification with the republic's beginnings had become so complete that people figured it was natural that he would even die on July 4, 1831, just like Adams and Jefferson had done five years before.

Both old-fashioned and cosmopolitan, Monroe knew enough about the Old World's corruptions and convulsions that he would not allow it to regain lost traction in the New World. The doctrine that Secretary of State (and future President) John Quincy Adams formulated for him has served as the bedrock of American foreign policy ever since then. The little "cabin-castle" in Virginia reminded Monroe every day of everything valuable in his country.