The Boy Becomes the Man

It only took five months for me to start dreaming about presidents.

A few nights ago, I dreamed that a teenaged James Monroe and I were both in high school (a colonial high school, if I remember correctly; definitely not my actual high school). He and I ran around the school, pulling pranks on people.

When I woke from the dream, it was just before dawn. In the dark, I was neither relieved, as though I'd just woken from a nightmare, or disappointed, as though I'd just woken from a pleasant dream. Instead, I was confused. Why on earth had I dreamed of pulling pranks with James Monroe? Was it a subconscious translation of his lasting contribution, the Monroe Doctrine? Were we asserting our right to our hemisphere? Was it a reaction to having read about Secretary of War Monroe heading out to the front lines to scout the British during the War of 1812?

I think it's this: Monroe is the first president with a documented childhood. Oh, with the first four, we understand very basic things like dates of birth and schools attended, but there's rarely much about them as a child or young man. This is odd, because I think we're trained to understand childhood as formative--that the boy is a version of the man. Absent this key part of biography, we lose something--the satisfaction of the reader-as-parent, watching our subject grow and learn, knowing all along what he or she will become.

That's why, I think, Gary Hart opens his Monroe biography with Monroe "a young lieutenant, merely eighteen years of age, who earlier that year had been a sophomore at the College of William and Mary." He's crossing the Delaware to attack Trenton during the Revolutionary War. He's a boy still, but we know who he'll become--the last of the Patriot Presidents. We know he'll deal with national security in a way that no president has before him.

The painter Emanuel Leutze puts Monroe just behind Washington in his famous painting "Washington Crossing the Delaware." There's no historical record proving that Monroe was on the same barge, but the message delivered by the painting is clear: here is a man who will follow Washington into battle and into the Presidency.

Moving Back Into Montpelier

This was my first view of James Madison's Montpelier:



It was a rainy day, solidly unpleasant in the weather, and a large moving van blocked the front door (unloading A/V equipment for the day's Constitution Day festivities), but there was still something reassuring about it--the house felt like the kind of place that, after two terms as president, I'd like to retire. And this is, indeed, how Montpelier looked when Madison returned to it in 1817, after a presidency that saw the nation's capital burned in its first war as a sovereign nation.

What's remarkable is that Montpelier didn't look like this six years ago. While Mount Vernon stayed in the Washington family and was then passed onto the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association, and Monticello had the good fortune to pass from Jefferson to a family who kept his house pretty much as it was, Montpelier was sold to settle debts and passed through a number of hands before ending up with the duPont family. When, in 1984, the heirs of Marian duPont Scott, following her wishes, donated the house to the National Trust, Montpelier had been added to until it was almost unrecognizable. In fact, when the Montpelier Foundation (who own the house now, having received it from the National Trust in 2000) began restoring it in 2003, their first order of business was to take off 24,000 square feet of house. Montpelier as it stands now is 12,000 square feet. Do the math; Madison's home was buried under something twice its size.



That project took the Montpelier Foundation five years. Now they've moved on to phase two of the restoration: bringing back the furniture. Imagine the impossibility of the situation; almost two hundred years after it was sold, re-sold, and handed down through heavens knows how many families, the Madisons' furniture is making its way back to their home piece by piece. And while in the 19th century, you could make an appeal based on patriotism or love of Washington or Jefferson, in 2009 those sentiments don't exactly run as strong as they used to.

And so a visit to Montpelier these days is to visit an empty house. Rather than teem with the stuff of Presidents past, Montpelier is an exercise in imagination. They're pretty sure they know which room the Madisons slept in, because the mantle of the fireplace is the most ornate. They think they've got the right color of paint on the walls, because they had to take twenty-something layers off to find the 1817 layer.

There are some aids to imagination, though, including a life-size statue (no short jokes, please) of the Madisons in the backyard, reading together. Cute and friendly, and not misleading like the statues of the Washingtons at Mount Vernon (which show Washington with his step-grandchildren; you have to know this to avoid assuming they're his kids and that GW didn't have any children of his own).



But the most interesting part of Montpelier for me was Madison's study, where he researched and wrote the Constitution. Despite the lack of furniture or historical guides, the tour guides at Montpelier know exactly where Madison's desk was, thanks to the ink splotches on the floor. I stood there, on a cold, rainy morning, alone in the room, looking down at blots on the floor, and felt the same frisson I'd felt at Yorktown Battlefield; here is one of the places where America, with all its flaws and beauties, its contradictions and its ideals, became possible.

It's a giving time of year, and while charities that help the living are of utmost importance, it's also important to remember that donations are down everywhere. If you've got a few extra bucks in your pocket after gift-giving, you might consider donating to the Montpelier Foundation. It's not every day you get to help bring a President's furniture home, or build a center to teach people about the Constitution, or just improve a house by taking away from it.

On Republican Governors of Virginia

Well, if the polls are any indication, it looks like Virginia will have itself a Republican governor-elect at the end of the day today.

In honor, or perhaps trepidation, of Robert McDonnell's upcoming four years at the helm, it seems only appropriate to announce our next biography, that of a former Republican governor of Virginia (but written by a Democratic senator from Colorado): Gary Hart's James Monroe.

Before we start with the last Founding Father to run the country, though, we'll take a trip to James Madison's house, Montpelier.

A Question of Greatness

Alright, four presidents in, and I feel it's about time to ask: when is anyone going to be any good at being president?

The four biographies we've read so far, without an exception, point out that their subjects were better at whatever they were doing beforehand than being the chief executive. Jefferson himself even goes so far as to keep being president off of his tombstone, opting instead for his roles in writing the Declaration of Independence and the Virginia Statutes of Religious Freedom, as well as founding the University of Virginia.



Washington does a decent job as president, but nothing special; his job as Commander-in-Chief is to hold the country together in its fragile newness. Adams not only signs the Alien and Sedition Acts--pretty indefensible, no matter how hard any biographer might try--but he also manages to become the first one-term president. Jefferson violates his party's principles (no advocate of small government is going to be OK with buying a whole lotta territory without Congress's approval); not to mention the fact that Jefferson hates being president so much he essentially bails four months before the end of his second term, leaving Madison (the president-elect) to run the country (oddly enough, Wills's biography of Madison points this, but Bernstein's biography of Jefferson doesn't mention it at all). And you don't get to be a great president if the nation's capital gets burned to the ground on your watch (again, a Republican has to realize that one of his party's platforms--no standing army--might not be without its disadvantages).

And these are the Founding Fathers! The guys we look up to as Paragons of Presidential Prestige!

Maybe it's because of the newness of the whole thing; they're making it up as they go along. After all, no one was campaigning for the post--such a thing was considered disgraceful then--but they did do enough backchannel work to get the jobs. Perhaps, with only a few people to talk to about being president and very little American history to learn from (not to mention how little republican democracies had ever existed), we should expect some stumbles.

Garry Wills points out something interesting about Madison in the closing chapter of his biography; that despite the bungling of the War of 1812--despite the fact that "he accomplished not a single one of the five goals he set out for the war to succeed"--Madison still managed to hand the reins over to James Monroe, a member of his own party.

"Given all these factors," Wills writes, "historians have not boosted Madison, considered as president, out of the average rank. On the other hand, they do not count him a failure--and they cannot. He was too popular at the end of his second term. He must have been doing something right." The emphasis is mine--if you're considering Madison as a Founding Father, he does pretty well.

Wills continues: "Despite the problems and setbacks of his chosen course, he never panicked. He was coolest at the darkest times. Admittedly, he was helped in this by his very flaws. In his provincialism and naivete he continued to underestimate the British, thinking they must have been badly harmed by his embargo."

What's more American than taking your flaws and turning them into advantages for you? Madison may not have been a great president, but he got the country through its first official war, rebounded from the burning of Washington, and managed to secure a peace with England that's lasted since. And that's good enough to get you on some currency.