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.