When he resigned, Madison gave the place to James Monroe, who continued secretary for the remaining six years that Madison was president, when he, like so many of his predecessors, went from the cabinet to the White House. During these six years the war with England was waged, the city of Washington burned, and we in vaded Canada. James Monroe was descended from a family of Scotch Cavaliers. lie attended William and Mary College, and was a member of the noted Phi Beta Kappa so ciety, which was formed at this historical Virginia College in 1776. He was a lieutenant at eighteen in the Third Virginia Regiment of the Revolution ary army. The regiment was commanded by Col. Thomas Marshall, the father of Chief-Justice John Marshall, and the great judge was himself also a lieutenant in it at the same time. He studied law in Thomas Jefferson's office. He served a term in, the Virginia legislature and three years in Congress. He was a member of the Virginia Convention which accepted the United States Constitu tion, but was opposed to it. Twenty-eight years afterwards he explained his reasons for opposing it in a letter to Andrew Jack son. He was a United States senator in 1 790. He was twice elected governor of Virginia, and resigned, soon after his second election, to become secretary of state. War with England was declared June 18, 1812, on account of England's interference with our commerce and treatment of our seamen. James Monroe communicated to England our declaration of war. He had not only his duties as secretary of state, but General Armstrong, the secretary of war was removed, and he had also the hard duties of that department to perform. When New Orleans was in danger, in 1814, and there was not money enough belonging to the government to defend the city, he pledged his private property and so raised
the necessary money; the British were de feated and the war brought to an end. The war ended by the treaty of Ghent and the fixing of the northern limits of the United States at Lake Huron and Lake Superior. Mr. Monroe was fifty years old when ap pointed secretary. So popular was he with the people that when he offered himself the second time for President of the United States, only one vote was cast against him. While a member of Congress in New York, when twenty-eight years old, he married Eliza Kortwright, a daughter of Lawrence Kortwright, a gentleman who had lost all his fortune in the Revolution. In 1817, when he became President, he appointed John Quincy Adams secretary of state, and he held the office during Monroe's two ad ministrations. A biographer says, " John Quincy Adams was the product of an ancestry and period, both of which put their forces into him in strong measure." He was born July 11, 1767, in Braintree, Massachusetts, now Quincy, ten miles from Boston. He came of a genuine Puritan family. His mother was Abigail Smith, a descendant of the Quincys. He said of his name : " My great-grandfather was dying when I was baptized, and my grandmother, his daughter, requested that I might receive his name. It was the name of one passing from earth to immortality. The fact, recorded by my father at the time, has connected with that portion of my name a charm of mingled sensibility and devotion. These have been among the strongest links of my attachment to the name of Quincy, and have been to me, through life, a perpetual admonition to do nothing unworthy of it." He went abroad with his father in 1778, and studied at the schools of Paris and Amsterdam and the University of Leyden. When twenty years old, he began to study law in the office of Theophilus Parsons, afterward chief justice of Massachusetts, at Newburyport. He opened an office in Bos-
