James Monroe: Special Message to the Senate on the Slave Trade Convention with Great Britain

About the Author

James Monroe, the nation's fifth president (1817–1825), was a complex thinker whose reasoning tended to be dense. As a consequence, his public writings—as a U.S. senator, governor of Virginia, ambassador to France and Great Britain, U.S. secretary of war and secretary of state, and president—require careful reading. His thoughts on the Constitution were typical. He attended the Constitutional Convention, and he was unhappy with the way some of its deliberations had gone. At the time, he was identified as an Antifederalist—that is, as someone who objected to a national government with powers stronger than those of the individual states. But as was typical for him, he did not fit in very well with all the Antifederalist views, and he eventually played an important role in persuading Virginia to ratify the Constitution. Deeply troubling for him was the absence of a bill of rights; he wanted the Constitution to specifically protect the civil liberties of individual citizens. Further, he thought that by giving each state an identical number of senators, the Senate would too often deadlock the government. He wanted the number of senators to be apportioned by population, somewhat like the House of Representatives. He objected to senators being chosen by state legislatures; instead, he wanted senators to be elected by a direct vote of the people to make them more beholden to the best interests of the people of their states. In addition, he thought that the president of the United States should be chosen by a direct popular vote.

On the other hand, Monroe disagreed with most Antifederalists about the power of the presidency. Whereas most Antifederalists wanted a weak chief executive, Monroe approved of giving the president veto power. He hoped that a strong chief executive would be able to mediate among the nation's opposing factions and thereby prevent paralysis of the government. Most Antifederalists would have disagreed with his belief that control of state militias should be given to the federal government. He thought that the United States would better respond to crises if the militias could be universally mobilized and coordinated in national defense.

Subtleties in his wording when discussing America and Americans might escape many modern readers, but they would have been noticed by most of his audience in his own day. He was careful to refer to the United States of America as a “compact” and to use plural verbs and pronouns when referring to the United States, as in the “United States are.” The word compact, in particular, was associated with states' rights advocates, who opposed the supremacy of federal laws over the laws of individual states; states' rights advocates usually wanted to protect the institution of slavery. But it would be an error to believe that Monroe was of a mind with his secretary of war, John C. Calhoun. Calhoun was a strong supporter of states' rights and slavery who made the word compact the essence of his argument that the United States could be broken apart anytime a state violated the Constitution, because the Constitution represented a compact that became invalid whenever a state did not abide by it. To Calhoun's thinking, the compact was violated whenever free states refused to return escaped slaves to slave states.

Monroe was not party to that thinking. He found slavery distressing, even calling the trading of slaves a crime. As governor of Virginia, he put down a slave rebellion and was saddened when some of the rebellious slaves were executed. He joined many others in searching for a way to remove dangerous slaves without executing them. One idea was to send slaves to western territories to settle them as emancipated people. Another was to sell rebellious slaves to Caribbean islands, where slavery was practiced. One plan that Monroe seemed to favor was to emancipate all slaves by having the federal government buy them. During his presidency, Monroe entertained the idea of pushing for emancipation but let the idea die because America could not afford to pay the owners for their slaves. In any case, he lent much of his public influence to the freeing of slaves and their resettling in Africa in what became the nation of Liberia.