James Monroe

James Monroe, born April 28, 1758, in Westmoreland County, Virginia, and died July 4, 1831, in New York City, served as the fifth President of the United States from 1817 to 1825, the last president who had fought in the Revolutionary War. His two terms, largely free of the partisan conflict of the preceding decades, became known as the Era of Good Feelings. His administration negotiated the 1819 Adams-Onis Treaty, by which Spain ceded Florida to the United States, and signed the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which admitted Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a free state while banning slavery north of a fixed line in the remaining Louisiana Purchase territory. In his 1823 annual message to Congress he articulated the Monroe Doctrine, declaring that the Americas were no longer open to further European colonization and that the United States would view any European attempt to interfere in the Western Hemisphere as a hostile act.