Today is the birthday of the 5th President of the U.S. James Monroe was born on April 28, 1758. Here is my favorite anecdote involving him.
Because he was boring, Monroe does not have many interesting anecdotes. He does feature in a sequel to Hamilton’s famous “Reynolds Affair”. Before the duel with Burr, there was almost a duel between Hamilton and Monroe. In 1792, Monroe was a Senator and his committee got wind of possible financial malfeasance by Secretary of the Treasury Hamilton. Monroe and two other committee members were sent to interview Hamilton. Hamilton was forced to reveal that the smoke was from his affair with Mary Reynolds. He had paid off her husband, but not with government funds. He provided documents, including letters. Monroe and the others were convinced that Hamilton was innocent of anything illegal and agreed to keep the letters confidential. Unfortunately, in 1797, the clerk of the committee passed the documents on to journalist James Callendar, who was the Matt Drudge of his day. He had earlier “outed” the Jefferson-Hemmings affair. Hamilton assumed Monroe had leaked the information. He made a trip to NYC to confront him. Hamilton was accompanied by his brother-in-law John Church. When Hamilton accused Monroe of doing him wrong, Monroe proclaimed his innocence. Hamilton called him a liar. Monroe called him a scoundrel. Hamilton suggested they settle it on the dueling field. Monroe said to get his pistols. At this point, Church intervened and cooler heads prevailed. However, the men began to exchange inflammatory letters daring each other to duel. It got to the point where Monroe asked a friend to go to Hamilton and negotiate. His friend was Aaron Burr. Burr managed to convince the men to stand down. Things were cool for a while, until Hamilton published a pamphlet bringing his story of the affair to the public. He included insinuations that Monroe had leaked the documents. The potential duel was on again, with Monroe sending a letter challenging Hamilton. Hamilton wrote back, accepting. But he never mailed it and today we don’t remember a Hamilton-Monroe duel.
– Boller, pp. 53-54
– https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/time-when-alexander-hamilton-almost-dueled-james-monroe-180957045/
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