First Inaugural Address

Summary

James Monroe was sworn in on 4 March 1817 on a platform outside the temporary Brick Capitol, where Congress met while the building the British burned in 1814 was being restored. It was the first inaugural delivered outdoors. The War of 1812 had ended in 1815, the Federalist party was collapsing, and Monroe, the last Revolutionary veteran to reach the presidency, spoke at length to a crowd rather than a chamber. The address is built around a question Monroe asks aloud: "What raised us to the present happy state?" His answer is the people. Self-government had lasted forty years since the Revolution and twenty-eight under the Constitution; commerce, territory, and new States had grown, no one had been executed for treason, and the late war had shown the government equal to "the greatest of trials." All of it, he says, was owed to an intelligent and virtuous citizenry. The danger he names is the reverse: when a people become "ignorant and corrupt" and "degenerate into a populace," usurpation becomes easy. From that diagnosis come his policies. Coasts and frontiers should be fortified, the army and navy kept moderate but ready, and the militia organized in peacetime, because "National honor is national property of the highest value." Roads and canals, "proceeding always with a constitutional sanction," should bind distant States together, and domestic manufactures should end dependence on foreign supply that the war had exposed. Monroe ends with unusual optimism. Discord "does not belong to our system," the people are "one great family with a common interest," and the government has approached so near perfection that the task is to preserve it, not improve it. A Boston newspaper named the following months an Era of Good Feelings. Readers who know that sectional conflict would return over Missouri within three years can weigh how much of Monroe's harmony was achievement and how much was hope.

Top Lessons

• A people who can lose self-government

  Monroe gives the credit for American success to the people, and in the same breath warns that a people who "degenerate into a populace" become instruments of their own ruin. Self-government, in his account, depends on a moral and intellectual condition that can be lost. His remedy is to "promote intelligence among the people."

• Preparing for war in a time of peace

  Writing two years after the British had burned Washington, Monroe argues that fortifications and a trained militia are cheaper than a single campaign of invasion. Peace is "the best time for improvement and preparation of every kind." The lesson asks whether preparation preserves peace or anticipates war.

• Harmony that does not belong to the system

  Monroe claims that "Discord does not belong to our system" and that the government is near perfection. The claim fit the collapse of party opposition in 1817, yet the Missouri crisis of 1819-1821 would show deep sectional division. Students can study how a leader describes unity he hopes to keep.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

Presidential inaugurals concern constitutional politics and national crisis; they have no medical content for this library's lens.