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Home – Founding Fathers & American History – From Monroe to Clinton, How the American Presidency Changed 

From Monroe to Clinton, How the American Presidency Changed 

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words” from Daily Signal senior contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to Victor Davis Hanson’s own YouTube channel to watch past episodes.

Sami Winc: Your presidents today are, as you’ve been speaking of, Bill Clinton and then also [James] Monroe, who followed on [James] Madison’s work and is probably most famous for the Monroe Doctrine.  

Victor Davis Hanson: Yes. James Monroe was our fifth president. [George] Washington, [John] Adams, [Thomas] Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, and he was … Just think of it. 

He was, after Washington and Jefferson and Madison, he was the fourth president from Virginia, and that was at that time called the Virginia Dynasty. I think there would be four more. I don’t know if I remember them all, but there was [John] Tyler and Benjamin Harrison and Woodrow Wilson. I’m sure Woodrow Wilson was a Virginian. 

He was a Southerner, abject racist, by the way, not that that’s always to be equated with Southerners. It’s not.

But [Monroe’s] known now for a couple of things. Liberia, the capital is Monrovia. Remember that? He was a big advocate of reverse colonization as a solution to the slavery problem, and during his administration, it didn’t work out too well because slaves, African slaves had been there for 200 years. So they were no more African than white people were. 

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You know what I mean? So it didn’t work out too well. But he also had seen this during Madison and his presidency, they had closer ties with …  

After the War of 1812, they kinda shifted, and they normalized their relationship with Britain, number one, and they had seen what the French Revolution had done and Napoleon that followed had done to Europe. 

And they were very skeptical of the Spanish Empire. So there was a new idea that the United States would follow Washington, would not get involved with foreign powers. But they had established a much better relationship with Britain. They were going back to being pro-British again. And the result of that was they were very skeptical of the Spanish. 

And so, under Monroe, they annexed Florida. And he and Madison were really instrumental in carrying out the, not the spirit of the Louisiana Purchase, but the actual implementation of it.  

So this was a period where they doubled the size of the United States, and he was … But one of the things he did not want were imperial European powers intervening in the Western Hemisphere. 

That was largely Spain, because the Spanish Empire had a very........

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