The New York herald., 1922-10-22

to have a memorial in the very
house in Prince street, where upon his
deathbed he suffered the last of many
painful humiliations A philantropic New
Yorker has bought the neglected property
and will restore it, so that it will remain
an appropriate landmark where the pub
New York, not ldng before his death.
broken in health and fortune, having sold
his handsome home, Oak Hill, in Virginia.
jefferson died six years before Monroe,
barely in time to escape the humiliation
of selling Monticello, and John Quincy
Adams, his grandson says. would have
been as poor as Monroe had not his son
anship a dozen years before his death.
Monroe lived in New York with his SON
whom John Quincy Adams, as Monroes
successor in the Presidency, had appointed
1OSlliletSlSI VI 4NCn LOih % AiS AAS'A oP
pointed another son-in-law of Monroe to
the Federal bench. Monroe had appointed
none of his kinsmen to office, but there
was a friendly understanding among
Presidents and ex-Presidents in those days
based, perhaps, upon their common condi-
ton of financial embarrassment.
Gouverneur's father had been a gay per-
son in New York and at Washington.
owner of a famous race horse, Post Boy,
and giver of notable dinners at the capital,
at one of which, as a guest afterwards
testified, seventeen baskets of champagne
were served. Monroe's mainstay probably
did not inherit much from that gay father;
at any rate he lived in a simple three
story brick house of no great size. as any
one may learn by visiting the "raggery'
in Prince street at Lafayette place.
Monroe's Oak Hill is noble looking
mansion, with finely hand wrought wood
work, and two rich marble mannions made
for it in Italy at the order of Lafayette
James Monroe's snubs and humiliations
began early and kept occurring all through
his life. He was recalled suddenly by
Washington from the mission to Paris.
Jefferson "pocketed" treaty that Monroe
had negotiated with England, and curbed
Monroe's wish to succeed him in the Presi-
dency, by making Madison the heir. When
Monroe put in proper bill of expenses
for his services abroad Madison neglected
to pass upon it, and Monroe was too deli
cate to do anything about the matter so
long as he himself was President. When
Congress finally made an appropriation to
pay the cost of Monroe's missions abroad
the money was not enough to meet his
debts. False charges of speculation in
Washington building lots were brought
against Monroe and unpleasant things
were said of him when nearly a thousand
acres of his land in Virginia was sold over
his head to pay local debts. Lafayette,
whom Monroe had helped out of difficulties,
offered the ex-President half the lands in
Florida voted Lafayette by Congress, but
Monbe was too sensitive to accept the gift.
Although Monroe must have recalled
with pleasure the New York of his youth,
where he had married the lovely Elizabeth
Kortright in 1856, he met in this city after
his retirement from the Presidency a snub
of the mcst painful kind at the hands of
another lovely New York woman, Eliza
beth Schuyler Hamilton, the widow of
Alexander Hamilton. That proud woman,
who outlived her husband fifty years, did
not outlive her belief that Monroe had
played discreditable part in the scandal
that led Hamilton. in protection of his pub
lie repute, to confess to the world that he
had deeply wronged his wife. Monroe, old
and worn made the strange mistake of