Happy Birthday to the Founding Father Who Brought Florida into the U.S.

Happy 253rd birthday to the president who helped grasp Florida from Spain.

No, not Andrew Jackson who led the military invasion of Florida in 1818, or John Quincy Adams who met with Spanish Ambassador Luis de Onis to draft the treaty that led to American possession of the peninsula. James Monroe, who was president from 1817 until 1825, was born on April 28, 1758.

Its easy to overlook Monroe. He was the last member of the Virginia Dynasty, the three presidents from the Old Dominion who presided over the White House from 1801 until 1825. Monroe simply did not have the original and creative mind that his predecessors and friends Thomas Jefferson and James Madison possessed. As historian George Dangerfield noted in his Pulitzer Prize winning "The Era of Good Feelings," even in studies of the Monroe administration, its easy to lose focus on the president himself.

As a senior at Trinity College, I wrote athesis on John C. Calhouns tenure as secretary of war under Monroe -- and, yes, I lost sight of Monroe. It's very easy when Calhoun, Adams, Jackson, Henry Clay, William H. Crawford, John Randolph and other colorful political leaders were on the stage. I wrote the thesis planning to scorch Jackson for disobeying orders and invading Florida without orders from Monroe or Calhoun. While Monroes defenders (Harry Ammon in particular in his magisterial biography of our fifth president) still insist that Jackson had no authorization to send American troops into Spanish Florida, I reached the conclusion that Monroe (and to a much lesser extent Calhoun, who had been a very late appointment into the Cabinet) offered subtle signs backing the operation. Dangerfield and other historians quoted the line that whoever possessed the Floridas held a pistol at the heart of the republic -- something Monroe knew quite well after the near-disasters in the War of 1812 -- and so he gave Jackson a wink and a nod to defuse the situation.

So under President Monroe, the American government invaded and eventually bought Florida from Spain. While he is not as connected to the Sunshine State as Jackson is, there is a county named after Monroe and its fitting that the Capitol in Tallahassee is on a street named after him.

Near-bankrupt when he left the White House, Monroe would move to New York to live with his daughter. He passed away on July 4, 1831 -- five years after both Jefferson and John Adams died, on Independence Day. Even in his death, Monroe seemed to be an afterthought among the Founding Fathers -- but he is the one member of that remarkable generation of political leaders whose fingerprints are on the Sunshine State.