Elizabeth Kortright Monroe

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Elizabeth Kortright Monroe

Elizabeth Kortright Monroe (born June 30, 1768 in New York City , † September 23, 1830 on her Oak Hill plantation ) was the wife of the fifth US President James Monroe and thus the First Lady of the United States from 1817 to 1825.

Life

Elizabeth Monroe came from a long-established New York family of Dutch-Flemish origin. Her grandfather, Cornelius Kortright (1704–1745), was a trader. Her father, Captain Lawrence Kortright (1728–1794), continued this tradition and made a fortune as a co-owner of privateers equipped with letters of war against the "enemies of the British crown". Not only was he one of the founders of the New York Chamber of Commerce, but he was also involved in the Anglo-French conflicts on the side of the British Crown during the Indian Wars. However , he stayed out of the American War of Independence . It was therefore a surprise when his daughter Elizabeth married James Monroe on February 16, 1786 at the age of seventeen. At the time, Monroe, 27, was a lawyer. The son-in-law, of Scottish-Welsh-French descent, was not only known for his French-friendly attitude, but also for his anti-British attitude. The young couple initially lived in Fredericksburg , Virginia, and their first child was born in 1787, daughter Eliza Kortright (1787–1835). In 1794, Elizabeth Kortright Monroe then accompanied her husband to Paris, as he had been appointed US envoy to France by President George Washington . But already in 1796 he was relieved of his post because he had fallen out of favor in Washington because of his anti-French attitude. In the spring of 1797, the Monroe and their daughter returned to America. While James Monroe was then busy writing a 500-page justification, Elizabeth had two more children in the following years: JS (which probably stands for James Spence, 1799–1801) and Maria Hester (1803–1850) . After 1800, however, the political climate changed and Monroe was sent to Paris again in 1803, this time together with Robert R. Livingston as plenipotentiary envoy, who there successfully negotiated the cession of the Louisiana area by purchase.

Her husband became secretary of state under President James Madison in 1811 , and the Monroes became part of Washington’s social life . When Monroe became president himself in 1817, Elizabeth was the perfect host, but the Washingtoners had certain problems with the European, label- oriented “New York style” favored by her and her daughter, which contrasted sharply with the more open “Virginia social style ”of its extremely popular predecessor Dolley Madison . The wedding of her daughter Maria Hester Monroe with her nephew Samuel L. Gouverneur, the first wedding that was held in the White House, was then also purely private, without Washington society, which was not credited to her in the episode. During her husband's presidency, she fell ill, was no longer able to get involved in society and stayed aloof. Her husband sympathized with her, unlike the Washington residents, who considered her indolent and vain.

However, she retained her label-laden, almost aristocratic style of European courts. The preference of mother and daughter for formal European manners probably went back to the time in Paris. Daughter Eliza, for example, was friends with Hortense de Beauharnais , who later became Napoleon's stepdaughter , and both girls attended the elite school of Madame Campan , a former chambermaid of the French Queen Marie-Antoinette .

After the end of her husband's second term in office, the couple settled on the Oak Hill plantation in Virginia, where they spent the last years together. Elizabeth's health deteriorated noticeably. She died after a long illness on September 23, 1830 in Oak Hill and was buried in Hollywood Cemetery, Richmond .

literature

  • James E. Wootton: Elizabeth Kortright Monroe , Charlottesville (VA) 1987, Ash Lawn-Highland, College of William and Mary.
  • Finn Pollard: Elizabeth Monroe. In Katherine AS Sibley (Ed.): A Companion to First Ladies. Wiley-Blackwell, Chichester 2016, ISBN 978-1-118-73222-9 , pp. 75-88.

Web links

Commons : Elizabeth Monroe  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files

proof

  1. ↑ The numerous members of the New York Kortright families originally come from Bastiaen Van Kortryk (born 1580), a Protestant who moved from Kortrijk , a town in West Flanders, i.e. in the Catholic Habsburg Netherlands , to Leerdam in South Holland around 1615 , moved to the Calvinist northern Netherlands. His two sons Jan Bastiaense and Michiel Bastiaense, who were born in Leerdam between 1618 and 1620, emigrated there shortly before the Dutch colony in North America was ceded to the English. The two brothers arrived with their wives and children on April 16, 1663 on the ship De Bonte Koe ( The Colorful Cow ) in New Amsterdam. Cornelis Jansen Kortryk (1645–1689) was one of the children of Jan Bastiaense and through Lawrence Corneliussen Kortright (1681–1726) the grandfather of Cornelius Kortright (1704–1745), who in turn was the grandfather through Captain Lawrence Kortright (1728–1794) by Elizabeth Kortright. Dutch-Colonies-L Archives: Van Kortryk / Kortright
  2. ^ "Lawrence Kortright - Biography" at: nysoclib.org.
  3. ↑ "Elizabeth Kortright Monroe" at: obamawhitehouse.archives.gov.
  4. ↑ Entry by James Monroe on page 737 in Volume 18 of the Encyclopaedia Britannica from 1911.
personal data
SURNAME Monroe, Elizabeth Kortright
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American first lady
DATE OF BIRTH June 30, 1768
PLACE OF BIRTH New York City
DATE OF DEATH September 23, 1830
Place of death Oak Hill plantation