James Monroe (1730–1772) married Spence Monroe in 1752 and they had five children: Elizabeth, James, Spence, Andrew, and Joseph Jones. His paternal great-grandfather Patrick Andrew Monroe emigrated to America from Scotland in the mid-17th century. In 1650 he patented a large tract of land in Washington Parish, Westmoreland County, Virginia. Monroe's mother was the daughter of a wealthy Welsh immigrant who had settled in nearby King George County, Virginia. Also among James Monroe's ancestors were French Huguenot immigrants, who came to Virginia in 1700. At age eleven, Monroe was enrolled in the lone school in the county. Monroe attended this school for
James Monroe Unlike Jefferson, Monroe was rarely attacked as an atheist or infidel. In 1832 James Renwick Willson, a Reformed Presbyterian minister in Albany, New York, criticized Monroe for having "lived and died like a second-rate Athenian philosopher." Monroe owned dozens of slaves. According to William Seale, he took several slaves with him to Washington to serve at the White House from 1817 to 1825. This was typical of other slaveholders, as Congress did not provide for domestic staff of the presidents at that time. As president of Virginia's constitutional convention in the fall of 1829, Monroe reiterated his belief that slavery