James Monroe while expanding the United States at the expense of the Spanish Empire, from which he obtained Florida and the recognition of a border across the continent. Faced with the breakdown of the expansionist consensus over the question of slavery, the president tried to provide both North and South with guarantees that future expansion would not tip the balance of power between slave and free states, a system that, Weeks remarks, did indeed allow the continuation of American expansion for the best of four decades. Monroe pursued warmer relations with Britain in the aftermath of the War of 1812. In 1817
James Monroe Trotter African Americans. His son William Monroe Trotter became a rights activist and was founder and editor of the "Boston Guardian", a progressive African American newspaper. James Monroe Trotter was born on February 7, 1842, twenty-five miles south of Vicksburg in the once-thriving community of Grand Gulf, Mississippi, in Claiborne County, Mississippi, although some sources give Trotter's date of birth as November 8, 1842. James was born into slavery; his mother Letitia was a slave and his father was her white master, Richard S. Trotter, then unmarried. After Richard Trotter married in 1854, he freed Letitia and their mixed-race children: James