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 Blanche Kelso Bruce was appointed to the office, serving 1891–1893. Trotter died of tuberculosis after his return to Boston. The James M. Trotter Convention Center in Columbus, Mississippi was named in his honor. "James Monroe Trotter (1842–1892) was a prominent 19th-century civil rights advocate. He came to Boston to join the Massachusetts 54th* Regiment, the first African-American corps of soldiers in the Civil War. After the war, Trotter became the highest ranking, non-elected African-American in the federal government in his position as Federal Recorder of Deeds. He was the father of civil-rights leader William Monroe Trotter." – The Bostonian Society,