“…the books arrived…in good condition. I immediately handed to the President his copy with the accompanying letter and he smiled when I told him he would find in the volume a pretty good history of Vermont during the dictatorship of Old Ethan and that it would probably amuse him when he arrived at those days of dignified leisure to which every patriot was entitled at last….There is very little news here… Since the nomination at Harrisburg the politicians seem to be…waiting for the moving of the waters in some other quarter. The course pursued by Vermont has been dignified and proper. She is universally considered as nearly unanimous for Mr. Adams…”

 

When Congressman Bradley wrote this letter after seeing James Monroe, the outgoing President was about to end his second term. In the election that year, he supported his Secretary of State John Quincy Adams as his successor, running against Andrew Jackson, William H. Crawford, and Henry Clay. Jackson received the greatest number of popular votes but as no one had received a majority of the Electoral College, the contest was thrown into the House of Representatives, where Adams finally won the office - with the support, as Bradley predicted in this letter, of Vermont and all the other states of New England.

 

The book mentioned was undoubtedly “Vermont State Papers”, compiled and published by the Vermont Secretary of State, which included documents about Revolutionary War hero Ethan Allen’s “dictatorship” while dominating Vermont politics and ruthlessly hunting down former British Loyalists. Monroe would have been aware of these events while representing Virginia in the Continental Congress, 35 years before his rise to the Presidency.   Bradley went on to live to the age of 85, long enough to remember this chat with “patriot” James Monroe while supporting Abraham Lincoln and the new Republican Party in the run-up to Civil War.