I am currently reading through Harry Ammon's tome on James Monroe who was the US President after James Madison and Thomas Jefferson. It is interesting to note how the revolution had its effect on the early Republicans where they came to see their form of government as promoting republicanism to the world.

Monroe was younger than Jefferson and Madison. Jefferson started mentoring Monroe in the philosophies of public office when he was young and while Jefferson was Governor of Virginia.

Madison also corresponded with Monroe, but Monroe was more pragmatic and practical than Jefferson and Madison who wrote back and forth on all matter of republican philosophy.

Monroe was ambitious for public office even though he saw the public service as the height of a citizen's duty, especially a planter's.

During the Revolutionary War, Monroe made a strong friendship with the Frenchman Pierre DuPonceau who leant Monroe French books of the enlightenment just as Jefferson was to open his library to Monroe.

Monroe was a young officer, fighting a revolutionary cause and being exposed to enlightenment principles in the same environment. Ammon writes;

... it is evident that Monroe no longer thought of the Revolution in the narrow terms of a family quarrel between George III and his American subjects.

He now viewed the conflict - as the first step in a world-wide struggle to liberate mankind from the baneful effects of despotism.

This sense of commitment to a movement for political freedom with world-wide implications had a profound effect upon Monroe and his contemporaries.

The identification with a force greater than themselves gave a particular stamp to every aspect of their later careers.

In its simplest form it could be called a sense of mission - they felt themselves called upon to achieve something previously unattainable in human experience.

Thus Monroe, for the rest of his life, worked to convert the ideals of the Revolution (expressed only in the most general terms) into a basic reality of American life - a reality which would serve as a model and as an example to the rest of the world.

I have seen this called recently the "American Creed", though I cannot recall where I read that.

When Monroe was the American Ambassador to France just after the French Revolution, he wrote;

Republics should be near each other ... their governments are similar; they both cherish the same principles and rest on the same basis, the equal and unalienable rights of men.

DuPonceau wrote similarly at the same time;

... it is the sweetest fraternity ... that must unite us [America and France] ... this union shall forever be indissoluble, as it will forever be the dread of tyrants, the safeguard of the liberty of the world, and the preserver of all the social and philanthropic virtues.

DuPonceau was a practising lawyer in Philadelphia and had picked up the American zeal. The French Republic never became what the American Republic promised to be. France's revolution was more social than political.

In Australian Republicanism the closest philosophy to that kind of political destiny comes from Charles Harpur. Vosper had the pen, Deniehy the oration and Dunmore-Lang the shoulder at the grind-stone; but Harpur is the only one that intimated toward a republicanism that would be in a state of perpetual advancement.

One that would kindle and reaffirm the promise in us, and ensure the constant reach for a more perfect, social, moral, ethical and political form of organisation.

The Australian Republican creed starts in Charles Harpur.

More Reading on James monroe

• James Monroe
• James Madison
• Thomas Jefferson
• Charles Harpur
• Pierre DuPonceau
• Harry Ammon
• James Monroe's Political Freedom
• Three US Presidents on Partisanship