Harry Ammon is Professor Emeritus of History at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. He is also the author of The Genet Mission (1973).

This monumental survey of James Monroe's life and career is exhaustively researched and documented, a work of patient and perceptive scholarship that sheds a good deal of light on the politics and personalities of the early American Republic." —Publishers Weekly"From Monroe's birth on the Virginia Tidewater, through his service in the revolutionary army, the Confederation Congress, the United States Senate, and as governor of Virginia, to his diplomatic missions, exertions in Madison's cabinet, and presidency, we now have a detailed authoritative recording of that remarkable career.. One feels sure that we now have, for a long time to come, the book on Monroe to which all will turn." —Ralph Ketcham, Virginia Magazine of History and Biography