Monroe wore knee breeches, a powdered wig, long white stockings, and high-heeled buckled shoes long after it was cool. His penchant for the fashions of yesteryear earned him the nickname “the Last Cocked Hat.”

Monroe doesn’t jump off a historian’s pen. He wasn’t a walking bundle of contradictions like Jefferson, or a tiny philosopher king like Madison. He lacked their heft and gravitas. He was, one historian once quipped, “unoriginal to the very end,” even dying on July 4, just as his predecessors Adams and Jefferson had done five years before.

They at least had the grace to stage manage their exits. Adams’s last words were famously “Jefferson still survives,” not knowing that his friend and former political foe had died hours earlier on the 50th anniversary of our nation’s founding.

But even fate disrespected Monroe. While Adams and Jefferson expired from old age in grand old homes, surrounded by servants or slaves and debts that others would have to attend to, Monroe died from tuberculosis at 73, penniless and already forgotten, having been forced to move in with his daughter and her husband.

Monroe wasn’t a rogue or rascal, like the peglegged womanizer Gouverneur Morris, who penned the preamble to the Declaration of Independence, or Aaron Burr, who, as vice president, shot and killed a former Cabinet secretary and was party to treasonous plots out west.

Monroe was boring, stable, and reliable. But we as a country are better for it. There is, after all, something to be said for each of the traits, particularly as a young nation navigates uncharted waters.

James Monroe was the last of the Founding Fathers to serve as president of the United States. His successor, John Quincy Adams, had been a mere boy of 7 when the Battle of Bunker Hill erupted in 1775.

By contrast, Monroe fought in the Revolution and had been molded by it, suffering grievous wounds while leading a vanguard charge at the Battle of Trenton. He was Jefferson’s left-hand man and Madison’s right, serving in key diplomatic and Cabinet posts at crucial moments in the young republic’s history.

He was substantial in his own way, and as our nation approaches the 250th anniversary of its founding, it should remember James Monroe every bit as much as it remembers a Benjamin Franklin or an Alexander Hamilton.

Monroe was the president who solidified the gains of the founding generation, passing it off safely, if tenuously, to the era of Andrew Jackson, expanded horizons, and extended suffrage. Monroe was the bridge between America’s early years and the promises and perils of Jacksonian democracy.

He was our first “national security president,” working steadfastly and proactively to prevent encroachment from the much more powerful and established nations of Europe.

Decades before the Civil War would tear the country apart, Monroe confronted its first real crisis over slavery. He was well equipped to do so. Like great men before and since, he was confident enough to surround himself with men of standing and substance.

His Cabinet was filled with heavy hitters: John Quincy Adams at State, John Calhoun at War, and William Crawford at Treasury. It was, almost certainly, the best Cabinet since George Washington’s first term.

Indeed, Monroe was arguably the best president between Washington and Jackson. He managed to avoid the near-calamitous mistakes of his immediate predecessors, who unleashed economic devastation on their own country with failed embargoes (Jefferson) or initiated wars that they couldn’t possibly win (Madison).

Monroe was one of only two presidents to run virtually unopposed for a second term — the other was Washington himself. He presided over what historians would call “the Era of Good Feelings.” This speaks volumes about what came before and after his presidency, but it also signals that a steady hand was guiding the ship of state at a crucial moment.

Like Dwight D. Eisenhower, another soldier who occupied the Oval Office more than a century later, the country was blessed with eight years of peace, growth, and comparative tranquility. No major wars were fought or lost, the partisanship of previous and subsequent years was largely set aside, and the center held. That’s no small thing.

Monroe, one historian reluctantly conceded, “had to be doing something right.”

James Monroe was born on April 28, 1758, in the Northern Neck of Virginia. He was 8 years old when his father, a carpenter, signed a pledge against the consumption of English imports in protest of the much-hated Stamp Act, which the British had levied against the colonies.

His uncle, Joseph Jones, was a judge and member of the Virginia House of Burgesses. Jones served on the committees that drafted the Virginia Declaration of Rights and the Virginia Constitution, and he was friends with George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison — all members of prominent families or prominent men themselves in pre-Revolutionary War era Virginia.

When war finally came, it found Monroe as a 17-year-old student at the College of William and Mary. He dropped out and joined the Third Virginia Regiment. Monroe’s literacy and bearing attracted attention, and he was commissioned as an officer despite his young age.

The American Revolution forged Monroe. For the entire first five years of his early adulthood, he was a soldier. As one biographer, former Colorado Sen. Gary Hart, pointed out, “Like Washington, but unlike John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, or James Madison, Monroe was a military man before he was a diplomat or politician.” He might not have patented inventions like Benjamin Franklin or Jefferson, nor was he pioneering political theory like Alexander Hamilton or Madison, but like Washington “he knew how to mount a warrior horse, ford an icy river, and lead men in combat.”

“If the world, or at least the Revolutionary American world, could be divided between men of thought and men of action, Monroe and his commander in chief, George Washington, were very much men of action,” Hart observed.

Emanuel Leutze’s famous 1851 painting, Washington Crossing the Delaware, depicts the general standing on a flat-bottomed Durham boat, a young Monroe crouched behind him, holding an American flag, as the patriots prepare for a stealth attack against the British on the day after Christmas.

It’s not known if Monroe was actually in the same boat as Washington, but he most certainly was at the Battle of Trenton that followed. Monroe was bloodied in the engagement, a musket ball severing an artery. Only the presence of a New Jersey physician, Dr. John Riker, who had volunteered a mere hour or two before, saved him.

Monroe recovered to see more battles and finished the war as a 23-year-old colonel. After the guns grew quiet, he studied law under Jefferson and served in the Fourth Congress of the Confederation. A 1784 tour through western New York and Pennsylvania, then the frontiers of the nascent republic, convinced him that the U.S. had to pressure the British to abandon their nearby forts in order for the country to finally be free and secure.

Monroe would be preoccupied with European designs on the continent for the rest of his life. As early as the 1780s, he warned of the need to “protect our frontiers” and prevent “the loss of the country westward.”

W.P. Cresson, an early 20th-century U.S. diplomat and architect, put it best: “In the struggle for greater empire, which now forms the might and glory of the Republic, no statesman of his time played a more significant part than James Monroe.”

The young Virginian was a constant and consistent advocate for the still-undefined rights of the U.S. to the lands ceded by the Treaty of 1783, and for free navigation of the Mississippi River. The rise of America, he correctly perceived, would have been impossible without either. 

He “was on the forefront of those who viewed things nationally, rather than merely as citizens of individual states,” Hart wrote.

Monroe’s anti-British sentiments, and his concern about the young republic’s Western frontiers, made him a fierce critic of the controversial Jay Treaty signed in 1794. Most historians now regard the treaty, which sought to end unresolved Anglo-American disputes, as a success. But the compromises necessary to obtain it proved wildly unpopular with the American public.

In the 1790s, Monroe earned a reputation as a fierce anti-British partisan. As a senator and disciple of Thomas Jefferson, he viewed the French Revolution through rose-colored glasses, often justifying, or overlooking, its bloody excesses. Later stints as a U.S. minister (the young country eschewed the phrase “ambassador” believing that it smacked of royal privilege) to France and Great Britain, as well as several terms as Virginia’s governor, helped mature his judgment.

Fittingly for a man who had championed the American frontier, Monroe had served as one of Jefferson’s special envoys to negotiate the Louisiana Purchase, doubling its land mass overnight and laying the groundwork for the country to become a continental power.

Just like James Madison, his sometime rival, Monroe benefited from Jefferson’s tutelage, as well as his patronage. All three men constituted what would become known as the “Virginia dynasty.” Each served two terms as president, one after the other, an era of unbroken power that is still unprecedented in American history two centuries later.

Madison had served as Jefferson’s secretary of state when the latter was president. And when Madison became president, Monroe eventually took his place as the nation’s chief diplomat. His tenure would be eventful.

Jefferson had done his level best to avoid being drawn into the Napoleonic Wars that had engulfed Europe and beyond. Madison wasn’t so lucky. 

In its initial phases, the War of 1812 was an epic disaster. The nascent republic’s armies fared poorly on the battlefield. After the British captured Washington, D.C., and burned the nation’s capital, including the White House, Madison finally fired Secretary of War John Armstrong, one of the most incompetent men to have held the office. As his replacement, the president called in his pinch hitter: Monroe.

More than 200 years later, James Monroe remains the only person to serve concurrently as both secretary of state and secretary of war. Long before Henry Kissinger or Marco Rubio served simultaneously as secretary of state and national security adviser, Monroe held the top two foreign policy Cabinet posts.

At the war’s conclusion, America was engulfed by a new wave of patriotism, embodied in songs like “The Star-Spangled Banner” and in the hero of the Battle of New Orleans, Andrew Jackson.

By 1816, Monroe was the natural successor. The Federalist Party, which had fiercely decried the war and even toyed with secession, was done as a national political force. Monroe, now 58, decisively defeated its candidate, New York’s Rufus King, in the presidential election.

The era, Hart observes, was a “phenomenal period” in which the “old order dominated by great figures of the American Revolution was passing.” The U.S. sought — and needed — more “stable definitions of its relationships with the European powers” so it could focus on internal development and growth.

Monroe was the first president to take office since the War of 1812, and he was acutely conscious of that fact. The White House that Monroe moved into was still in the final phases of being rebuilt. America needed years of peace and couldn’t afford another calamitous war.

Monroe was well-suited for the job. By 1817, he had been a public figure for more than three decades, with diplomatic stints in London, Paris, and Madrid. He alone among the founders could lay claim to having won the confidence, and sometimes mentorship, of Washington, Jefferson, and Madison.

Fittingly, Monroe would be the first to make a presidential visit to the West. Like Washington, he undertook several regional tours throughout the country, seeking to inspect military facilities and unite a nation that had been fractured by the recent war.

The new president was a fierce proponent of expanding America’s holdings. But he did not “believe the geographic status of the United States as a virtual island nation offered it sufficient security,” Hart notes. Instead, he advocated for what a later president would call “peace through strength,” pushing for reform of state militias and maintaining a capable regular army.

As another biographer, Harry Ammon, observed, Monroe believed that “a diplomacy based on strength had a far better chance of realizing its objectives than a policy derived from weakness.”

Monroe’s secretary of state, John Quincy Adams, is rightly regarded as one of the most capable to have held that office. His fame derives from diplomatic feats such as the Adams-Onis Treaty, which gave Florida to the U.S. and established a firm Western boundary for the Louisiana Purchase, as well as the Monroe Doctrine warning European powers not to interfere in the Western Hemisphere.

The latter is a landmark document, built on and expanded by future presidents from Theodore Roosevelt to Donald Trump. Adams, as secretary of state, authored it. Monroe, as president, delivered it.

That Adams has received the lion’s share of the credit mirrors how later historians and pundits would credit the media-savvy Henry Kissinger for foreign policy achievements while ignoring the role of the less likable president he served, Richard Nixon.

America’s westward expansion brought security from nations abroad, but it also raised the specter of disunion at home. With each state added, the question of whether it would allow slavery was raised. 

Monroe would be the first president to confront head-on a problem that Jefferson famously said was like “holding a wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him or safely let go.” 

The 1820 Missouri Compromise, brokered by House Speaker Henry Clay, admitted Missouri as a slave state, Maine as a free state, and banned slavery in the lands of the Louisiana Purchase north of the 36°30′ latitude line. It was imperfect, the first of many such compromises.

Monroe, a slave owner himself, reluctantly supported it for what it really was: a temporary truce. But such truces bought the North time to industrialize and eventually defeat the South. By kicking the can down the road, they preserved the Union, both in the short and long term.

By the end of his presidency, Monroe was a tired man, his health broken from years of public service and wartime wounds. The “Era of Good Feelings” was coming to an end, with new political parties and movements forming that were more raucous than the era in which he came of age.

A quarter century of rule by the Democratic-Republican Party had a corrosive effect on D.C.’s bureaucracy, which had become, over time, corrupt and indolent. It would be up to a future president, Andrew Jackson, to go to war with it, but Monroe quite literally took a jab. 

According to the diary of John Quincy Adams, Monroe once raised fireplace tongs at Treasury Secretary William Crawford and threatened to “turn him out of the [White] House” after the latter grew angry at Monroe’s refusal to grant the patronage appointments that he wanted.

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Monroe seems to be the only president to have almost physically fought a Cabinet member.

But James Monroe deserves to be more than a trivia question. Now largely overlooked or forgotten, our last Founding Father did as much as his contemporaries to pave the way for American greatness.

Sean Durns (@seandurns) is deputy commentary editor of the Washington Examiner.