The circumstances of Monroe's election pledged him to a truly national policy. He had received the electoral votes of all but three States. * He was now President of an undivided country, not merely a Virginian fortuitously elevated to the chief magistracy and regarded as alien in sympathy to the North and East. Any doubts on this point were dispelled by the popular demonstrations which greeted him on his tour through Federalist strongholds in the Northeast. "I have seen enough," he wrote in grateful recollection, "to satisfy me that the great mass of our fellow-citizens in the Eastern States are as firmly attached to the union and republican government as I have always believed or could desire them to be." The news-sheets which followed his progress from day to day coined the phrase, "era of good feeling," which has passed current ever since as a characterization of his administration.
* Monroe received 183 electoral votes and Rufus King, 34-- the votes of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Delaware.
It was in this admirable temper and with this broad national outlook that Monroe chose his advisers and heads of departments. He was well aware of the common belief that his predecessors had appointed Virginians to the Secretaryship of State in order to prepare the way for their succession to the Presidency. He was determined, therefore, to avert the suspicion of sectional bias by selecting some one from the Eastern States, rather than from the South or from the West, hitherto so closely allied to the South. His choice fell upon John Quincy Adams, "who by his age, long experience in our foreign affairs, and adoption into the Republican party," he assured Jefferson, "seems to have superior pretentions." It was an excellent appointment from every point of view but one. Monroe had overlooked--and the circumstance did him infinite credit--the exigencies of politics and passed over an individual whose vaulting ambition had already made him an aspirant to the Presidency. Henry Clay was grievously disappointed and henceforward sulked in his tent, refusing the Secretaryship of War which the President tendered. Eventually the brilliant young John C. Calhoun took this post. This South Carolinian was in the prime of life, full of fire and dash, ardently patriotic, and nationally-minded to an unusual degree. Of William H. Crawford of Georgia, who retained the Secretaryship of the Treasury, little need be said except that he also was a presidential aspirant who saw things always from the angle of political expediency. Benjamin W. Crowninshield as Secretary of the Navy and William Wirt as Attorney-General completed the circle of the President's intimate advisers.