=321. The Era of Good Feeling.=—Monroe’s name is chiefly connected to-day with matters of foreign policy, and his administrations have been termed “The Era of Good Feeling,” because domestic affairs wore on the whole so quiet an aspect. Yet, as we shall soon see, the debates on the subject of slavery connected with the admission of Missouri as a state showed that the country was in reality far from united; and the tariff legislation of 1824 brought out the fact still more clearly in a few years. Harmony was also far from the minds of the politicians, however united politically the people might appear to be. Intrigues for the succession to the Presidency occupied the leading statesmen, and in the combinations formed by them a careful observer might have perceived the beginnings of a division into two parties not radically dissimilar to the Federalists and Democratic-Republicans of the preceding generation. =322. The Character of Monroe as President.=—Monroe has generally been regarded as the weakest of the early Presidents, although his popularity was widespread. This view is plausible, but hardly just. He certainly behaved with great dignity toward the intriguing politicians who were aiming to succeed him; he showed discretion in adopting from his advisers the foreign policy that bears his name; and he preserved a strict impartiality and adherence to the cause of the Union in the sectional disputes that disturbed his administrations. He was not a commanding man, yet he deserves to be remembered as a statesman who outgrew early rashness, and he was fully entitled to the confidence given him by the masses. For his second term (1821–1825), indeed, he had no opposition. But a solitary vote was cast against him, in order, as the story goes, that Washington should be the only President unanimously chosen. DIPLOMATIC ACHIEVEMENTS. =323. The Oregon Region.=—Two boundary disputes with Great Britain and Spain early occupied the attention of Monroe and his advisers. The first was mainly concerned with the so-called Oregon region beyond the Rockies, drained by the Columbia River, which the United States claimed through the discovery of this great stream by Captain Robert Gray in 1792, and through explorations made by Lewis and Clark (§ 287), whom Jefferson had sent out soon after the purchase of Louisiana (1805). In this region the British Hudson Bay Company had, however, established trading posts, and Monroe found that the best thing he could do was to agree upon the forty-ninth parallel as a northern boundary as far as the Rockies and upon joint occupancy for ten years of the disputed territory beyond.