“It was soon found to be improper, at a period of so much danger and urgency, to keep that Department in the hands of a temporary occupant; it ought to be filled by the person who would have to form the plan of the campaign in every quarter, and be responsible for it. It being indispensable to fill it with a prominent character, and the question remaining undecided relative to the command of the army, more persons thinking a change urgent, and the opinion of the President in regard to me being the same, General Armstrong was put in the Department of War. Had it been decided to continue the command of the army under General Dearborn, and the question been with me, ‘Would I take the Department of War, the President and other friends wishing it?’ I would not have hesitated a moment in complying; but it never assumed that form.” If Monroe was more jealous of one man than of another, his antipathies centred upon John Armstrong, the late American minister at Paris. As has been already shown, Monroe came into the State Department expecting rivalry with Armstrong; but he had no occasion to begin active measures of hostility. Armstrong’s opinions of Madison and Monroe were known to be the same as those of other New Yorkers; if he came to the support of the Administration he came not in order to please the Virginians, but to rescue the government from what he thought Virginian incompetence or narrowness; and that Armstrong would shut the door of military glory in the face of the Secretary of State was as certain as that the Secretary of State would, sooner or later, revenge the insult by ejecting Armstrong from the Cabinet if he could.