[Jabez Lamar Monroe]. American educator, born in Lincoln County, GA, on the 5th of June 1825; graduated at University of Georgia in 1843 and at the Dane Law School of Harvard in 1845. After practicing law for a short period he enlisted as a private in the Mexican War (1846). In 1847 he was elected to the legislature of Alabama, and was re-elected in 1853 and 1855. In 1856 he was an elector to the convention that nominated Buchanan. In 1857 he was elected to Congress as a state’s rights advocate, and served until 1861, when he resigned. He was a representative in the first Confederate Congress (1861), and served also in the Confederate army (1864–65) as a lieutenant-colonel of cavalry. He afterward was ordained a Baptist minister, and was president of Howard College, Alabama (1866–68), and professor of English, philosophy and constitutional law in Richmond College (1868–81). In 1881 he was made general agent of the Peabody Fund, with a residence in Washington. From 1874 until 1885 he was president of the foreign mission board of the Southern Baptist convention. In the early part of the latter year he was appointed United States minister to Spain, in which capacity he was able to settle some difficult questions which had been in dispute for years. He received the degree of LL.D. from Mercer University in 1867, and of D.D. from Rochester University in 1871. His publications include Baptists and Pedobaptists (1877); Constitutional Government in Spain (1889); William Ewart Gladstone: A Study (1891); and The Southern States of the American Union (1894).
