James Madison University - Index

James Madison University - Liberty & Learning - Index

Acknowledgments
Liberty and Learning was first conceived during a planning meeting with Janet
Wendelken from JMU’s Office of Development. During that time, we discussed
the need for a concise book on James Madison, which would help make this
most enigmatic of founders more accessible and relevant to our university’s student
body as well as to K-12 students from around the country. Janet quickly
became the book’s greatest advocate, and she successfully elicited the assistance
of the Roller-Bottimore Foundation in Richmond for the project. Through its
financial generosity and commitment to public education, Liberty and Learning
has become a reality. We are grateful for their confidence and support.
We are indebted to the many Madison scholars and researchers who have
compiled volumes of his original correspondence and official documents. David
Mattern’s work as editor of the Madison papers at the University of Virginia
is truly extraordinary and indispensable. Likewise, Holly Shulman and Catherine
Algor have provided similar exceptional scholarship on the life of Dolley
Madison. The three-volume set of Jefferson and Madison’s correspondence, The
Republic of Letters, compiled by James Morton Smith has been particularly helpful
in chronicling the friendship between these two extraordinary men. There
are several excellent biographies of Madison that we have routinely consulted
as well, including Irving Brant’s The Fourth President: A Life of James Madison,
Drew McCoy’s The Last of the Fathers: James Madison & the Republican Legacy,
and Ralph Ketchum’s seminal James Madison: A Biography.
In our quest to learn more about James Madison’s first teacher, Donald Robertson,
we visited the King and Queen County Historical Society and were granted
complete access to their historical records and files. We were also given the opportunity
to visit the site of Robertson’s remarkable school, although, sadly, nothing
of it remains today. At the Virginia Historical Society, we were able to view Robertson’s
original journal, which partially chronicles the early studies of the young
Madison. They are fascinating records, and some of these pages are printed here
for the first time. The James Madison Center maintains an annual scholarship
for a pre-service elementary teacher named in Donald Robertson’s honor. Madison
once said of Robertson, “All that I have been in my life I owe largely to that
man,” a wonderful testament to the impact that great teachers can have on their
ix