James Madison University - Index

James Madison University - Liberty & Learning - Index

piedmont, princeton, and an educated citizenry
Madison and Jefferson were destined to meet personally one last time in April
1826 at the regular Board of Visitors meeting in Charlottesville. Upon learning
of Jefferson’s death some three months later, Madison became the rector of the
University of Virginia. For the next eight years, he served with distinction, hiring
new faculty members, expanding course offerings, and enlarging the library to
more than 10,000 volumes. By 1834, though, Madison’s own health was failing,
and he was becoming increasingly immobile, unable to make the trip to Charlottesville.
He resigned his position as rector content in the legacy he had left in
education. As he had written sometime earlier,
What spectacle can be more edifying or more seasonable, than that of liberty
& learning, each leaning on the other for their mutual & surest support? 54
endnotes
Epigraph: John Pendleton Kennedy quoted in Drew R. McCoy, The Last of the Fathers: James Madison
& the Republican Legacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 17.
1 At the time of Madison’s birth, because of the Protestant Reformation and Protestants’ fierce opposition to
the papacy, the British were still using the inaccurate Julian calendar. As a result, Madison’s birth is sometimes
recorded as March 5, 1750 (OS), but it was, in fact, March 16, 1751, according to the Gregorian calendar.
2 James I quoted in Eric Burns, The Smoke of the Gods: A Social History of Tobacco (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 2007), 46.
3 Virginia has an excellent series of navigable rivers—the James, the York, the Rappahannock, and the
Potomac. These rivers divide the state’s tidewater region into three peninsulas—the lower peninsula (between
the James and York rivers), the middle peninsula (between the York and Rappahannock rivers), and the
Northern Neck (between the Rappahannock and Potomac rivers). Virginia has four distinct geographical
regions—tidewater, the piedmont, the Shenandoah Valley, and the mountain west.
4 The fall line of the James is at Richmond; the Rappahannock cataracts are at Fredericksburg; the Potomac’s
are at Alexandria/Washington, D.C.
5 At his death, Ambrose Madison listed ownership of twenty-nine slaves. See Ann L. Miller, The Short
Life and Strange Death of Ambrose Madison (Orange: Orange County Historical Society, 2001), 28. See also
Beth Taylor, “James Madison and Slavery” (lecture presented at James Madison University, 2008).
6 Oyer and Terminer trial quoted in Douglas B. Chambers, Murder at Montpelier: Igbo Africans in Virginia
(Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005), 5.
7 Miller, Death of Ambrose Madison, 27-28. The accused slaves were Pompey, Turk, and Dido. Pompey
was the person executed.
8 In one of history’s interesting coincidences, John Wilkes Booth crossed the Rappahannock River at the
ferry crossing between Port Conway and Port Royal in April 1865 after having assassinated President Abraham
Lincoln. Booth was killed a short time later at the Garrett farm house a short distance away. Today, Port
Royal is in slow but consistent decay, but its eighteenth - century architecture is readily apparent. See http://
www.co.caroline.va.us/portroyal.html.
9 Nelly’s mother, Rebecca Catlett Conway, had remarried at this point. William T. Hutchinson, ed., Papers
of James Madison 16 March 1751-16 December 1779 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 3.
10 Only two of Madison’s eleven siblings would out live him—William Madison (1762-1843) and Sarah
Catlett (1764-1843).
11 Bryan Green, Ann L. Miller, and Conover Hunt, Building a President’s House: The Construction of
James Madison’s Montpelier, (Orange: The Montpelier Foundation, 2007), 5.
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