On 1 June 2024 J. C. A. Stagg retired as editor in chief of the Papers of James Madison, bringing to a close nearly four decades at the project’s helm. During that time John oversaw the publication of twenty-nine volumes of Madison’s writings, steering the Congressional Series and Presidential Series to their conclusions and inaugurating the Retirement Series. In 1996 the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations awarded volume 2 of the Secretary of State Series (edited by Mary A. Hackett, J. C. A. Stagg, Jeanne Kerr Cross, and Susan Holbrook Perdue) the Arthur S. Link Prize, which was bestowed on outstanding collections of primary source materials in the fields of international or diplomatic history. John is also the author of three scholarly monographs (Mr. Madison's War: Politics, Diplomacy, and Warfare in the Early American Republic, 1783–1830 [1983]; Borderlines in Borderlands: James Madison and the Spanish-American Frontier, 1776–1821 [2009]; and The War of 1812: Conflict for a Continent [2012]) as well as more than twenty articles and essays published in scholarly journals and collections. John’s “Freedom and Subordination: Disciplinary Problems in the U.S. Army during the War of 1812” won a 2015 Moncado Prize as one of the best articles published in the the Journal of Military History. John’s encyclopedic knowledge of Madisoniana has been invaluable to the project and is simply irreplaceable. We will greatly miss his humor and kindness and hope that his retirement will be filled with much good music.