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Cezar Trent, one of the elite free Black citizens of antebellum Princeton, was the employee of a prominent landowner, the object of a town resident's published recollections, and a slave owner himself.

More than half of the officers and founding members of the New Jersey Colonization Society were Princeton affiliates.

Although Princeton president Ashbel Green condemned slavery on moral grounds, his religious convictions did not keep him from owning or hiring enslaved people himself—including at least three who lived and worked in his house on campus.

The financial contributions of Moses Taylor Pyne (Class of 1877), one of Princeton's most prominent benefactors, reveal the complex relationship between Princeton, the American sugar trade, and the slave economy.

Princeton’s first nine presidents all owned enslaved people at some point in their lives. Though widely considered to be forward-thinking religious, intellectual, and political leaders in the 18th and 19th centuries, they failed to align their practices with their ideals—embodying the tensions between liberty and slavery that characterized American life from the colonial period to the Civil War.