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John Maclean Jr., Princeton’s tenth president (1854-1868), was a non-slaveholder and held moderate antislavery views. His commitment to attracting southern students to the college and reducing sectional tension on campus, however, contributed to Princeton’s conservatism in the years leading up to the Civil War.

James Carnahan, the College of New Jersey’s longest-serving president (1823-1854), was a slave-owner and a director of the American Colonization Society of New Jersey. Records show that Carnahan owned slaves in 1820, just before assuming the presidency, and that free African Americans resided in his household into the 1850s.

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

Princeton alumni from South Carolina owned successful plantations, large numbers of slaves, and served as leaders in the Confederate cause during the Civil War.

In 1819, Princeton Mayor Erkuries Beatty engaged a recent College of New Jersey graduate to recapture his runaway slave, Joe. The incident underscores the terror and uncertainty of enslavement in central Jersey.