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Antebellum autograph books reveal the intimate, cross-sectional friendships northern and southern Princeton students formed in the years before the Civil War.

Ten years after their graduation, alumni from the class of 1859 established a prize meant to demonstrate their class unity after the divisive Civil War years. Their efforts to reconcile North and South reflected a national trend to obscure serious ideological differences and the role of slavery in the Civil War.

The College of New Jersey attracted large numbers of Virginia students in the 18th and 19th centuries, contributing to Princeton’s reputation as a school for southerners. This essay focuses on three students from Virginia whose careers as clergymen and educators reflected evolving arguments about slavery and emancipation from the Revolutionary War to the Civil War.

The extensive correspondence between antebellum Princeton student Henry Kirke White Muse and his slave-owning father illustrates the College of New Jersey’s appeal to southern students as well as its conservatism on the issue of slavery.

Thomas Carter Ruffin, Princeton alumnus and later Chief Justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court, propounded the legal doctrine of slave-owners’ absolute power over their human property in the 1829 case State v. Mann.