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Princeton students engaged in heated debates over slavery during the contentious 1860 election, in which New Jersey was the only northern state where Abraham Lincoln lost the popular vote.

Tensions between Unionist and Secessionist students reached their peak in 1861, shortly after the outbreak of the Civil War.

News about the College of New Jersey and its students—including their connections to the South—spread across the country through multiple forms of print media.

The secession of southern states from the United States in 1860 and 1861 bitterly divided Princeton’s students along regional and political lines—prompting the withdrawal of one quarter of the student body, many of whom later fought in the Confederate Army or served in the rebel government.

On an 1855 trip to Princeton, Louisianan Ann Maria Davison visited fourteen homes in the town’s black neighborhood.  Davison’s observations convinced her that Princeton’s free black residents were intelligent and hard-working people fully capable of supporting themselves and their families—a position that contradicted common arguments in favor of slavery.