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

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

Princeton students and their families lived in the Mississippi area decades before statehood in 1817. From the 1790s to the Civil War, Mississippians at the College of New Jersey came from elite families who built their wealth on cotton and slave labor.

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.