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Princeton Theological Seminary’s 19th century faculty and students encountered enslaved people as a familiar part of life. Though early leaders of the seminary owned slaves and largely failed to condemn the institution of slavery, some notable alumni—including the first African American man to graduate from a theological seminary in the United States—became prominent antislavery activists.

Princeton student Thomas Ancrum attacked black abolitionist minister Theodore Wright during the commencement of 1836. The incident exposed the commitment to white supremacy among college students and officials.

James McCosh, Princeton’s eleventh president (1868-88), admitted African American graduate students into his classes and strongly criticized slavery and the Confederacy—convictions that angered white southern students attending the college after the Civil War.

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.

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.