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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 Witherspoon-Jackson community, centered around Witherspoon Street, comprised the heart of Princeton’s African-American community during  the 19th century.

A firm majority of Princeton's founding trustees (sixteen out of twenty-three) bought, sold, traded, or inherited slaves during their lifetimes.

After a fire destroyed Nassau Hall in 1802, Princeton alumnus Joseph Clark canvassed Virginia on a nine-month fundraising mission. Throughout the trip, Clark relied on the hospitality and financial contributions of fellow Princeton alumni and their connections among Virginia’s slave-owning elite.

Princeton’s first nine presidents all owned enslaved people at some point in their lives. Though widely considered to be forward-thinking religious, intellectual, and political leaders in the 18th and 19th centuries, they failed to align their practices with their ideals—embodying the tensions between liberty and slavery that characterized American life from the colonial period to the Civil War.