Site Search

Although Princeton president Ashbel Green condemned slavery on moral grounds, his religious convictions did not keep him from owning or hiring enslaved people himself—including at least three who lived and worked in his house on campus.

Local academies in Princeton helped maintain the relationship between the College of New Jersey and the South.

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.

Princeton University, founded as the College of New Jersey in 1746, exemplifies the central paradox of American history. From the start, liberty and slavery were intertwined.

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.