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10Results for "April 4, 1777"
Stories

Princeton’s Founding Trustees
by Michael R. Glass | Colonial & Early National (1746-1820)
A firm majority of Princeton's founding trustees (sixteen out of twenty-three) bought, sold, traded, or inherited slaves during their lifetimes.

John Witherspoon
by Lesa Redmond | Colonial & Early National (1746-1820)
John Witherspoon (1723-1794), Princeton’s sixth president and founding father of the United States, had a complex relationship to slavery. Though he advocated revolutionary ideals of liberty and personally tutored several free Africans and African Americans in Princeton, he himself owned enslaved people and both lectured and voted against the abolition of slavery in New Jersey.

Princeton’s Fugitive Slaves
by Joseph Yannielli | Colonial & Early National (1746-1820), Antebellum (1820-1861)
Princeton residents published at least 28 newspaper advertisements for runaway slaves between 1774 and 1818. Each tells a unique story of courage and resistance in the face of tremendous odds.

Princeton and the Civil War
by W. Barksdale Maynard | Civil War (1861-1865)
The Civil War divided Princeton as well as the United States along regional lines, complicating the university’s patriotic history of wartime service as students and alumni fought in both the Union and Confederate forces.

The Manumission of Prime
by Izzy Kasdin | Colonial & Early National (1746-1820)
In 1786, an enslaved man named Prime became one of only three enslaved people to be manumitted by act of the New Jersey legislature in exchange for his service during the Revolutionary War.
Primary Sources

Receipt of Sale for Prime
April 4, 1777 | Colonial & Early National (1746-1820)
This receipt of sale documents John Taylor's purchase of Prime from Mary Bainbridge.