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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.

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.

James Collins Johnson, a fugitive slave freed after an 1843 trial in Princeton, became a prominent figure in town and on campus over the course of his many decades working at the College of New Jersey.

Alexander Dumas Watkins (1855-1903), a self-taught biologist, conducted significant scientific research alongside Princeton University professors from the 1880s until his death in 1903. Despite holding no formal academic position, Watkins worked in Princeton’s laboratories and taught courses as the University’s first Black instructor—and the last until the 1950s.

The College of New Jersey attracted large numbers of Virginia students in the 18th and 19th centuries, contributing to Princeton’s reputation as a school for southerners. This essay focuses on three students from Virginia whose careers as clergymen and educators reflected evolving arguments about slavery and emancipation from the Revolutionary War to the Civil War.