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

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.

At least five Princeton presidents who served between 1756 and 1822 owned enslaved people who lived, worked—and on one occasion were auctioned off—at the President’s House on campus. During this period, the President’s House was the center of slavery at Princeton.

Samuel Davies, Princeton’s fourth president (1759-61), was a pioneering Presbyterian minister on Virginia’s western frontier and one of the earliest missionaries to enslaved people in the British colonies. Davies preached the spiritual equality of Africans and African Americans and supported the education of enslaved people, but owned at least two slaves during his life.