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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.

John Maclean Jr., Princeton’s tenth president (1854-1868), was a non-slaveholder and held moderate antislavery views. His commitment to attracting southern students to the college and reducing sectional tension on campus, however, contributed to Princeton’s conservatism in the years leading up to the Civil War.

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.

Abel Upshur’s political career began and ended with Princeton: in 1807, he was booted from the college for leading a student rebellion; in 1844, he was killed in an explosion aboard the U.S.S. Princeton. In the years between, Upshur was one the most influential pro-slavery statesmen in the antebellum United States.

In 1895, African American Princeton resident John Collins shot and killed white Princeton student Frederick Ohl. The racially biased news coverage surrounding Collins’s trial illustrates racial tensions still present on campus and in town thirty years after the end of the Civil War.