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Tapping Reeve (1744-1823), Princeton alumnus and founder of the nation’s first law school, served as co-counsel in the 1781 case Brom and Bett v. J. Ashley, Esq., which led to the abolition of slavery in Massachusetts.

Under the leadership of President Witherspoon, the College of New Jersey launched an ill-fated campaign to secure donations from slaveholding planter elites in the West Indies.

Jonathan Dickinson, a prominent figure in the Great Awakening of the mid-18th century, served as Princeton’s first president.  Genny, an enslaved girl he purchased in 1733, may have worked beside him and his students in the college’s earliest years.

John Witherspoon and Samuel Stanhope Smith’s curriculum emphasized Scottish moral philosophy, providing early Princeton students with a new philosophical framework for opposing slavery even as pro-slavery apologists used the same philosophical concepts to defend the practice of owning slaves.

Patriot and theologian Samuel Hopkins (1721-1803) vigorously opposed slavery throughout his life. Paradoxically, his antislavery theology was inspired by his mentor, the slave-owning Princeton president Jonathan Edwards Sr.