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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.

Princeton students engaged in heated debates over slavery during the contentious 1860 election, in which New Jersey was the only northern state where Abraham Lincoln lost the popular vote.

Samuel Stanhope Smith, Princeton’s seventh president (1795-1812), was an early defender of the unity of mankind—arguing that environment, not innate biological differences, determined one’s race.  His convictions, however, did not prevent him from owning slaves himself, and his teachings ultimately influenced Princeton alumni to establish the American Colonization Society.

Betsey Stockton (1798?-1865), enslaved as a child in the household of Princeton president Ashbel Green, became a prominent and respected educator in Princeton, Philadelphia, and the Sandwich Islands (present-day Hawai'i).

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.