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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.

Princeton’s faculty and students actively opposed abolition, creating a climate of fear and intimidation around the subject during the 19th century. Although some Princeton affiliates were critical of slavery, the institution demonstrated a catastrophic failure of leadership on the greatest moral question of the age.

Betsey Stockton (1798?-1865), a former slave of Princeton president Ashbel Green, became a prominent and respected educator in Princeton, Philadelphia, and the Sandwich Islands (present-day Hawaii).

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.

The secession of southern states from the United States in 1860 and 1861 bitterly divided Princeton’s students along regional and political lines—prompting the withdrawal of one quarter of the student body, many of whom later fought in the Confederate Army or served in the rebel government.