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Princeton students and their families lived in the Mississippi area decades before statehood in 1817. From the 1790s to the Civil War, Mississippians at the College of New Jersey came from elite families who built their wealth on cotton and slave labor.

Cezar Trent, one of the elite free Black citizens of antebellum Princeton, was the employee of a prominent landowner, the object of a town resident's published recollections, and a slave owner himself.

Princeton residents published at least 28 newspaper advertisements for runaway slaves between 1774 and 1818. Each tells a unique story of courage and resistance in the face of tremendous odds.

Robert Field Stockton, a naval officer and supporter of the American Colonization Society, embodied the College of New Jersey’s struggle—and eventual failure—to reconcile the cruelties of slavery with a desire to encourage harmony between the North and South.

Runaway slaves from the Princeton area used sophisticated knowledge of the late-18th and early-19th century’s changing legal and political landscape when they planned their escapes, forcing slave-owners to acknowledge their resourcefulness and determination to liberate themselves.