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Joseph Henry spent fourteen years at the College of New Jersey, serving as Chair of Natural History between 1832 and 1846. Sam Parker, his assistant, was a free Black man.

Thomas Carter Ruffin, Princeton alumnus and later Chief Justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court, propounded the legal doctrine of slave-owners’ absolute power over their human property in the 1829 case State v. Mann.

As tensions over slavery led to sectional crisis in the first half of the 19th century, Princeton’s commencement addresses became increasingly pro-slavery in tone.