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A firm majority of Princeton's founding trustees (sixteen out of twenty-three) bought, sold, traded, or inherited slaves during their lifetimes.

Prospect House and Palmer House, both now University properties, have deep links to the Potters—a slaveholding family with strong ties to Georgia as well as to Princeton and the College of New Jersey.

Many of the donors and fundraisers who contributed to the construction of Nassau Hall had substantial personal, familial, or business ties to slavery and the slave trade.

Princeton University, founded as the College of New Jersey in 1746, exemplifies the central paradox of American history. From the start, liberty and slavery were intertwined.

Jonathan Edwards Sr. (1703-58), who served as Princeton’s third president for less than two months, exercised an immense influence on religious and intellectual thought in colonial North America. Though he recognized the cruelty of the slave trade and considered enslaved people his spiritual equals, Edwards himself owned slaves throughout his life and career.