Site Search

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’s first nine presidents all owned enslaved people at some point in their lives. Though widely considered to be forward-thinking religious, intellectual, and political leaders in the 18th and 19th centuries, they failed to align their practices with their ideals—embodying the tensions between liberty and slavery that characterized American life from the colonial period to the Civil War.

John Witherspoon (1723-1794), Princeton’s sixth president and founding father of the United States, had a complex relationship to slavery. Though he advocated revolutionary ideals of liberty and personally tutored several free Africans and African Americans in Princeton, he himself owned enslaved people and both lectured and voted against the abolition of slavery in New Jersey.

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.

Hundreds of Princeton alumni served the Confederacy as soldiers, officers, and political leaders. Yet Princeton’s close involvement with the Confederate States of America has received surprisingly little scholarly attention until recently.