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At least five Princeton presidents who served between 1756 and 1822 owned enslaved people who lived, worked—and on one occasion were auctioned off—at the President’s House on campus. During this period, the President’s House was the center of slavery at Princeton.

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.

When a yellow fever epidemic devastated Philadelphia in 1793, former slave Marcus Marsh—born in Princeton in 1765—remained in the city to treat the sick alongside physician and founding father Benjamin Rush.

Between 1832 and 1863, more than 1,000 students lived in off-campus boarding houses while attending the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University). Certain boarding houses catered to large numbers of southern students.

Forced labor in Liberia built the Firestone fortune—and transformed Princeton. The story of Firestone, Liberia, and Princeton reveals how racist exploitation entangled and enriched Nassau Hall in the century that followed the U.S. Civil War.