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Betsey Stockton (1798?-1865), enslaved as a child in the household of Princeton president Ashbel Green, became a prominent and respected educator in Princeton, Philadelphia, and the Sandwich Islands (present-day Hawai'i).

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.

Jonathan Edwards Jr. (1746-1801), the son of early America’s preeminent theologian and Princeton’s third president, strongly opposed slavery throughout his life and career as a minister—becoming a leading antislavery activist of the 18th century and one of the few abolitionists Princeton ever produced.

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.

Aaron Burr Jr. (Class of 1772), the third Vice President of the United States, fathered two children by a woman of color from Calcutta, India. Their son, John Pierre Burr (1792-1864), would become an activist, abolitionist, and conductor on the Underground Railroad.