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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.

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.

James Carnahan, the College of New Jersey’s longest-serving president (1823-1854), was a slave-owner and a director of the American Colonization Society of New Jersey. Records show that Carnahan owned slaves in 1820, just before assuming the presidency, and that free African Americans resided in his household into the 1850s.

Prospect Farm, today part of Princeton’s central campus, was worked by enslaved people in the 18th and 19th centuries. Prospect House was built in 1851 with money derived from slave labor on southern rice plantations.

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.