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Robert Field Stockton, a naval officer and supporter of the American Colonization Society, embodied the College of New Jersey’s struggle—and eventual failure—to reconcile the cruelties of slavery with a desire to encourage harmony between the North and South.

Runaway slaves from the Princeton area used sophisticated knowledge of the late-18th and early-19th century’s changing legal and political landscape when they planned their escapes, forcing slave-owners to acknowledge their resourcefulness and determination to liberate themselves.

Stephen Alexander, Princeton’s first astronomy professor, held moderate antislavery views but denied the equality of Black and white Americans. At the same time, he may have employed an African American man named Alfred Scudder as an assistant on campus.