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Jonathan Edwards Sr. (1703-58), who served as Princeton’s third president for less than two months, exercised an immense influence on religious and intellectual thought in colonial North America. Though he recognized the cruelty of the slave trade and considered enslaved people his spiritual equals, Edwards himself owned slaves throughout his life and career.

Nassau Hall’s memorial atrium—built in the 1920s—reflects the era’s reconciliationist politics, erasing the role of slavery and emancipation in the Civil War and granting moral equivalency to the Union and Confederate causes.