Site Search

News about the College of New Jersey and its students—including their connections to the South—spread across the country through multiple forms of print media.

Princeton students engaged in heated debates over slavery during the contentious 1860 election, in which New Jersey was the only northern state where Abraham Lincoln lost the popular vote.

Hundreds of Princeton alumni served the Confederacy as soldiers, officers, and political leaders. Yet Princeton’s close involvement with the Confederate States of America has received surprisingly little scholarly attention until recently.

The Civil War divided Princeton as well as the United States along regional lines, complicating the university’s patriotic history of wartime service as students and alumni fought in both the Union and Confederate forces.

Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve (class of 1849) was a celebrated classical scholar and unrepentant Confederate apologist. Gildersleeve’s education at Princeton, which he considered “almost a Southern college,” shaped his defense of the South during and after the Civil War.