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Prospect House and Palmer House, both now University properties, have deep links to the Potters—a slaveholding family with strong ties to Georgia as well as to Princeton and the College of New Jersey.

The lives and careers of Princeton’s early students from Georgia, who went on to hold prominent political positions during the colonial and Revolutionary periods, illustrate one of the key paradoxes of American history: the interconnection of slavery and liberty from the time of the country's founding.

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.

As Princeton president John Witherspoon’s children married and left New Jersey, their relationships to slavery were shaped by the political climate and economy of their new homes throughout the North and South.

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.