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More than half of the officers and founding members of the New Jersey Colonization Society were Princeton affiliates.

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.

Peter Scudder rose from humble beginnings to become a successful businessman and a notable member of the free Black community in Princeton.

Samuel Stanhope Smith, Princeton’s seventh president (1795-1812), was an early defender of the unity of mankind—arguing that environment, not innate biological differences, determined one’s race.  His convictions, however, did not prevent him from owning slaves himself, and his teachings ultimately influenced Princeton alumni to establish the American Colonization Society.

Princeton’s first nine presidents all owned slaves at some point in their lives. Though widely considered to be forward-thinking religious, intellectual, and political leaders in the 18th and 19th centuries, they failed to align their practices with their ideals—embodying the tensions between liberty and slavery that characterized American life from the colonial period to the Civil War.