Site Search

Princeton’s reputation as a moderately conservative college with a large proportion of southern students attracted the sons of wealthy slave-owning families such as the Joneses of Liberty County, Georgia.

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.

African Americans were a constant presence at the College of New Jersey as servants, support staff, research and teaching assistants, and students. They labored under harsh conditions on a campus dominated by racism and white supremacy.

Reverend I. W. L. Roundtree, who attended the Princeton Theological Seminary in the 1890s and received a Master’s degree from the College of New Jersey in 1895, was one of Princeton’s earliest African American graduates. He may also have been the first and only former slave to graduate from the college.

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.