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Founded and supported by 19th-century Princeton alumni, the American Colonization Society promoted the repatriation of freed slaves to a colony in Africa. Ultimately, however, colonization was more of an intellectual movement for moderately antislavery whites than a practical option for free blacks.

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

A truly national denomination from the 18th century to the Civil War, American Presbyterianism encompassed a wide range of viewpoints on slavery. Prominent leaders in the church were slaveholders, moderate antislavery advocates, and abolitionists.

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.

Princeton students and their families lived in the Mississippi area decades before statehood in 1817. From the 1790s to the Civil War, Mississippians at the College of New Jersey came from elite families who built their wealth on cotton and slave labor.