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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.

Princeton Theological Seminary’s 19th century faculty and students encountered enslaved people as a familiar part of life. Though early leaders of the seminary owned slaves and largely failed to condemn the institution of slavery, some notable alumni—including the first African American man to graduate from a theological seminary in the United States—became prominent antislavery activists.

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.