Slaves in the Ivy League: Princeton Discovers Its Racial Past

Princeton U. Archives

When Martha A. Sandweiss moved to Princeton, in 2009, she didn’t know much about the history of the university, least of all why she had heard some people refer to it as “the southernmost Ivy.” Ignorance and curiosity, she said, drove her first undergraduate seminar, in 2013. In that course, Ms. Sandweiss, a professor of history, worked with a group of students to examine Princeton’s historical ties to slavery, largely because no scholars before her seemed to have taken a thorough look.

Nobody is as surprised as Ms. Sandweiss by what that seminar has sparked. Out of it came the Princeton and Slavery Project, a continuing work of research that already stands as one of the most-ambitious investigations of an institution’s racial history.

The project’s website, which went live on Monday, provides remarkable details about Princeton’s past among its 88 stories and 370 primary-source documents.

For example: At some point in their lives, the college’s first nine presidents — the last of whom served until 1854 — owned slaves, even though a New Jersey law in 1804 called for the gradual abolition of slavery. One of the project’s most-striking discoveries came from a newspaper clipping dated 1766. Princeton’s fifth president, Samuel Finley, had died, and the Pennsylvania Journal announced the sale of his belongings — furniture, cattle, books, and other ephemera. Also up for sale at an auction, to be held between the two sycamore trees framing his home: his six slaves. Two women, a man, and three children were to be sold, provided that they had not been purchased before the auction.

Reckoning With Slavery

In recent years, scholarship on the history of slavery has leapt beyond academe to force a societal reckoning. This occasional series explores fresh questions scholars are asking as America confronts its history of human bondage.

• A New Path to Atonement
• A ‘Long Overdue Conversation’: Do Universities That Benefited From Slavery Owe a Debt to Black Colleges?
• The Scholars Behind the Quest for Reparations

Princeton prohibited students from bringing their own slaves to the campus in 1794. But students regularly interacted with slaves, who would deliver wood to their rooms or work on neighboring farms. And students would undoubtedly run into slaves when visiting the president’s home. The college’s eighth president, Ashbel Green, purchased John, a 12-year-old, and Phoebe, an 18-year-old, as slaves in 1813 after moving to Princeton.

As the plantation economy moved westward from 1748 to 1865, Princeton’s enrollment reach followed. A heat map on the website depicts the geographic origins of Princeton’s students, showing that on four occasions between 1790 and 1821, more than 60 percent were from Southern states. The influx left a heavy mark on the political and social culture on campus, Ms. Sandweiss said.

For the first year of the project, Ms. Sandweiss and Daniel J. Linke, the university archivist, pored over the institution’s archives, not knowing what they would find, but knowing they would find something.

“That first year was challenging,” Ms. Sandweiss said. “We tried different questions, we tried different research approaches. We had to figure out what kinds of questions the archives could answer for us, and what kinds of stories the archives might suggest to us.”

When she started her work, Princeton lagged behind institutions like Georgetown, Brown, Harvard, and the University of Virginia, which had already taken steps to research their ties to slavery. At first, the Princeton research was a passion project for Ms. Sandweiss and Mr. Linke, who worked without any institutional mandate.

After the first year, Princeton began to offer more-formal support. With the help of a postdoctoral researcher, paid for by the university’s Humanities Council, the team delved deeper into the archives, asking “more sophisticated questions” and finding “richer stories.”

Patience paid off with a website that is easily accessible to the public and has room for expansion. That’s why the team decided to produce a website instead of a book. Students, both undergraduates and graduates, have contributed stories on the website, but Ms. Sandweiss wanted to extend the conversation to the local community as well.

“I’m a historian, and historians are really good at figuring out what happened in the past, but historians have to play by a particular set of rules,” Ms. Sandweiss said. “We live and die by our footnotes.”

But writers, playwrights, and artists have the freedom to treat history in more creative ways, and others on the campus have taken the opportunity to expand on her primary-source documents. The Princeton University Art Museum has commissioned a sculpture to display in front of the president’s house. The McCarter Theater has augmented its schedule with seven short plays derived from the documents, the public library added an exhibition, and public schools in the area designed new curricular units. An academic symposium, with the Nobel laureate Toni Morrison as the keynote speaker, is sold out. The theater has added more shows. The public-library exhibit has been well attended.

“There were a handful of slaves left in New Jersey at the end of the Civil War,” Ms. Sandweiss said. “I think a lot of people don’t realize that, so the story of slavery in the state and in this town is much more complicated and deeper than many people know. It’s a discovery for them.”

But there’s nothing special about Princeton, she said. It’s not any different from other institutions; it is American.

“The history of Princeton is the history of America writ small,” she said. “It makes us just like the United States of America. We are deeply, deeply American in sharing this history with our country in a larger scale.”