The Report

When Princeton Seminary was founded by the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in 1812, slavery in New Jersey remained very much alive. To be sure, the state had passed a law eight years earlier declaring that any child born to a slave mother after July 4, 1804, would eventually be free. Those children, however, had to serve the mother’s master for a term—women until the age of 21, men until 25. Those already in bondage prior to 1804 remained slaves until they died. As late as the Civil War, New Jersey continued to have a slave population, albeit a steadily dwindling one. As one historian has observed, the last 13 African Americans “held in bondage in New Jersey in 1860 were liberated by death or the Thirteenth Amendment.” In short, gradual abolition also meant prolonged bondage, and it shifted the financial cost of freedom from the slaveholders to the enslaved themselves. The slow movement toward freedom in other Northern states often (though not invariably) paralleled that of New Jersey, but the Garden State was clearly in the rear of the procession. This fact meant that those who taught in the Seminary during its first years and those who studied here encountered slavery as a familiar part of life. They also encountered freed African Americans in a greater number than would have been the case in most New Jersey towns. In 1840, the census listed approximately 21 percent of the community as black—about three and a half times the percentage for the entire state.²

Princeton Seminary’s relationship to slavery also needs to be set in a national and international context in which support for the institution of slavery was declining and yet its effects were deeply enmeshed in nearly all aspects of social and economic life. “Everywhere in the country,” Gordon Wood has written of the 1780s, “most of the Revolutionary leaders assumed that slavery was on its last legs and headed for destruction.” Between 1777 and 1804, Northern states outlawed slavery or provided for the gradual emancipation of those in bondage. Even in the South, particularly the Upper South, many felt the institution to be waning. In some places the strict slave codes passed at the beginning of the 18th century were laxly enforced. Virginia, Delaware, and Maryland passed laws making it easier for masters to free slaves, and there was often talk in the South of the eventual demise of the institution. Then, in 1807, largely with Southern acquiescence, Congress outlawed the foreign slave trade, effective the following year.

But as early as the 1790s, there were also signs of growing wariness about anti-slavery rhetoric. The black rebellion in the French colony Saint-Domingue (Haiti), and later, in 1800, the revolt in Henrico County, Virginia, led by the artisan slave Gabriel, made many Southerners uneasy with loose talk about freedom or ameliorating the condition of slaves. Laws now obliged free blacks to carry papers or wear patches proving their freedom, and Virginia in 1806 passed a statute requiring that freed slaves depart the state. With the invention of the cotton gin and the opening of new territories east of the Mississippi River and then in the west with the Louisiana Purchase, the use of slave labor spread rapidly and became more—not less—entrenched as cotton became an economic powerhouse. The controversy over the admission of Missouri as a slave state in 1820 deepened divisions over slavery. As these events were unrolling, Princeton Seminary was created and entered the first decades of its life.³

2. James J. Gigantino II, The Ragged Road to Abolition: Slavery and Freedom in New Jersey, 1775-1865 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015); Gregory Nobles, “Betsey Stockton,” Princeton & Slavery Project, accessed December 2, 2017. The quotation is from Arthur Zilversmit, The First Emancipation: The Abolition of Slavery in the North (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), 222. In addition to Zilversmit, other works examining the complexities of abolition in the North include Douglas R. Egerton, Death or Liberty: African Americans and Revolutionary America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).

3. Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 508-42; quotation on 518; Douglas R. Egerton, Gabriel’s Rebellion: The Virginia Slave Conspiracies of 1800 and 1802 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993). Of course, the American Revolution, even when its rhetoric invoked themes of universal liberty, also coded its message in ways that were often far more restrictive; see, for example, Robert G. Parkinson, The Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016).

In the Seminary’s early years, several of its founders and prominent leaders were entangled with slavery and even employed slave labor themselves. Ashbel Green (1762-1848), the first president of the Seminary Board of Directors, is a case in point. In 1809, Green, then pastor of Philadelphia’s Second Presbyterian Church, formally proposed the creation of the Seminary to the Presbyterian General Assembly. At the school’s opening in 1812, he was elected president of the Board of Directors—a post he held until his death in 1848. He was also president of the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University) from 1812 to 1822. Despite espousing anti-slavery sentiments (examined below), Green employed slave labor. Shortly after becoming president of the college, he acquired a 12-year-old boy, John, in addition to Phoebe, a girl almost 18. As historian R. Isabela Morales observes, their respective birth years (1801 and 1794) meant that they were not covered by New Jersey’s gradual manumission law of 1804. An entry in Green’s diary, however, indicates that he may have promised them eventual freedom if they served him satisfactorily. Their ultimate fate, however, is unclear. Also among Green’s servants was Betsey Stockton, who was born sometime around 1798, probably as a slave in the family of Robert Stockton, one of Princeton’s most prominent figures. Betsey entered the Green household as a young girl, transferred to Ashbel’s wife, Elizabeth, who was the daughter of Robert Stockton.

Green’s attitudes toward slavery are difficult to discern, as his relationship with Betsey Stockton indicates. Green’s encouragement of Betsey’s education and his willingness to free her and to support her involvement as a missionary to the Hawaiian islands (then called the Sandwich Islands) have been taken as evidence that his household provided a mild and relatively benign form of slavery. Yet it is possible to read the sources—almost all of which came from him and reflected his self-perceptions—in a more critical light. During a period when he found her recalcitrant, he sold her labor for several years to someone else in his extended family. In Morales’s judgment, one must resist romanticizing Green as an indulgent master, for he “exercised patriarchal authority in all realms of his life, authority that extended to corporal punishment of his children, students, and slaves. Green described one such occasion in his diary entry for December 9, 1816: ‘Had a most uncomfortable time with my servant John. I had to whip him.’” Yet whatever one’s assessment of his relationship with his slaves, including Betsey Stockton, Green did facilitate her missionary service which in turn paved the way for her, after returning to the United States, to embark on a career as an educator, first in Philadelphia and then in Princeton, where she shaped the distinguished Quarry St. School for black children.⁴

Archibald Alexander (1772-1851), the first professor at Princeton Seminary, likewise was complicit with slavery, although there is no evidence that he held slaves while he was at the Seminary. A native of Virginia, he was ordained in 1794 to serve the Briery and Cub Creek Presbyterian churches in the state’s southside, became president of Hampden-Sydney College in 1797, and was called to the Third (“Old Pine”) Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia in 1807.  While there, he assumed a leading role in wider Presbyterian circles and advocated that the General Assembly establish a theological seminary; and when Princeton Seminary was formed in 1812, he was named the first professor.

Alexander’s entanglement with slavery dated at least from his days as pastor of the Briery Church, which derived some of its revenue from slavery. In 1766, the church began a campaign to raise funds to purchase slaves. The intent was to hire out the slaves—and their descendants—in order to raise money to pay the minister’s salary and other church-related expenses. “For the next 100 years,” historian Jennifer Oast has recently documented, “the members of Briery Presbyterian were the beneficiaries of the labor of those slaves and their descendants.” Presumably, too, Archibald Alexander was a financial beneficiary when the church paid him for his services as pastor. Oast also suggests that Hampden-Sydney College, while not possessing slaves itself, on occasion hired their labor from those who did own them.⁵

Alexander benefitted from slavery again when he acquired through his wife, Janetta Waddel, a slave woman named Daphne who had served her since childhood. When the Alexanders moved to Philadelphia, Daphne accompanied the family. Slaves brought into Pennsylvania from other states would, if their owners remained more than six months, become free. Although the Alexanders apparently did not formally emancipate Daphne when they went to Philadelphia, she and they recognized her changed legal status when she accompanied them. The Alexanders’ subsequent relationship with Daphne—or at least the family’s memory of it—is illuminating. As told by Alexander’s son more than a half century later, the salient facts were these: Daphne’s husband, John Boatman, had remained in Virginia as a slave, presumably owned by a family other than Alexander’s. When members of Philadelphia’s Society of Friends learned of her separation from her spouse, they raised money to purchase his freedom, and he joined her. For a time, Alexander “kept them both as hired servants upon wages.” Realizing that he could earn more elsewhere, Boatman—remembered by the Alexanders as “a brawny and ill-favored black”—became a coachman for the governor of Pennsylvania. Likewise, his wife “learned to entertain more lofty thoughts” and “she soon left her kind protectors and set up for herself.”  Then the husband went astray, deserted his wife, and ended up in prison. She fell ill, could no longer work, and had to enter an almshouse. When two of Janetta Alexander’s sisters visited her there and proposed that she return to the service of the Waddel family in Virginia, she readily agreed. Archibald Alexander, now living in Princeton, told her that this meant she would have to go back to slavery. She acquiesced, recalling “the quiet and ease which she [had] enjoyed under a nominal bondage.” Or so the story was remembered by the Alexander family; how it appeared to Daphne, one suspects, was probably quite different.

Yet whatever the facts of the case, the episode reveals much about the Alexanders’ view of themselves as slaveholders and their perception of those whom they held in bondage. They saw themselves in the role of “kind protector” of those whose enslavement was only “nominal.” They feared that blacks who entertained “lofty thoughts” and struck out on their own risked harm to themselves. In the background also lurked the menacing image of “a brawny and ill-favored” black male. The Alexanders’ memory was fraught with racial stereotypes and paternalistic assumptions.⁶

The Seminary’s second professor, Samuel Miller (1769-1850), a native of Delaware who joined the Seminary in 1813 after a distinguished pastorate in New York City, likewise employed slave labor in his lifetime, including while he lived in Princeton. His son recorded of Miller:

But greatly as he disliked the institution [of slavery], he did not, we have seen, consider slaveholding in itself, of necessity, a sin; and even during the earlier part of his residence in New Jersey, at different times, held several slaves under the laws providing in that state for the gradual abolition of human bondage. In fact he held them only for a term of years, in a sort of apprenticeship, excepting in one case, in which he found himself deceived by the vendor as to the age of a man- slave, and obliged, by law, to hold him and provide for him for life. It was difficult otherwise to secure domestics; but this experiment of slavery, what with some that ran off, one that he could not get rid of, and the short-comings of all, was not very encouraging.

In short, while Miller did not like slavery and hoped for its eventual demise, he did not consider the use of slave labor as sinful and was not averse to employing it himself.⁷

Charles Hodge (1797-1878), a native of Philadelphia and after 1820 the third person to join the Seminary faculty, likewise employed slave labor. In 1828, as his family was growing, he purchased Henrietta and a few years later acquired Lena, perhaps through his mother’s estate. During the 1830s, he also used at least two other African American servants—John and Cato— though Hodge’s most careful recent biographer says that it is impossible to determine whether they were enslaved or wage earners.⁸

Many at the Seminary also called for the Christianizing and educating of slaves and freed people as a means of uplift. For example, Sarah Miller, Professor Samuel Miller’s wife, helped create the Mount Lucas Orphan and Guardian Institute near Princeton and helped secure an endowment for it. When that organization later closed, she arranged for the endowment to be transferred to the Ashmun Institute (later renamed Lincoln University) whose purpose was to provide higher education for African Americans.

Despite entanglement with slavery, the leaders of the Seminary professed to long for a day, unspecified and uncertain, when slaves would all be free. They insisted, however, that slavery per se was not condemned in the Bible and that abolitionists who called slaveholders sinners were fanatics. The faculty at the Seminary, along with others in the College of New Jersey, played a key role in the formation of the American Colonization Society and made Princeton an epicenter of support for the movement (see Colonization Section).

The Seminary’s founding leaders and faculty members in the school’s early years were in many ways complicit with slavery as individuals, and they participated in a larger culture that was inextricably entangled in the effects of the slave trade. In many cases, their personal views on slavery, while sometimes difficult to discern, reflect a fundamental contradiction between expressions of condemnation of the institution of slavery, on the one hand, and reticence to call for its immediate and radical abolition, on the other.

4. R. Isabela Morales, “Ashbel Green,” Princeton & Slavery Project, accessed November 15, 2017,  slavery.princeton.edu/stories/ashbel-green; Nobles, “Betsey Stockton.” The Princeton and Slavery Project, of which the essays by Morales and Nobles are a part, is an immensely valuable online resource.

5. Jennifer Oast, Institutional Slavery: Slaveholding Churches, Schools, Colleges, and Businesses in Virginia, 1690- 1860 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 87-125, 160-174; quotation 87-88.

6. James W. Alexander, The Life of Archibald Alexander, D.D. (New York: Charles Scribner, 1854), 280-282; Gary Nash and Jean R. Soderlund, Freedom by Degrees: Emancipation in Pennsylvania and Its Aftermath (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); James H. Moorhead, Princeton Seminary in American Religion and Culture (Grand Rapids: Erdmans, 2012), 42-43.

7. Samuel Miller, The Life of Samuel Miller, D.D., LL.D., 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Claxton, Remsen and Haffelfinger, 1869) 2:300.

8. Paul C. Gutjahr, Charles Hodge: Guardian of American Orthodoxy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 156.

It is clear that the early leaders of the Seminary benefitted individually from the use of slaves. But did the Seminary as an institution have ties to human bondage? To date, research suggests that slave labor was not involved in the construction or in the maintenance of the school’s buildings. The workers involved in the Seminary’s first construction projects, including the original Seminary building and Archibald Alexander’s home, were paid laborers for whom the Seminary has records of wages disbursed. Nor did the institution as such own slaves. However, the institution’s financial ties to slavery represent a more complicated issue.

In answering this question, it is important first to acknowledge the pervasiveness of slavery’s role in the American economy during the pre-Civil War era. Daved Anthony Schmidt, who prepared an examination of the Seminary’s finances for this project (see Appendix B), offers thoughtful comments on this reality, and they merit quotation at length.

“Slavery was interwoven into the American economy. Its presence was felt in the mills and workshops of New England as well as on the plantations in Georgia. It created the capital needed to build schools of higher education in Virginia as well as in New York. One did not have to own slaves to benefit from slavery. Yet it is not helpful for this type of study to paint everyone who simply participated in the economy in the same shade. Most people would agree that there is a difference between the owner of a cotton plantation in Georgia and someone who buys a cotton shirt in Boston. It is often difficult to talk about how.

This report approaches the problem by viewing donors based on their relationship with slavery. These categories are far from perfect, and individuals often do not fit neatly into one, but they do provide a framework for discussing how a person could potentially benefit financially in a slave economy. The first is, of course, slave owners. The second is a person who does not personally own slaves, but was nevertheless raised in a family of slave owners and thus accrued financial advantages by extension. The third consists of individuals who profited from slavery through business and financial ties. Where the second category is determined by chance of birth, the third is voluntary and often deliberate. Finally, the fourth category is the cotton shirt buyer who benefited from slavery far down the production line.

Ultimately, the Seminary sits in the middle of this spectrum. It benefited financially from those in its denominational family who owned slaves and who profited from the slave system. It also invested its funds in organizations that both profited from slavery and financed its expansion.”⁹

As a school of the Presbyterian Church, the Seminary’s donor base reflected the geographical diversity of the denomination, and Southern slave owners were a source of fundraising in the early years of the school. Schmidt estimates that money given by slaveholders and the interest income it subsequently generated accounted for 15 percent of the total revenue of the Seminary in the pre-Civil War era. Furthermore, if one considers donors who remotely profited from slavery and thus whose wealth was in some measure derived from the slave trade, then as much as 30 to 40 percent of the Seminary’s revenue before the Civil War could be connected to slavery. As Schmidt concludes, “No prominent institution from this period could escape its own context. Slave owners played a part in the Seminary’s donor base because slave owners were part of the Presbyterian Church. Slavery contributed to the school’s revenue because slavery was a key part of the American economy. The Seminary was, in the end, merely a product of its time.”¹⁰

From its beginning, Princeton Seminary gained advantage from those who owned slaves.  Richard Stockton, one of the Princeton community’s wealthiest individuals and a slaveholder, donated the land on which the school’s first buildings were erected. The Seminary similarly benefitted through the financial campaigns conducted by the Presbyterian General Assembly. Starting in 1810, two years before the school opened, the assembly designated several dozen prominent clergy to serve as agents to raise funds for the Seminary. In the decades before the Civil War, approximately 16 percent of the funds raised for the Seminary came from the South, and nearly all of the major gifts from that region came from slaveholders. As illustrations, Schmidt’s report includes the following biographical information of some of those who established scholarships or made other contributions before the Civil War:

“But greatly as he disliked the institution [of slavery], he did not, we have seen, consider slaveholding in itself, of necessity, a sin; and even during the earlier part of his residence in New Jersey, at different times, held several slaves under the laws providing in that state for the gradual abolition of human bondage. In fact he held them only for a term of years, in a sort of apprenticeship, excepting in one case, in which he found himself deceived by the vendor as to the age of a man- slave, and obliged, by law, to hold him and provide for him for life. It was difficult otherwise to secure domestics; but this experiment of slavery, what with some that ran off, one that he could not get rid of, and the short-comings of all, was not very encouraging.

“John Whitehead owned around 40 slaves on a plantation in Burke County, Georgia. James Nephew owned over 120 slaves on plantations in South Carolina and Georgia. Jane Keith was the influential wife of Isaac Stockton Keith, an equally prominent (and wealthy) pastor in Charleston. His previous wife was Catharine Legare who inherited slaves from her father Thomas Legare, one of the largest slave owners in Charleston. When Isaac died in 1813, Jane inherited an estate of $30,000 along with slaves. Hester Smith of Natchez, Mississippi likewise inherited slaves from her parents. Ann Timothy of Charleston also owned slaves, but she freed them upon her death in 1853.

Charleston and the surrounding area was perhaps the most active donor base in the South. Along with Jane and Isaac Keith, the most important Presbyterian figure in the city was Andrew Flinn, the founding pastor of the Second Presbyterian Church of Charleston. The church was erected in 1811 at the cost of $100,000, a testament to the planter class who attended. Flinn and his wife Eliza Berkley Grimball were major voices of support for the Seminary. The Grimball family, like the Legares, were one of the largest slave owners in Charleston. They recruited other individuals on the same tier of the Southern social hierarchy to give to the Seminary. James Legare owned a 2,000-acre plantation named Mullet Hall on John’s Island with around 130 slaves. He and his brother John were both faithful contributors to the Seminary, as was William Eddings of Edisto Island.”¹¹

Donor connections to slavery were not limited to persons from the southern states. At least two major Seminary patrons from the mid-Atlantic derived, through their families, significant income generated in part from slave-related enterprises, though these individuals never owned slaves themselves. For example, James Lenox, a director of the Seminary from 1835 to 1847, financed the first separate library building on campus—the Lenox Library. He inherited his fortune from his father Robert (also a Seminary director, 1813-1830). One of three immigrant brothers, Robert came to America shortly before the American Revolution. He and a younger brother established a merchant firm, based in New York City, which engaged in far- flung trade, their business extending to plantations in Jamaica, Cuba, and the New Orleans area. “His ships,” Schmidt notes, “did not carry slaves as cargo, but rather goods such as sugar, rum, and pimento produced by slaves, which they brought to New York before traveling on to Europe.” From the fortune that he amassed, Robert Lenox became a philanthropist, endowing a scholarship at the Seminary and ensuring the inheritance that would allow James to continue the family tradition of generosity to the school.

Isabella McLanahan Brown, who donated the funds for the Seminary’s Brown Hall, is another case in point. Her husband, George Brown (1787-1859), at the age of 15 had joined his father’s investment banking firm, Alex. Brown and Sons. The company became part of an international trading powerhouse with offices in Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, Liverpool, and London. Schmidt summarizes the firm’s scope succinctly:

“Its range of services included shipping, insurance, currency exchange, and credit. By the late 1820s, it had become the leading exporter of cotton to Liverpool and the second largest exchange merchant in the United States. The Browns not only benefited from the products of slavery, they also benefited from slaves themselves. The firm provided loans to plantation owners in lands opening in the West. During this same period, the firm’s ships carried slaves from the East Coast as cargo to be sold in markets in New Orleans and Mississippi.”

The profit from this business gave George Brown the capital that he subsequently invested in America’s burgeoning railway system, particularly the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. That money, passed to his wife Isabella upon his death in 1857, in turn allowed her to endow the Brown Memorial Presbyterian Church in Baltimore in his memory, as well as to finance Princeton Seminary’s Brown Hall.

In addition to funds raised for annual operating expenses and building projects, the Seminary raised money for an endowment to support the school, and the General Assembly itself became an investor of funds on behalf of the Seminary, though initially there was not much to invest. What money the General Assembly did have in the permanent endowment fund for the Seminary was chiefly invested until the mid-1830s in government bonds and secured loans. These yielded a generally reliable but unspectacular (by the standard of the day) five to seven percent per year.

In the 1830s, the General Assembly adopted a more aggressive investment strategy. It invested much of the Seminary’s endowment with Southern banks, especially in the western part of the Old Southwest, where annual yields of eight to 10 percent were promised. These banks were helping fund the expansion of white settlement in the West. When the government opened millions of acres in the 1830s, expelling native Americans in the process, the availability of cheap land drew those seeking economic opportunity and resulted in the dramatic expansion of the cotton industry—and, consequently, the use of slave labor—across the West. Such expansion was financed by a complex system of credit. As individuals borrowed funds from banks to purchase land, seed, equipment, and slaves, the speculators who provided capital to the banks often made considerable profit. However, this system of speculation would prove to be a bubble that would soon collapse, in part triggering the Panic of 1837. The result was the collapse of many institutions, and Princeton Seminary was a victim, too. At its low point in the early 1840s, the value of the Seminary endowment fell to less than 50 percent of its worth in the mid-1830s.¹²

To rebuild its diminished resources, the Seminary turned to the Rev. Cortlandt Van Rensselaer to spearhead a campaign for a larger and permanent endowment. Van Rensselaer, who studied for a time at the Seminary and served as a member of the Board of Directors, came from an exceedingly wealthy family whose fortune went back to the Dutch patroons who settled along the Hudson River in the 1630s. The acquisition of that fortune had included ownership of slaves, though there is no evidence that Cortlandt himself did. His own personal contribution to the Seminary’s campaign—$2,000—was a substantial sum for the era and a sign of the wealth he had inherited. Van Rensselaer’s fundraising was highly successful. Between 1844 and 1846, he raised nearly $37,000; and by 1852 the total rose to over $86,000. Although he kept a diary of his journeys and submitted a final report to the General Assembly in which he detailed the churches from which he had received contributions, neither document is extant. In view of the general giving patterns to the Seminary by the 1840s, it is likely that the vast majority of the funds came from the mid-Atlantic states. On the other hand, one contemporary account noted that he travelled to “almost every section of the country from Champlain to Pontchartrain, and from the Hudson to the Mississippi.” Therefore, it seems likely that at least some of the donations he secured derived from slaveholders.¹³

Van Rensselaer and his campaign thus symbolized Princeton Seminary’s complicated financial engagement with slavery. In the years before the Civil War, Princeton Seminary as an institution reflected a complex moral and financial entanglement with slavery that was not untypical for its day. The institution did not own slaves or earn revenue directly from slavery. However, it benefitted financially from philanthropists who derived their wealth within an economy in which slavery was a significant force.

Van Rensselaer also symbolized a broader outlook on the peculiar institution typical of the Seminary. He wrote to a Southern correspondent in 1858: “Slaveholding is not in all circumstances sinful. … We regard the Christian instruction of slaves as a means to an end, and that end is the recovery of the blessings of personal liberty, when Providence shall open a way for it.” In short, he refused to call slaveholders sinners and would have no truck with those who demanded immediate abolition. On the other hand, he thought that Christians had a duty to educate slaves in such a way as to prepare them for eventual liberty. Bondage was not their ultimate destiny.¹⁴ Similarly, many of the Seminary’s leaders and faculty members were wary of, if not hostile towards, the abolitionist cause, instead favoring gradual emancipation and colonization, as we will examine in the following chapter.

9. On the role slavery played in building modern capitalism, see, for example, Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Knopf, 2014); Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 2014); and Calvin Schermerhorn, The Business of Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism, 1815-1860 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015). How thisdevelopment affected higher education is told provocatively in Craig Steven Wilder, Ebony and Ivory: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of American Universities (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2013).

10. Schmidt, Appendix B.

11. Schmidt, Appendix B.

12. In addition to Schmidt, Appendix B, see Jessica M. Lepler, The Many Panics of 1837: People, Politics, and the Creation of a Transatlantic Financial Crisis (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

13. Schmidt, Appendix A; [Cortlandt Van Rensselaer], Princeton Theological Seminary (Pamphlet indicating no publisher or date but almost certainly 1844), esp. 4; Memorial of Cortlandt Van Rensselaer (Philadelphia: C. Sherman and Sons, 1860).

14. “Cortlandt Van Rensselaer, D.D., Founder of the Presbyterian Historical Society,” Journal of the Presbyterian Historical Society 1 (March 1902): 213-235; quotation on 217. Van Rensselaer’s own life embodied that conviction, for he began his ministry in the 1830s as an educator and preacher among Virginia slaves.

The early leaders of Princeton Seminary said that they looked toward a time when slaves would be free. In 1797, Samuel Miller, then a New York City pastor, addressed the New York Society for Promoting the Manumission of Slaves and condemned slavery with vigor. It was, he said, a “humiliating tale … that in this free country … in this country, from which has been proclaimed to distant lands, as the basis of our political existence, that ‘ALL MEN ARE BORN FREE AND EQUAL,’—in this country there are found slaves!” Miller avowed that Scripture as well as the Declaration of Independence condemned slavery. “God,” he said quoting the Apostle Paul, “has made of one blood all nations of men that dwell on the face of the whole earth.” Moreover, we are commanded that we should do unto others as we would that they should do unto us. Such principles “wage eternal war both with political and domestic slavery.” Miller did admit that the Old Testament allowed slavery in ancient Israel and that the New Testament enjoined obedience upon those in servitude, but he denied that these passages justified a continuance of the institution in the present. He admitted that difficulties prevented immediate emancipation of all slaves and suggested that the remedy lay “in emancipation in a gradual manner, which will at the same time, provide for the intellectual and moral cultivation of slaves, that they may be prepared to exercise the rights, and discharge the duties of citizens.” How long would this take? Miller did not say, but he closed his address on a strongly hopeful note:

“The time, I trust, is not far distant, when there shall be no slavery to lament—no oppression to oppose in the United States— …when every being, who bears the name MAN, whatever complexion an equatorial Sun may have burnt upon him, … shall enjoy the privileges, and be raised to the dignity which belong to the human character.”¹⁵

Samuel Miller supplied a different response to the problem of slavery roughly a quarter century later. In 1823, he returned to the subject when he spoke in Newark to address the Presbyterian Synod of New Jersey about a school for African Americans that it sponsored. The Miller of 1823 still espoused much that he had believed in 1797. He stressed “the enormity of the evil” of chattel slavery, and he urged the necessity of preparing slaves for freedom through education. But the sense that slavery might soon give way to freedom or that those freed might be raised to citizenship had dimmed, if not vanished altogether. Miller dwelt on the degradation that slavery wrought on its victims and the difficulty, if not impossibility, of raising them to full citizenship in the American republic. His words deserve to be quoted at length:

“… while an adequate and an early remedy for the multiplied and dreadful evils of Slavery is earnestly to be desired; yet we are not to expect that any human means can be found, which will put an end to these evils at once. Such a large and complicated mass of evil cannot be removed in a day, or a month, or a year. It must be a work of time, of patient labour, and of large expenditure. We must pay, and pay much, as the penalty of our dreadful mistake and folly; and well will it be for us, if we can obtain deliverance from it almost at any price. Some have been so inconsiderate as to maintain, that because slavery is, in all cases, an evil, that, therefore, it ought to be abolished at a stroke, and every slave in our land made free in a day. But the idea of liberating, and turning loose on society, at once, a million and a half of slaves, with all the ignorance and depravity to which their bondage has contributed to reduce them, would surely be the extravagance, or rather the cruelty of benevolence. It would be to bring, not merely on the White population, but on the slaves themselves, thus suddenly liberated without being prepared for it, an accumulated curse under the name and guise of a blessing.”

What then should be done? Miller continued:

“And as this class of people could not be either respectable or happy, if liberated and left among the whites: so, as neighbours, they would be a constant source of annoyance, of corruption, and of danger to the whites themselves. Suppose a million and a half of such people scattered through the United States. They could never be trusted as faithful citizens. They would never feel that their interests and those of the whites were precisely the same. Each would regard the other with painful suspicion and apprehension. On the one hand, those who had lately been slaves, or who had descended from slaves, would consider every advantage they could take of their former masters, as so much fair gain, and would, therefore, be apt, as far as possible, habitually to prey upon them. On the other hand, the whites would be tempted, and could hardly fail, to cherish sentiments toward their coloured neighbours, in a great measure inconsistent with liberal, kind, or even just treatment; and would seldom think of any tiling but rendering them subservient to their pleasures, their pride or their avarice. In short, they would be mutual sources of corruption, of danger, and of trouble to each other. It would be impossible for them to be safe, pure, or happy together. It is, of course, essential to the interest of each that they be separated; and separated to such a distance from each other, as to render intercourse very seldom practicable—If this be so, then the Coloured people must be colonized. In other words, they must be severed from the white population, and sent to some distant part of the world, where they will be in no danger either of suffering themselves, or of inflicting on others, the evils already described. …”¹⁶

Thus, at the end of the day, education to uplift a supposedly degraded people, followed by emigration from the United States to “a distant part of the world,” was the path to avert a social disaster.

Several years before Miller’s address to the Synod of New Jersey, Ashbel Green, president of the Seminary’s Board of Directors, supplied a similar analysis though with a more hopeful rhetoric. In 1818, he chaired a committee of the Presbyterian General Assembly charged with the question of whether a church member, who was selling a slave who happened to be a fellow believer, should be brought to discipline if the slave did not wish to be sold. Green wrote the committee’s report, which was adopted unanimously by the assembly. The report did not directly answer the question that prompted its formation. It gave no definitive ruling, only that such matters should be brought for settlement to the local church courts. The body of the report dealt with the larger moral and theological question posed by slavery. In tones reminiscent of Revolutionary-era optimism, the report declared:

“We consider the voluntary enslaving of one part of the human race by another, as a gross violation of the most precious and sacred rights of human nature; as utterly inconsistent with the law of God, which requires us to love our neighbour as ourselves, and as totally irreconcilable with the spirit and principles of the gospel of Christ, which enjoin that “all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them.” The report then asserted that it was the clear “duty of all Christians … to use their honest, earnest, and unwearied endeavours, to correct the errors of former times, and as speedily as possible to efface this blot on our holy religion, and to obtain the complete abolition of slavery throughout Christendom, and if possible throughout the world.””¹⁷

But the report made clear that “as speedily as possible” did not mean any time soon. “The number of slaves, their ignorance, and their vicious habits generally,” said the Green committee, “render an immediate and universal emancipation inconsistent alike with the safety and happiness of the master and the slave.” Moreover, the Green committee’s report expressed sympathy with the plight of those “portions of the church and our country where the evil of slavery has been entailed upon them,” and it warned “others to forbear harsh censures, and uncharitable reflections on their brethren, who unhappily live among slaves, whom they cannot immediately set free.” In other words, the assembly saw slaveholders as themselves slaves of a sort caught in a system they did not create, their predicament calling for compassion not condemnation. The judicatory recommended several tangible steps to ameliorate the suffering of black Americans. Masters might instruct their slaves in Christianity and endeavor to keep their families intact. Presbyterians might also “patronize and encourage the society lately formed, for colonizing in Africa, the land of their ancestors, the free people of colour in our country.” Green’s solution was ultimately the same as Miller’s—colonization of free blacks in Africa.

Overview of Princeton Seminary and the Colonization Movement

In the longest book he ever wrote, A History of Colonization on the Western Coast of Africa, Archibald Alexander claimed with pride that the idea of the removal of freed slaves to Liberia originated in Princeton among Presbyterian clergy and professors at both the Seminary and the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University).¹⁸ He recounted a meeting in 1816 in which Princeton native son and pastor of the Presbyterian Church in Basking Ridge, Rev. Dr. Robert Finley, shared his vision for ending slavery and solving America’s race problem with Alexander and the other Presbyterian clergy in Princeton:

The first public meeting which ever took place to consider the subject of African colonization in this country, was held in the Presbyterian church in the borough of Princeton. It was called by Dr. Finley, when he explained to a small assemblage the plan of the society which he wished to be formed, and called on the writer [Archibald Alexander] to address the people. He made some observations on the object aimed at. The meeting was small, but in the number of attendants were most of the professors of the College and of the Theological Seminary. It was apparent that the interest of those to whom the scheme was made known was increased the longer they thought upon it.¹⁹

Though, in fact, ideas about African colonization had been discussed in areas ranging from New England to Virginia since the Revolutionary era, the Princeton version of the conversation resonated with all such schemes: raising money and developing ecclesial, private, and governmental support for a large-scale effort to send freed slaves to Africa where they would establish a new life.

Though the New Jersey chapter of the American Colonization Society was not organized until 1824 in the congregation now known as Nassau Presbyterian Church, Finley joined several other like-minded civil and religious leaders and co-founded the national level of the colonization effort in 1816 in Washington, D.C. When the New Jersey chapter was founded a few years later, the entire faculty and about half of the Seminary’s Board of Directors were present and volunteered to play key leadership roles for the coordination of the colonization efforts in New Jersey. ²⁰

The leadership of the Presbyterian Church’s seminary supported colonization and never seem to have wavered from this commitment for nearly the entirety of the 19th  century. In 1877, the Seminary’s practical theologian and functional president, Rev. Dr. Alexander Taggart McGill, gave an address to the American Colonization Society. Even 12 years after the conclusion of the Civil War and the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment outlawing slavery and granting full citizenship to blacks, the leader of Princeton Seminary’s faculty continued to raise money and to speak publicly in support of the colonization effort, likely motivated both by the economic and material wretchedness of the newly free black community in the United States, as well as white anxieties about competition for jobs and growing unease about financial stress related to care for poor blacks. Eleven years later, in The Princeton Press for December 22, 1888, John Miller, son of Princeton Seminary Professor Samuel Miller, urged an effort “to revive the New Jersey Branch of the American Colonization Society.” After delineating the early role of Princeton in starting the American Colonization Society, John Miller urged that “Princeton that originated the scheme might now take the lead in restoring it to vigor.” ²¹

By this point, the Society had nearly run out of money and was unable to fund the 2,000 African American applicants asking for passage to Liberia at the time. Miller suggested that funding their passage would be an economical means of missionary activity.

The available evidence does not indicate precisely when Princeton Seminary’s faculty finally abandoned the colonization idea; it simply fades from the written record. Colonization was still widely supported by many political and intellectual leaders in the nation, especially in the state of New Jersey, well into the mid-19th century. Congress did not officially end disbursement of funds for colonization until 1864. It may be that support for the American Colonization Society by the Seminary’s faculty faded away in tandem with the decline of that organization at the end of the 19th and into the early years of the 20th century. Hopefully, it was at some point well before the American Colonization Society finally went defunct in the United States in 1964. ²²

The American Colonization Society never realized the extent of its vision for resettlement. During the course of the nearly half century of the organization’s determined fundraising efforts prior to the Civil War, it only resulted in the voluntary resettlement of some 20,000 people—out of a total black population of over 2,000,000. ²³

In many respects, the colonization effort seemed doomed from the start given the massive amounts of money that would need to have been raised to realize its agenda, the relatively small numbers of human beings involved, and the hardened opposition from the majority of those it was supposed to have helped. Given these realities, why did the movement have such a long life among the leaders of Princeton Seminary? The answer seems to lie in the belief that colonization would provide a tidy solution to several social, economic, and theological dilemmas.

Rationale

The faculty and board members of Princeton Seminary and the faculty of the College of New Jersey supported the colonization effort for at least four major reasons. First, colonization would constructively address the social evil of slavery, while making allowances for the gradual eradication of the institution. Finley, Alexander, and the other Presbyterian clergy in Princeton believed that slavery, while not strictly forbidden by Scripture, was nonetheless an evil and a scourge that had to be addressed in order for God’s will to be accomplished in American society. The complexities of biblical interpretation on slavery combined with heightened sensitivity to the sensibilities of Southern Presbyterian slaveholders—not to mention the fact that Alexander and several other Princeton Presbyterian leaders like John Witherspoon and Ashbel Green had themselves owned slaves—led them to look for a solution to the problem that was gradual and voluntary. They wanted to find a way to end slavery without dividing the church and the country; the gradualism and voluntary character of colonization seemed the most viable and creative option available.

The gradualism inherent in the colonization scheme was also premised on a shared belief by Seminary leaders that slavery was on its last legs and would eventually simply run its course, given enough time. Part of the appeal of colonization had to do with mollifying Southern white slave owners during the process of slavery’s supposed inevitable phase out. They believed that it would garner support from Southerners who either did not want freed slaves in their midst for fear of potential insurrection or who wanted a way out of slavery but who could not afford to do so immediately. It also provided some incentive for Southern slaveholders who could afford to free their slaves sooner rather than later, since the newly freed slaves would have a viable place to go in order to make a fresh start.

Alexander and Miller aimed to supplement their gradualism with efforts to educate blacks in the rudiments of Christian belief, reading and writing, and social responsibility.²⁴ Yet, the Seminary’s faculty members believed, with the vast majority of white Americans in the 19th century, that “non-whites could only realize their innate potential as human beings – and perhaps their equality with whites – by separating themselves from the American republic.” ²⁵

The embrace of a middle way between support for slavery and immediate abolition led the Seminary’s faculty to rail against the abolitionists. In his lectures to third year students who were about to enter pastoral ministry, Archibald Alexander warned his charges to avoid the abolitionists and their dangerous immediatism. He saw people like William Lloyd Garrison as dangerous foes to the black race masquerading as friends. More than that, he urged that Presbyterian ministers should never entangle themselves in politics and should leave such matters to professional politicians. The abolitionists would, they feared, destroy the church and the nation by dividing both right down the middle. Their fears were not wrong; what they indirectly prophesied came to bloodily apocalyptic fact at mid-century. At root, Alexander and the rest of the Seminary faculty did not possess a theological imagination that would allow them to envision divine action through human agency to bring about a harmonious multiracial American society, even though they could easily imagine divine intervention through human agency to transform the entire continent of Africa through evangelization by black colonialists from America. Yet they simply could not envision a nation in which black and white lived together as political peers and socio-economic equals.

Second, Finley’s African colonization plan seemed to offer a constructive solution to America’s growing racial tensions. None of the Princeton Presbyterians believed that blacks were inherently inferior to whites. Quite the contrary, they believed in the ontological equality of black and white people on the basis of their reading of Genesis 1:26. The problem was not a fundamental difference in humanity so much as a massive socioeconomic chasm between the races brought about by two centuries of slavery. Blacks had been put into such a deficit economically, culturally, and educationally through the evils of slavery that Seminary leaders and Princeton Presbyterians simply could not conceive of what it would take to bring them into parity with the white population. Articulating a view shared by many enlightened white Presbyterians of his day, Alexander observed:

“Two races of men, nearly equal in number, but differing as much as the whites and the blacks, cannot form one harmonious society in any other way than by amalgamation; but the whites and the blacks, in this country, by no human efforts, could be amalgamated into one homogenous mass in a thousand years; and during this long period, the state of society would be perpetually disturbed by many contending factions. Either the whites must remove and give up the country to the coloured [sic] people, or the coloured people must be removed; otherwise the latter must remain in subjection to the former.”²⁶

Finley and scores of Presbyterian clergy from Princeton and across the denomination affirmed this assessment and believed in light of it that the only humane thing to do for freed slaves was to remove them from white society – at least until some distant point in the future in which blacks could attain the level of education, prosperity, and cultural development that would make it possible for black and white to interact as equals. This “benevolent civilizationism,” aptly named by American historian Brandon Mills, held open the possibility for multiracial harmony but only after a significant period of racial separation marked by black cultural and economic development to the level of white standards.27 In one of the keynote speeches delivered at the founding of the New Jersey Colonization Society in First Presbyterian Church on July 14, 1824, the Seminary’s Treasurer of the Board, James S. Green, offered this prospect to Seminary faculty and trustees along with several members of the faculty from the College of New Jersey, as quoted from an earlier speech by Pitt:

“…We may live to behold the natives of Africa and her reclaimed children, engaged in the calm occupations of industry, in the pursuits of a just and legitimate commerce. We may uphold the beams of science and philosophy, breaking in upon their land, which at some happy period in still later times, may blaze with full lustre; and joining their influence to that of pure religion may illuminate and invigorate the most distant extremities of that immense continent. Then we may hope, that even Africa, though last of all the quarters of the globe shall enjoy, at length, in the evening of her days, those blessings which have descended so plentifully upon us in a much earlier period of the world!”²⁸

The minutes from the meeting indicate that after these closing words to Green’s speech, Princeton Seminary faculty member Samuel Miller rose to speak and said that he could not say anything better on the subject. Instead of adding anything to the sentiments expressed by Green, Miller simply moved to the next item on the agenda: introduction of Rev. George Boyd, “an accredited Agent of the American Colonization Society.”²⁹

Seen from a larger perspective, a “separate until they equate” strategy characterized the bulk of progressive white Protestant thinking about Native Americans and African Americans in the 19th century and not simply those of Princeton Seminary or other Princeton Presbyterians. In his book Bind Us Apart: How Enlightened Americans Invented Racial Segregation, Nicholas Guyatt observes that:

“Colonization enabled reformers to break the link between emancipation and integration: it allowed slavery’s opponents to acknowledge “all men are created equal” without having to imagine a race-blind society on the other side of abolition. Colonization was not just a diversion, but a rewiring of white thinking about race.”³⁰

Guyatt argues convincingly that Finley’s scheme to send freed blacks to Africa has to be seen as part of a pervasive white normativity that similarly and simultaneously lay behind efforts at Indian removal and their eventual confinement to reservations. Because white people as a whole viewed Native Americans and African Americans as socially and culturally deficient and because most whites would not provide the kind of widespread social and economic resources to bring these two groups up to the same level as white “civilization,” the only compassionate thing to do was to remove them from a perpetually unequal societal situation in order to allow them to become civilized and prosperous enough to function as peers with white America. In this view, Native Americans should be removed beyond the zone of “civilization” to the West, and African Americans should be removed across the Atlantic to the west coast of Africa.

Third, colonization offered a way to deal with widespread fears among whites of slave revolt or uprising. Removing a segment of the population that was not only poor and uneducated, but resentful about slavery and, therefore, capable of violence on the scale of the uprisings in Haiti would provide safety for the white population. White anxiety about racial violence by vengeful blacks repeatedly bubbled up through the anti-slavery rhetoric of those advocating colonization. Returning to James Green’s speech at the organizational meeting for the New Jersey chapter of the colonization movement, we find this anxious appeal:

“And are we, Sir, entirely safe, while we breathe the same atmosphere with this powerful and disconnected horde? If intelligence should reach you, that three thousand men had landed on your shores with the avowed intention of marching to this place, to burn your buildings, to murder the inhabitants, to plunder your property, what stir, what anxiety, what exertion would everywhere mark the village, and neighborhood, and State; every man would be at his post, and the words ‘coward,’ and ‘traitor,’ would be marked in burning characters on the forehead of every one, who should refuse to join in the resistance. But for myself, I do verily believe, we have a more dangerous foe than this to content with; a foe under the disguise of slave or servant; one who is admitted without reserve into the bosom of our families; one to whom we often commit the custody of our dwellings; one to whom we frequently confide the care of our children, and yet one who secretly and cordially hates and despises the hand that feeds and maintains him. We all know that a foe in disguise is more dangerous than an open enemy. Against the last we can march, meet, face, and conquer him. The other is silent; his approach is unobserved; and the first notice that we may receive of his hostile intention may be cries and dying groans, or the midnight-conflagration of our dwellings.” ³¹

As critics of colonization like William Lloyd Garrison pointed out even at the time, it is rather incongruous to make such claims about a group of people who purportedly seethe with hatred and await only the right opportunity to engage in wholesale slaughter of white people yet who are to be entrusted with the establishment of a model democratic society in Liberia and the evangelization of the entire continent of Africa. ³²

Even as colonization provided a way to address white anxieties, it was also motivated by missionary zeal. As a fourth rationale for the colonization scheme, Finley and his Seminary and Princeton Presbyterian supporters believed that sending freed blacks (and, eventually, all blacks) back to Africa would contribute mightily to the Christian conversion of the heathen continent of Africa. This imagined benefit of colonization arose, in part, from the widespread belief that white missionaries to Africa had a tendency to die quickly from tropical diseases and that blacks seemed to have a basic immunity to such diseases. Because freed blacks sent to Liberia would now be Christian, they would be ideally suited to convert the heathen and to bring the light of Christ and “civilization” to the whole of Africa. In analyzing the theological vision of Finley on the matter of the evangelization of Africa as a primary benefit of colonization, Ben Wright points out that Finley (and, by extension, his Princeton Seminary supporters) believed rather ironically that “Training black American missionaries would turn a class of loathed, feared, or pitied Americans into pious servants of Christ. In the minds of white colonizationists, degenerate slaves and dangerous free blacks would become disciplined missionaries.” ³³ Freed Christian blacks would become instruments of fulfilling evangelical Protestant millennialist visions.

Finley and the Seminary supporters also believed that sending black missionaries to convert the continent of Africa would serve as a type of penitence, providing redress for the sin of slave trading itself. Wright observes:

By the second decade of the nineteenth century a clear majority of Americans believed that the Atlantic slave trade was evil, and although it had been abolished, a moral scar endured. Finley believed that the United States had committed a grave sin, but colonization offered “the atoning sacrifice.” The slave trade robbed Africa of millions of children, encouraged violence between African nations, and hindered the progress of missionaries by linking Christianity to slavery. Finley wrote, “if wrong has been done to Africa in forcing away her weeping children, the wrong can best be redressed by that power which did the injury.”³⁴

In other words, the evils wrought by slavery could be atoned for by sending blacks from America to Africa in order to redeem the continent from its godless ways through the preaching of the Gospel.

How the Colonization Scheme Played Out

The American Colonization Society (ACS) was founded in 1816 and remained in operation until 1964. From the beginning, Princeton played a leadership role in the colonization effort. Contrary to Archibald Alexander’s claims that the colonization vision was first articulated to the world by Finley in Princeton in the presence of faculty members from the Seminary and the College, such visions had been discussed by church leaders in New England in the three or four decades prior to Finley’s visit to Princeton in 1816. Such a scheme was known to members of the Revolutionary generation, including and especially Thomas Jefferson and other political leaders from Virginia. Black leaders like Paul Cuffe and James Forten also expressed support in the early part of the 1800s for black colonization in West Africa.³⁵  However, the town of Princeton was a significant center for the colonization movement. It was home to one of the co- founders of the ACS and the U.S. Navy leader most responsible for the establishment of the physical reality of the colony of Liberia, Robert F. Stockton.³⁶

The Seminary faculty benefitted directly from the leadership of Robert F. Stockton concerning the colonization effort in at least two ways. While serving in the U.S. Navy, Stockton secured, at the point of a gun, the land for ACS that eventually became Liberia. While technically speaking the land was not possessed as a colony for the government, since the United States did not want to see itself as a colonial power like Great Britain and did not formally recognize Liberia as an independent nation until 1862, the government allowed the ACS to function in a semiautonomous fashion and with varying degrees of official support.³⁷

The colonization vision made a major step forward toward realization when Stockton “secured” the initial bit of land for ACS in the spring of 1822.

Two years after forcibly appropriating the first swath of land that eventually became Liberia, Stockton presided over the organizational meeting of the New Jersey Colonization Society on July 24, 1824, in the building of The Presbyterian Church in Princeton. In addition to offering the opening speech, Stockton was elected the first president of the organization with two Princeton Seminary board members, James Green and John T. Woodhull, elected as vice presidents (along with four other vice presidents). Seminary board member John Vancleve and the third member of the Seminary faculty, Charles Hodge, served as two of the active “managers” for the new enterprise. The other two faculty members of the Seminary, as well as five current and one future member of the Princeton Seminary board, served as “directors or honorary managers” for the local chapter of the colonization effort. The entire faculty and most of the board of the Seminary supported and took their cues from Stockton in the colonization effort.³⁸

The colonization effort at the national level received widespread support in its early years. Such high-profile political leaders as Henry Clay, Francis Scott Key, James Monroe, and even Abraham Lincoln supported the endeavor as a way to deal with the problem of slavery in a gradual and nondivisive way. Several clergy from the Methodist, Congregationalist, Baptist, and Presbyterian traditions wholeheartedly supported the cause, particularly in its first decades. By leveraging such widespread social and spiritual capital, the ACS was able to secure congressional funding that easily equaled and probably surpassed the amount raised through private means in special events and local chapters.

A significant challenge for the ACS involved securing freed slaves who would agree to go to Liberia. A handful of free blacks saw Liberia as a way to get out of the toxic racial maelstrom of American society and some shared the evangelical vision of converting Africa to Christianity. Most free blacks, however, strenuously resisted the colonization effort; and those who did favor emigration often looked to some other organization than the ACS or placed their hopes in a venue other than Liberia. Those who opposed colonization did so on the grounds that they had been born and raised in America and that Africa was a completely foreign place to them. Others may have shared the missionary vision but did not wish to go to such a physically challenging place to carry out the mission. It is worth noting that two African American Princeton Seminary graduates, Thomas McCants Stewart and Hugh Mason Browne, set sail for Liberia in 1883 and spent some years there, the latter as the “Charles Hodge Professor of Intellectual and Moral Philosophy” at Liberia College and the former as professor of law and belles lettres at the same school, later serving as general agent for Liberian education, and still later as an associated justice of the Liberian Supreme Court and deputy attorney general. In the end, approximately 13,000 people—out of a black population of around 2,000,000 people— agreed to emigrate to Liberia.³⁹

Following the war an additional 2,000 emigrants went to Liberia between 1866 and 1871. In 1819, Congress passed an act which authorized the president to send a naval squadron to African waters to apprehend illegal slave traders and appropriated $100,000 to resettle captured slaves in Africa. No attempt was made to determine the actual tribes from which these recaptured slaves had come. Rather the ACS entered into agreements with the U.S. government to settle these rescued victims of the slave trade in Liberia as well. By 1867, close to 6,000 additional persons were thereby resettled in Liberia, though they had never been slaves in North America. This would account for the larger figure of close to 20,000 total settlers. On the colonization movement, see also Philip John Staudenraus, The African Colonization Movement, 1816-1865 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961). An excellent historiographical review of the published studies of the American Colonization Society may be found in Marie Tyler-McGraw, An African Republic: Black and White Virginians in the Making of Liberia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 413f

The relatively small number of people who emigrated to Liberia soon became the basis for withdrawal of support, if not outright ridicule, of the mission of the ACS.

The way colonization played out among the white population is complicated. Beyond the halls of power in Washington, D.C., the ACS initially enjoyed a broad base of support among white Protestants. White slaveholders in the South supported the effort for a time because it provided a way for free blacks to be removed from their communities and thereby not to serve as inspiration for rebellion or uprising among the multitudes of the enslaved. Some white slaveholders also supported colonization because it offered a way to salve their consciences by getting out of the slavery business without having to worry about future repercussions from their former slaves. The support among white slaveholders in the South fell off sharply after the Missouri crisis and with the rise of increasingly bold abolitionism from the North.

Northern whites seemed to support colonization as a creative and benevolent scheme until critics began to question the inherent racial assumptions at work in the ACS. Even noted abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison was a member of ACS and an active supporter of colonization for a brief time. It did not take long, however, for Garrison to see the fact that the ACS was both anti-slavery and anti-black. His book, Thoughts on African Colonization, laid bare all of the contradictions, deep-seated racism, and failure of imagination at work in the ACS. In Archibald Alexander’s book on the history of African colonization written in 1846—some 14 years after the publication of Garrison’s scathing exposé of the ACS and its theological rhetoric—he echoed an accusation to the effect that Garrison was the black community’s worst enemy while being disguised as a friend.⁴⁰

Other Northern whites continued to support the colonization effort as a middle way between the evils of slavery and the specter of ecclesiastical division and even civil war over the issues of slavery and race. But another swath of Northern white support fell away as a result of the revivalism of Finney and New School Presbyterians, whose spiritual fervor often led them to support abolitionist positions. Predictably, in light of its theological commitments and tendencies, Princeton Seminary rejected revivalism and abolitionism. As already noted, the Seminary faculty continued to support colonization as the solution to America’s racial problems and tensions well after the abolition of slavery in 1865.

Although the ACS continued to exist until 1964 in the United States and until 1985 in Liberia, the official colonization effort had lost most of its support by the end of the Civil War in 1865. That it continued to survive for 99 more years stands as a sad testimony to ongoing racism in American life, to the hope of part of a minority group of African Americans for a better life outside of the United States, and to the failure of theological imagination on the part of some of the greatest Presbyterian theological minds of the nineteenth century.

Theodore S. Wright, the Seminary’s first black graduate in 1828, offered a coda to the colonization scheme. Speaking in 1838 to an abolitionist gathering in Oneida County, New York, Wright rejected colonization on several grounds. It was inconsistent in its rationale and unworkable as policy.

“It changes its hues like the chamelion [sic]. At the South its advocates say, “we don’t mean to trouble your institutions. This society never contemplated emancipation.” At the North it is the only means to ultimately remove slavery. But the Colonization Society is inadequate to the task it has undertaken. It is impossible to colonize the colored people of America on the shore of Africa. It cannot be done. You might as well think of draining the ocean with a teaspoon. The society increased to the highest state of efficiency possible cannot remove the increase alone. O how absurd the idea, and foolish—I might say “fanatical”—the attempt to remove 3,000,000 of human beings to the other side of the ocean.”It changes its hues like the chamelion [sic]. At the South its advocates say, “we don’t mean to trouble your institutions. This society never contemplated emancipation.” At the North it is the only means to ultimately remove slavery. But the Colonization Society is inadequate to the task it has undertaken. It is impossible to colonize the colored people of America on the shore of Africa. It cannot be done. You might as well think of draining the ocean with a teaspoon. The society increased to the highest state of efficiency possible cannot remove the increase alone. O how absurd the idea, and foolish—I might say “fanatical”—the attempt to remove 3,000,000 of human beings to the other side of the ocean.”

It enticed African Americans with the notion that Africa was their real home. “Where is our home,” he replied, “if it be not the place where we were born, brought up, and where we now reside? Africa is not our home; no more than England, Scotland, Germany and Switzerland, are the homes of the Americans.” Colonization, Wright insisted, “fastens and strengthens the prejudice against colored people” and “is the more dangerous as she comes to us in the garb of Piety.” Perhaps thinking of his theological alma mater, Theodore Wright also observed: “Some have been led to look favorably upon this scheme because a great many good men have been engaged in it. But good men may err; men are the same that they ever were, finite and fallible; and bad principles are very frequently found among good men.”⁴¹

15. Samuel Miller, A Discourse, Delivered April 12, 1797, At the Request of And Before the New-York Society For Promoting the Manumission of Slaves (New York: T. and J. Swords, 1797), 9, 18, 31, 36.

16. Samuel Miller, A Sermon Preached at Newark, October 22d, 1823 Before the Synod of New Jersey (Trenton: George Sherman, 1823), 3, 5, 14-15.

17. Minutes of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America from Its Organization, A.D. 1789 to A.D. 1820 (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication, 1847), 688, 692.

18. Archibald Alexander, A History of Colonization on the West Coast of Africa (Philadelphia: William S. Martien, 1846). See also Robert Finley, Thoughts on the Colonization of Free Blacks (Washington City: n.p., 1816). See also Isaac V. Brown, Biography of the Rev. Robert Finley, D.D., of Basking Ridge N.J.: with an account of his agency as the author of the American Colonization Society: also a sketch of the slave trade; a view of our national policy and that of Great Britain towards Liberia and Africa (Philadelphia: J.W. Moore, 1857). An earlier version of this was published in 1819 in New Brunswick, NJ.

19. Alexander, A History of Colonization, 80.

20. “List of Officers,” Proceedings of a Meeting Held at Princeton, New Jersey, July 14, 1824 to Form a Society in the State of New Jersey, to Cooperate with the American Colonization Society (Princeton: D.A. Borrenstein, 1824), 39-40.

21. Princeton Press, December 22, 1888, as reprinted in Jack Washington, The Long Journey Home (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2005), 111-112.

22. “American Colonization Society records, 1792-1964,” Library of Congress Online Records,  https://catalog.loc.gov/vwebv/search?searchCode=LCCN&searchArg=mm%2078010660&searchType=1&permalin   k=y. It is worth noting that the American Colonization Society’s analog in Liberia continued to exist, at least on paper, until the 1980s. See: “American Colonization Society Still Owns Land in Liberia?”[Monrovia] SunTimes1985-07-03: 12.

23. Andrew Diemer, “‘A Desire to Better Their Condition’: European Immigration, African Colonization, and the Lure of Consensual Emancipation,” Beverly C. Tomek and Matthew J. Hetrick, eds. New Directions in the Study of African American Recolonization (Gainesville, FL: University of Florida, 2017), 249-50. It should be noted that some of the total number counted as colonists were people whom the U.S. Navy rescued from slave ships before they reached the shores of North America.

24. See for example, Archibald Alexander’s “Pastoral Duty to the Colored Race,” The Archibald Alexander Manuscript Collection, Special Collections, Princeton Theological Seminary Library, box 12, file 55.

25. Nicholas Guyatt. Bind us Apart: How Enlightened Americans Invented Racial Segregation (New York: Basic, 2016), 7.

26.  Ibid, 17.

27.  Brandon Mills, “Situating African Colonization within the History of U.S. Expansion,” in Tomek and Hetrick, New Directions, 175.

28. Proceedings of a Meeting Held at Princeton, New Jersey, July 14, 1824, to Form a Society, 26.

29. Ibid., 27.

30. Guyatt, Bind Us Apart, 330.

31. Proceedings of a Meeting Held at Princeton, New Jersey, July 14, 1824, to Form a Society, 16-17.

32. William Lloyd Garrison, Thoughts on African colonization: or, an impartial exhibition of the doctrines, principles and purposes of the American Colonization Society. Together with the resolutions, addresses and remonstrances of the free people of color (Boston: Garrison and Knapp, 1832).

33. Ben Wright, “‘The Heathen are Demanding the Gospel’: Conversion, Redemption, and African Colonization,” in Tomek and Hetrick, New Directions, 58.

34. Ibid., 59.

35. Though he eventually changed his mind and became a vocal opponent of colonization, Forten initially supported the cause.

36. R. John Brockmann, Commodore Robert F. Stockton, 1795-1866: Protean Man for a Protean Nation (Amherst, NY: Cambria, 2009).

37. The relationship between ACS and the United States government has many dimensions and went through several phases. The most important facts of governmental support for the colonization work of ACS involved financial support from Congress and authorization for naval support and protection of the colony.

38. Proceedings of a Meeting Held at Princeton, New Jersey, July 14, 1824, to Form a Society, 39-40.

39. Eric Burin, who has made a detailed study of the American Colonization Society, includes a chart in his book Slavery and the Peculiar Solution: A History of the American Colonization Society, of the number of persons sponsored for emigration by the ACS:
1820-1833: 3,160
1834-1847: 1,891
1848-1860: 5,888
Total by 1860: 10,939

40. Alexander (quoting F. Daveny), A History of Colonization, 385.

41.The Friend of Man, Vol. 3, No. 18, 17 October 1838. Digitized by Cornell University. Accessed Feb. 25, 2018, at http://fom.library.cornell.edu/cgi-bin/cornell-fom?a=d&d=TFOM18381017.2.2&e=——-en-20–1–txt-txIN——#         . For more on Wright, see the following section on Princeton Seminary alumni.

Another facet of the Seminary’s historical relationship to slavery is the attitudes and actions of those who studied at Princeton Seminary. The issue of slavery was important enough in the first half of the 19th century in the United States that the Seminary’s alumni would have had to confront it, no matter where they served. As Daved Anthony Schmidt has documented, the largest number of students in the period 1812-1865 had come from the mid-Atlantic area (53 percent) and gone on to serve in the mid-Atlantic for much of their careers. However a smaller proportion of the students had come from the South or the border states (20 percent) and a significant number of graduates would go on to serve some portion of their ministry in these areas (27 percent).⁴² In addition, as the century moved on, more students would move into the newer areas in the West as these areas were settled, not only the old Northwest Territory, which was at least legally supposed to be free of slavery, but also areas such as Missouri where slavery was permitted. The range of opinion held and action taken by these graduates on the slavery issue was varied.

Perhaps the best known stories of Seminary alumni regarding the slavery issue are those of two of its graduates connected to the abolitionist cause. Theodore Sedgwick Wright (Class of 1828) claims a special place in Princeton Seminary history as the first African American to attend and graduate from the Seminary. He attended from 1825 through 1828. The Board of Director’s Minute Book specifically stipulates that his race should be no bar to his admission to the Seminary (he had already been turned down by a number of institutions to which he had applied): “Dr. McAuley, on behalf of the Presbytery of Albany, applied to the Board to have Theodore Wright, a fine young man of color, admitted into the Seminary. Whereupon, resolved that his color shall form no obstacle in the way of his reception.”⁴³ Records seem to indicate that he was among the very first African Americans to receive any kind of formal higher education in North America.

Wright was named for Theodore Sedgwick (1746-1813), a Massachusetts attorney who successfully argued a 1781 case concerning two escaped slaves who gained their freedom in Massachusetts by claiming that the state’s 1780 constitution had declared that “all men are born free and equal.” This name thus gives some idea of the sentiments of the family into which Theodore Sedgwick Wright was born. He is reported to have attended the Free African School in New York City, which had been set up by the New York Manumission Society, of which Samuel Miller had been a founding member. During his middler year at Princeton Seminary, Wright became a subscription agent for the Freedom’s Journal, an early African American newspaper edited by Samuel Cornish, the pastor of the First Colored Presbyterian Church in New York City. At first Samuel Miller and others associated with the Seminary became subscribers.  However, when the paper began an attack on the American Colonization Society, with which members of the Princeton Seminary faculty as well as prominent Princeton townsfolk were involved, this began to cause problems. In 1827, a junior editor of the paper printed the contents of a letter written by Samuel Miller, which Miller had expected would be kept confidential, and Miller responded by canceling his subscription to the paper and forbidding its presence on the Seminary campus on the grounds that it had impugned the motives and vilified the characters of persons associated with the work of the Colonization Society.

Wright was ordained by the Presbytery of Albany on February 5, 1829. He was named pastor of the First Colored Presbyterian Church of New York City and served the congregation until his death in 1847. By all reports his pastorate was a very successful one, his congregation rapidly growing until they had to find a new meeting place and eventually becoming the second largest African American church in New York City. He and his congregation were active in the Underground Railroad, helping escaping slaves in their travels from the American South to freedom in Canada. In addition, Wright served as an agent of the New England Anti-Slavery Society and worked with other anti-slavery organizations, traveling and lecturing in the cause along with such other well-known African American abolitionists as Frederick Douglass. He also wrote for William Lloyd Garrison’s anti-slavery newspaper, the Liberator. In 1833, he became one of the founders of the American Anti-Slavery Society, serving on its executive committee and later helping to found the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society. He was chairman of the New York Vigilance Committee, which worked to prevent the kidnapping of free African Americans who would then be sold into slavery in the South. He was also vice president of the Phoenix Society, an organization promoting education and vocational training for African Americans.

Despite the altercation over the Freedom’s Journal, Wright appears to have kept contact with his Seminary professors and continued on good terms with them over the years. In 1836, seven years after completing his theological studies, Wright was back on the campus for a meeting of the “Literary Society of the Alumni of Nassau Hall.” Although this was a program of the alumni of Princeton College, the event took place in the Seminary chapel. The event was packed, but extra benches were brought in and Wright was able to take a seat about 10 feet from the door. Suddenly someone cried out, “Out with the n***,” and Wright was seized by the collar and kicked by a Princeton College student. Although Wright did not try to defend himself, one of the Princeton Seminary students came to his aid. The college student turned out to be from South Carolina, and Princeton University records indicate that he did not complete his studies at Princeton, possibly being expelled for his actions at this meeting.⁴⁴

This was not the only time Wright suffered because of his race. Much more serious was the death of his first wife. Traveling by steamer to Boston in the winter, they were compelled to stand outside on the hurricane deck in inclement weather. Wright’s wife was frail, and Wright offered to pay any money if they would just allow her to stand in the kitchen or pantry, but this was refused since she was African American. He wrapped his coat around her and put her against a chimney to keep her warm, but she contracted a severe cold and died shortly thereafter.⁴⁵ Wright also complained that the Presbyterian church did not adequately support ministry to African Americans and that African American members of the Presbytery were not accorded the same status as their white brethren, but he went faithfully on with his work. By the time of his death in 1847, Wright was so well known and his work so well appreciated that his funeral procession through the streets of New York contained an estimated 6,000 people.⁴⁶

The second well-known Princeton Seminary graduate connected with the cause of abolition was Elijah Parish Lovejoy (Class of 1834). Lovejoy was born in Maine and attended the school that today is known as Colby College. After graduation he travelled west to St. Louis, where he began a newspaper and ran a school. Sensing a call to ministry, he came to Princeton Seminary in 1832. After ordination he returned to St. Louis, where he resumed his newspaper work along with his work as a pastor. Among other topics, he wrote articles for his newspaper concerning abolition and the mistreatment of African Americans. These writings stirred up local resentment, and several times his newspaper office was vandalized. Eventually he decided to relocate his offices to Alton, Illinois, across the Mississippi River, since Illinois was nominally a “free” state. However, pro-slavery forces were strong in Alton as well, and his press was again attacked and destroyed.

When a new press was sent down the river from Cincinnati for Lovejoy, he and some friends stored it temporarily in a warehouse near the river and decided to spend the night guarding it. A mob gathered on the night of November 7, 1837, and demanded that it be turned over to them. If not, the mob threatened to burn down the warehouse. As Lovejoy and several colleagues stepped forward to defend their press, Lovejoy was shot five times and killed. The mob then seized the press, breaking it up and throwing the pieces in the river.

Lovejoy became one of the early martyrs of the abolition movement. His death made a profound impression on the national consciousness and stirred new interest in the anti-slavery cause and in defense of freedom of the press. Memorial services were held across the nation, including one organized by Theodore Wright at his church in New York City. Lovejoy’s brothers, Owen and Joseph, wrote a memoir of his life, a copy of which was presented to the Princeton Seminary library by the American Anti-Slavery Society when it was published in 1838. In more recent years, new accounts of the story of Elijah Parish Lovejoy have continued to appear (including even a recent one in comic-book form). A PBS-style documentary was made for television, portions of which were shot on the Princeton Seminary campus, and a commemorative plaque is located on the porch of the Mackay Center at Princeton Seminary. An award for courageous journalism named after him was established in 1952 at Colby College and continues to be given out annually.⁴⁷

A somewhat less-known figure was Albert Barnes (Class of 1823). Barnes was one of the most vocal Presbyterian pastors in the anti-slavery camp. He served for over 40 years as pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Philadelphia. He was a noted preacher and author of a series of popular biblical commentaries. He made an exhaustive study of the passages in the Bible related to slavery, and he concluded that whatever the Bible might say about slavery in ancient Israel or in the Roman Empire in the time of the apostles, slavery as practiced in the 19th century in North America could not simply be characterized as an abuse of an otherwise neutral system, but was completely “contrary to the spirit of the Christian religion” and that “the fair influence of the Christian religion would everywhere abolish slavery.” He recommended that Christian churches should follow the example of the Society of Friends (Quakers) and cease all connection with slavery. If that were done, he was convinced, the force of public opinion would be such that it could no longer stand.⁴⁸

Another lesser known Princeton Seminary alumnus who took up the abolitionist cause was John Finley Crowe (Class of 1816). Crowe was born in Tennessee, grew up in Missouri, and did his college studies in Lexington, Kentucky. Following his studies at the Seminary, he returned to Kentucky as a pastor of two small congregations and also founded an academy. In addition to his white students, he took up instructional work in the African American community and earned local opposition for this. No one would lend him the use of a building for the purpose. In May of 1822 he began publishing a newspaper, The Abolition Intelligencer and Missionary Magazine, which ran for about a year. It was one of the earliest publications of its kind in the country but earned him further rejection from the local populace. In his diary he wrote that he was willing “to suffer persecution and reproach, the loss of friends and property, if he might only be instrumental in doing something for the amelioration of the poor slave.” When he could no longer get his paper printed and had received threats to himself and his family, he finally accepted a call to pastor a congregation in Hanover, Indiana. In Hanover he again started a school which was incorporated in 1829 and became Hanover College in 1833, the first church- related college in Indiana. He served on the Board of Trustees of the college until his death in 1860 at age 72. An early memoir and some correspondence from John Finley Crowe are held at the Hanover College archives and show his ongoing contact with Princeton Seminary and its professors over the years. His correspondence and surviving speeches reflect his lifelong concern with the slavery issue, as well as with the condition of Native Americans and, in later years, with the colonization movement in Liberia. As one of the pioneer Presbyterian ministers in southern Indiana, he helped organize the Synod of Indiana in 1826, which sent repeated overtures on the question of slavery to the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church.⁴⁹

John Montieth (Class of 1816) was also active in the anti-slavery movement. While at Princeton Seminary he lived with Archibald Alexander as a tutor to two of Alexander’s sons. He was the first Presbyterian minister to reach Michigan. In 1817, he preached the first English sermon there and established the first Protestant congregation in Detroit. He apparently fostered good ecumenical relations, as the first service was actually held in the Roman Catholic church building. He also helped establish the first university in the territory (later to become the University of Michigan), serving as its first president, and he founded the first public library in Michigan. In 1821, he moved to Hamilton, New York, to teach at Hamilton College, followed by a second teaching stint in Germantown, Pennsylvania. In 1831, he moved to Elyria, Ohio, where he served until 1845. He was a pioneer in the anti-slavery cause in the Western Reserve, near the shores of Lake Erie, and operated a station on the Underground Railroad in the region. At one point he narrowly escaped being tarred and feathered by a pro-slavery mob (in northern Ohio, a supposedly slave-free area), and another time his daughter remembered him coming home with his horse’s mane and tail completely sheared off. His friends in Michigan recalled him to that area between 1845 and 1855, but he returned to Elyria in 1859 to continue his teaching and anti-slavery work, dying there in 1868.⁵⁰

A classmate of John Montieth, Jeremiah Chamberlain (Class of 1817), also had a pioneering role in higher education. Although less vocal about his beliefs regarding slavery, he nevertheless ended up paying for them with his life. Born in Pennsylvania and educated at Dickinson College, Chamberlain’s mother had made a vow at the time of his birth to dedicate him to the work of the church. After finishing his program at Princeton Seminary, he accepted a missionary appointment to travel through western Pennsylvania and then down the Ohio River to St. Louis and on down the Mississippi, stopping at towns between Natchez and New Orleans, and finally ending up in Mobile, Alabama, where he was the first Protestant minister ever to hold a service, using his silk hat as a pulpit desk on which to rest his sermon notes. He returned to Bedford, Pennsylvania, where he served a congregation and founded an academy in 1818. In 1822, he was called to Centre College in Danville, Kentucky, serving as president of the institution at age 27. In 1826, he was called to Jackson, Louisiana, to head a college there, but the support was not what had been expected, and he resigned to start his own academy there in 1828. In 1830, he worked together with the Presbyterian Church officials to establish what became Oakland College in Mississippi, about 40 miles from Natchez. The school flourished under his leadership for the next 20 years and at its founding was the only church-related college southwest of Tennessee.

Although Chamberlain’s own sympathies were for ending slavery, his position depended upon working amicably with slaveholding neighbors and supporters. In the same year he founded Oakland College, he co-founded the Mississippi Colonization Society, dedicated to encouraging the manumission of slaves for resettlement in Liberia. The first classes at Oakland were held in a home that was the private residence of the wife of a slave trader, and land and early endowments for the college came from local plantation owners. By the 1850s there were tensions in the area on political issues, including slavery and states’ rights, and Senator Jefferson Davis, an opponent of the Compromise of 1850, lost in his bid to become governor of Mississippi. On the evening of September 5, 1851, Chamberlain was stabbed to death in front of his own home, while his wife, several of his children, and his son-in-law looked on. The murderer rode away and hid for several days after the killing but himself was found dead about a week later, presumably from suicide. The reason for the murder was not made fully clear by the official proceedings, but contemporary reports suggest that the murderer had been a Jefferson Davis supporter, had been drinking, and was concerned about pro-Union and anti-slavery sentiments being propagated at the college. It is interesting to note that despite Jeremiah Chamberlain’s concerns about slavery, the county slave schedule for 1850 shows him as owning three young slaves himself, ages 24, 17, and 15.

Oakland College closed during the Civil War, and the property was bought by the state after the war. Congress had required states with segregated educational systems to establish black land grant colleges if the state wished to qualify for gaining land grant benefits. The former Oakland College, a school originally set up for white students, became the first land grant college for African Americans, Alcorn College. In 1974 it became Alcorn University.⁵¹

While some alumni of Princeton Seminary did become active in the anti-slavery movement, many who were opposed in principle to slavery as practiced in North America before the Civil War were also opposed to the immediate abolitionist stance of Douglass and Garrison. They believed that freeing slaves without adequate preparation for citizenship would create serious social and economic disruption.

A very common position among Presbyterian ministers of the antebellum period, including Princeton Seminary graduates, was to affirm the value of ultimate emancipation, while in the meanwhile working for voluntary manumissions, an amelioration of the system of slavery while it lasted, and the education of free African Americans and of slaves and their children. A number of graduates of Princeton Seminary were involved, at least for a portion of their ministry, as missionaries to the slaves and to freedmen in the American South. Others served with sabbath schools in the North, giving basic literacy education and religious instruction, and also provided other services for African American Presbyterian congregations.

An interesting case was that of Charles Colcock Jones (Class of 1830). He was born the son of a plantation owner on the Georgia coast and became a substantial slaveholder in his own right. When he was 17 he made a profession of faith. Deciding to enter the ministry, he went to Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, and Andover Seminary, completing his theological education at Princeton Seminary in 1830. While in Massachusetts he became very concerned about the family plantation and the morality of owning slaves. During his studies in Princeton, he wrote to his fiancé about his interest in carrying on religious instruction among slaves. Following graduation from Princeton Seminary, he accepted a position at the First Presbyterian Church of Savannah, where he organized an Association for Religious Instruction of the Negroes in Liberty County. In 1833, he took up took up missionary work among slaves in Liberty County, Georgia, as his major responsibility. With the exception of a short period when he served as professor of church history at Columbia Seminary, the missionary work engaged his attention from this time until 1848. After another short period as professor of church history, he served as the secretary of the Board of Missions of the Presbyterian Church from 1850 until 1853, then returned to the family plantations in Liberty County.⁵²

Jones placed much emphasis on visiting with the slaves on the plantations and arranging meetings for worship and instruction. He did not always find the task easy. Once, preaching to the slaves from the Epistle of Philemon on the duty of obedience, and condemning the practice of running away, he lost his audience, half of them simply walking away. Some declared that there was no such epistle in the Bible. Others declared “that it was not the Gospel.” Jones quietly re-evaluated his approach and but kept on with his work, learning how best to present the gospel to the slaves while not at the same time openly questioning the institution of slavery.⁵³

Clearly his position as a slave owner interested in sharing the gospel with the slaves sometimes caused him to do much reflection about the task. Unable to find a suitable catechism, for example, he decided to write his own in phrasing he thought would communicate better with the slaves than any he could find. He also urged slave owners to better treatment of their slaves, including better physical treatment. He published his ideas on religious instruction for slaves in a volume called The Religious Instruction of the Negroes in the Southern States in 1842 and a further volume, Suggestions on the Religious Instruction of Negroes in the Southern States in 1847. In 1861, before a General Assembly of the Southern Presbyterian Church in Augusta, Georgia, he gave an address on the subject. His story has proved of interest to more recent writers. Besides academic papers and dissertations, literary critic Robert Mason Myers published a large collection of Jones family letters, The Children of Pride, which won a National Book Award in 1973, and historian Erskine Clarke’s Dwelling Place: A Plantation Epic, also based on the Jones family correspondence, won a Bancroft Prize in 2006.

John Miller Dickey (Class of 1827) spent time as a young minister in missionary work in southern Georgia and Florida. According to his 19th century biographer he “always felt a profound interest in the African race, and was a zealous and efficient friend to a multitude of colored young men struggling for an education.”⁵⁴ Returning to his native Pennsylvania he was involved in the recovery of free-born African Americans who had been illegally kidnapped by slave hunters and sold into slavery in the South.

John Miller Dickey also developed a concern for starting a school for African Americans who desired a higher education but found it hard to be accepted at the existing schools, and he was instrumental in founding Ashmun Institute, which today is Lincoln University. Canvassing for support, he received a commitment of $50,000 from Cortlandt Van Rensselaer (Class of 1833), who himself had spent time as a missionary to slaves in Virginia in 1833-1835. He also gathered promise of support from other sources. Land was purchased near Oxford, Pennsylvania, and an institute for the higher education of African Americans was chartered in 1854. The Presbyterian Board of Education provided a salary for the first professor, and the school opened its doors in 1856. Cortlandt Van Rensselaer gave the opening address. Originally named Ashmun Institute, the name of the school was changed to Lincoln University after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. It was the first degree-granting historically African American institution in North America, and its notable alumni include Langston Hughes and Thurgood Marshall. John Miller Dickey remained president of the Board of Trustees of Lincoln University from its founding until his death in 1878.⁵⁵

Lincoln University continued to draw support from persons connected with Princeton Seminary for many years. Graduates of Princeton Seminary would regularly take positions on the teaching faculty, and Seminary faculty and board members were involved with fundraising for the school. A handbill for a post-Civil War fundraising drive for the University bears the names of Charles Hodge, Alexander McGill, W. Henry Green, James Moffatt, and C. Wistar Hodge, all members of the Seminary faculty, along with the names of nine members of the Princeton College faculty and the pastor of the First Presbyterian Church in Princeton.

As mentioned, Cortlandt Van Rensselaer, was an early and generous supporter of what became Lincoln University. His father was one of the wealthiest men in upstate New York and his mother was a daughter of William Paterson, a signer of the U.S. Constitution, a governor of New Jersey, and an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court. After graduating from Yale in 1827, he studied law for three years and was admitted to the bar of New York state, but then chose to devote himself to the Christian ministry. He studied at Princeton Seminary for his first two years and completed his studies at Union Seminary in Virginia. There the situation of the African American slaves deeply impacted him. Upon graduation he accepted the invitation of a well-known plantation owner to come and live on the plantation and work among the slaves.  His work was educational, as well as providing religious instruction, but soon raised opposition from other planters in the area, and he was forced to leave Virginia and return to the North. After a short time serving congregations in New Jersey and Washington, D.C., he was invited by the Princeton Seminary Board of Directors to travel the country to raise funds for the Seminary and following that assignment spent many years as corresponding secretary for the Presbyterian Board of Education, raising funds to support ministerial education in general. In addition to his address at the opening of the future Lincoln University, he published an extended series of articles on the issue of slavery, challenging the views of George D. Armstrong, pastor of the First Presbyterian Church in Norfolk, Virginia, who called himself a “Pro-slavery man” and whose The Christian Doctrine of Slavery was a major Southern theological defense of the practice.  Cortlandt Van Rensselaer positioned himself as a “conservative” on the issue, “repudiating, on the one hand, the fundamental principal of fanatical abolitionism … and, on the other hand, rejecting with equal conscientiousness the ultra defences of slavery, which constitute it a Divine ordinance … and which claim for it an undefined permanence.” “Christians, whose minds and hearts are imbued with the spirit of their Lord,” he wrote, “cannot regard with complacency an institution, whose origin is in wrong, and whose continuance depends upon the inferior condition of a large class of their fellow-men.”⁵⁶ He advocated education and religious instruction for slaves, looking toward the ultimate abolition of slavery, and he suggested that many more were ready for freedom, or could shortly be made ready for freedom, than Armstrong and other Southern defenders of slavery were ready to admit. Still, he ends his argument with the sentiment that the prospects that freed African Americans could really look forward to being treated as equal citizens in the United States were not hopeful, based on past experience, and that one could be thankful that another option had been made available for them by the American Colonization Society and the possibility of emigration to Liberia.

As one might expect, given the commitment of their Seminary professors, colonization was a popular cause among many Princeton Seminary alumni. Daved Anthony Schmidt has identified a dozen Princeton Seminary alumni who served as administrators in national or regional colonization societies, and many others were undoubtedly members or supporters of the movement.⁵⁷

While support for eventual abolition of slavery, education, colonization, and the amelioration of the conditions of slavery remained popular positions among Princeton Seminary alumni, there were also those, especially those who came from the South or emigrated there to serve following their Princeton education, who actively supported the institution of slavery and even themselves owned slaves. One of the earliest graduates of Princeton Seminary was Samuel Blanchard How (Class of 1815). Born in New Jersey, he attended the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton Seminary and was ordained in 1815. While his earliest ministerial services were in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, in 1823 he accepted a call to the Independent Presbyterian Church in Savannah, Georgia. He served there until 1827, then returned north to serve primarily in Dutch Reformed churches. His major ministry was at the First Reformed Church in New Brunswick, New Jersey, where he was pastor from 1832 until 1861.

In 1855, the General Synod of the Reformed Protestant Dutch Church received a petition from the North Carolina Classis of the German Reformed Church seeking formal ecclesiastical connection. The petition was ultimately rejected by the Synod, with two main objections being raised during the debate. The first was from those who felt it would be “inexpedient” and would disturb the “peace of the church” as it would raise the divisive issue of slavery in church debates, many members of the North Carolina Classis being slaveholders. The second objection was from those in the church who held that slaveholding was an outright sin and that the church should not hold communion with persons who held others in bondage. Samuel How made an eloquent address to the Synod in defense of the North Carolina Classis and in support of their bid for formal ecclesial connection. The substance of his address, together with an extended appendix on slavery and its history, was eventually published under the title Slaveholding Not Sinful. Much of it is a review of passages in the Bible that deal with the topic of slavery, showing that indeed slavery “is constantly spoken of in the Sacred Scriptures, but there is no direct prohibition of it.” How proposed that slavery was one of the “penal effects of the fall, and of the great wickedness of men,” but that masters would be accountable before God for the treatment of their slaves.  Since God has permitted slavery to exist, slave owners should not be kept out of the church. Rather, they should be admonished to do their duty to their slaves (“Masters, give unto your servants that which is just and equal, knowing that ye also have a Master in heaven,” Col. 4:1). Likewise, the slave should be admonished to “submit to the rule of his master and to perform the duties which he owes him with fidelity, and in fear of God.”

Besides the biblical arguments, How had other considerations to present. He felt that Southern slave owners had been grossly misrepresented in the North in pieces such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Further, he felt that slave owners in the American South were unjustly accused of being “manstealers” and pirates. After all, the slave trade had been quite legal in most states until the early years of the 19th  century and had been confirmed in the U.S. Constitution. It was Africans who had sold their fellow Africans into slavery. At most, the Southerners might be held responsible for “receiving stolen goods, knowing them to have been stolen,” but that the British and Northern ship owners who had brought the slaves to North America and sold them were equally guilty in this regard. Therefore anyone who had received funds which could be traced back to the slave trade was also to be held accountable. “Let us deal fairly with both, and say to the Southerner, Emancipate at once your slaves; and to the Northerner, and especially to the Abolitionist, Relinquish at once all the property which you hold which originally was acquired by trafficking in slaves.” While he feels this is good reasoning, he in fact does not feel it should be actually carried out, as such a thing “would shake society to its foundations”:

“Suppose, then, that the three millions of Southern slaves were all liberated at once, that the wishes of the Abolitionist were carried out to their full extent. What would be their condition? Would we join them to drive the Southern white men from their homes, and to seize their property, and so throw them out, with their families, houseless, impoverished and helpless? Or are the Abolitionists of the North prepared to receive and support these three millions of slaves? … None can predict what disasters and crimes and sorrows would follow an event so marked by folly and wickedness.⁵⁸ How’s address must have spoken to a fair number of people, as the first edition quickly sold out and was followed by a second. He was preparing yet a third edition as the Civil War broke out in 1861.”

Another prominent Princeton Seminary alumnus who spoke on behalf of Southern slave owners was James Adair Lyon (Class of 1836). Born in Tennessee and a graduate of Washington College in Tennessee, he served churches in Tennessee and Mississippi from 1837 to 1847. In 1848, he moved to St. Louis where he served a congregation and founded a school for young women, and then returned to his congregation in Mississippi in 1855 and served there throughout the Civil War and until 1870, when he became professor of mental and moral science at the University of Mississippi. He was a recognized leader in the Presbyterian Church in the Confederate States of America, and his articles, sermons, and comments appeared in the Southern Presbyterian Review, the True Witness and Sentinel (published in Memphis and New Orleans), in the Columbus, South Carolina, newspapers, and other Southern periodicals. In 1863, he was elected moderator of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the Confederate States of America. In 1850, he delivered an address to the Missouri Colonization Society that was frequently republished as The Missionary Aspect of African Colonization. In 1859, there was an attempt to bring illegally pirated Africans into Mississippi, and James Lyon had boldly spoken out against such activity in an address on Christianity and the Civil Laws. On a national fast day proclaimed by President Buchanan in early 1861, Lyon spoke out against secession in his sermon. However in the following months, he embraced the Southern cause and in his Confederate Fast Day Sermon, preached in June of that year, he declared that “We must regard the present crisis as one of the grand moves in God’s providence to bring about a higher and better order of things.”

One of the most important and interesting documents to come from the pen of James Adair Lyon is Slavery and the duties growing out of the Relation. In December 1861, Lyon was appointed the chair of a committee tasked by the Southern General Assembly to express their views on the slavery issue. It was presented at the Southern General Assembly of 1863, held in Columbia, South Carolina, in the midst of the war. Although never formally adopted by the Southern General Assembly, the whole document is worth reading for its insight into the mind of the theologically educated Southern Presbyterian regarding his view of the issue. It was published for circulation in the Southern Presbyterian Review, and Lyon asserts that many “secretly approved of the sentiments therein set forth, yet they never adopted them as their own.”⁵⁹

There is not room here for an extensive review of this piece, but it begins by acknowledging that the “providence of God” has remarkably committed to the people of the Southern states the “great responsibility” but also “high privilege” of “elevating a whole people, which have been, by the manifest interposition of the Almighty, transplanted from their own land of darkness and degradation, where nature is not propitious to civilization and mental development, to this favored land of promise—this home of light and liberty, and, infinitely above all, of a pure Christianity.” Although admitting that avarice, cruelty and greed were manifest in the way this was carried out and deploring “the African slave trade” as immoral, it was seen as part of God’s great design, bringing good out of evil, as had been the case of the selling of Joseph into Egypt. The piece goes on to justify the existence of slavery itself, apart from any abuses that have crept in. “Like the existence of God, it is taken for granted from the beginning to the end of the Bible … slavery, in some form or other, does exist, will exist, and must exist in the present condition of humanity.” The question is “what kind of slavery … will most accord with the laws of nature and the spirit of Christianity.” If the responsibilities of the slave owner are properly carried out, the slave, “like the parasitic plant that rises with the oak, is elevated with and by the master. … The most favorable condition of the black man, on this continent, is that of servitude. For this state he is eminently qualified by nature, being constitutionally kind, affectionate, imitative, and contented. He would be utterly incapable of taking care of himself, as facts do but too sadly prove.” There are indeed “evils and abuses” connected with slavery, but these are regretted “by all good men.” As “a tree is more fruitful, and a flower more beautiful” when it is properly cultivated, so the good slave owner has a responsibility to educate his slaves and provide them with religious instruction:

“A smart slave is more valuable than a stupid one … the more intelligent a slave is, and the greater his capacity to reason, the more contented he is with his servile condition, provided he is treated correctly, and the less likely to engage in insurrectionary and unlawful enterprises, since he is the more capable of perceiving, not only the hopelessness of such dangerous and futile attempts, but the undesirableness of success, even if they were feasible. … Still further it is perfectly manifest that in proportion as a slave’s conscience is cultivated in accordance with the principles of the Bible, the less likely he is to become a criminal.”

The document recommends having slaves attend worship and be given instruction in Christianity. It also recommends laws against teaching slaves to read be repealed, but does not recommend slaves be sent to schools and academies “in their present condition.” It recommends against leaving slaves simply under the control of overseers, rather than under the good influence of the slave owner and his family, and against “the practice, too prevalent in many localities, of unauthorized assemblies taking the law into their own hands.” Finally, a major section deals with the evils of breaking up slave families and destroying marriage and domestic relations among slaves.

One of the most prominent Presbyterian preachers in the middle years of the 19th century was Henry Jackson Van Dyke (Class of 1846). After pastorates in South Jersey and Germantown, Pennsylvania, he was called to the prestigious pulpit of the First Presbyterian Church of Brooklyn, New York. In December 1860, on the very eve of the Civil War, following the election of Lincoln and the already rumbling threats of secession from South Carolina, he preached a sermon on 1 Timothy 6:1-5, a passage which enjoins “servants as are under the yoke” (that is, “slaves”) to honor and obey their masters, whether the masters be believers or unbelievers, “that the name of God and his doctrine be not blasphemed.” The sermon was shortly expanded into a printed pamphlet under the title “The Character and Influence of Abolitionism.” In it he charges the abolitionist movement with having no foundation in Scripture, misrepresenting the true situation of most slaves in the South, leading often to complete infidelity regarding the beliefs and practices of the Christian religion, and finally accusing the movement as “the chief cause of the strife that agitates, and the danger that threatens our country.” At several points he takes specific aim at fellow Princeton Seminary alumnus Albert Barnes, including extended footnotes in small print, challenging the way Barnes has interpreted the Scriptures and calling Barnes the person who “has done more, perhaps, than any other man in this country to propagate Abolitionist doctrine.” Against abolitionist accounts of the atrocities of slavery, he prefers that his hearers should know of Christian families in the South where “slaves are better fed and clothed and instructed, and have a better opportunity for salvation, than the majority of laboring people in the city of New York.” He gives an extended quote from the Southern Presbyterian pastor and theologian Benjamin Palmer, who would become the first moderator of the Presbyterian Church in the Confederate States of America in 1861:

“The worst foes of the black race are those who have intermeddled on their behalf. We know better than others, that every attribute of their character fits them for dependence and servitude. By nature the most affectionate and loyal of all races beneath the sun, they are also the most helpless; and no calamity can befall them greater than the loss of that protection they enjoy under this patriarchal system.  Indeed the experiment has been grandly tried of precipitating them upon freedom which they know not how to enjoy; and the dismal results are before us in statistics that astonish the world. … Freedom would be their doom.”

Van Dyke went on to proclaim his substantial agreement with Benjamin Palmer and the South Carolinian Presbyterian leader James Henley Thornwell, who also defended slavery as morally right and justified under the Christian religion. Referencing one of the classic biblical friendships, he wrote “My soul is knit to such men with the sympathy of Jonathan for David.”⁶⁰

By 1861, America was embroiled in a Civil War. While one cannot determine views on slavery simply from participation in the war, records indicate that somewhere near 170 former Princeton Seminary students served in some official military capacity during the Civil War. Of this total, 145 served with the Union and 24 with the Confederacy. For the most part, those who served acted as chaplains, though two served as surgeons for the Union and another handful served in official support roles for the Union war effort. Thirty-nine alumni are recorded as serving in combat roles with the Union Army, and five in combat roles for the Confederacy.⁶¹

The number of African American students at Princeton Seminary in the 19th century was never large, but at least some had personally experienced slavery before coming to the Seminary. African American alumni of the Seminary often were able to put their abilities, combined with their education, to significant use following graduation in working for the welfare of their people. Although a number of them only came to Princeton Seminary after the close of the Civil War, they had often been born during the period of slavery, and their lives and ministries were deeply shaped by the pre-Civil War history of the African American community and the new challenges that emerged in the period of Reconstruction. Since many of their stories are not well known, it is appropriate to recount at least a few of them here.

We have already looked briefly at the life and ministry of Theodore Sedgwick Wright. Henry M. Wilson (Class of 1848) served churches in Manhattan and Brooklyn. He helped form the American League of Colored Laborers to provide vocational education for African Americans for jobs in manufacturing, agriculture, and commerce, and to provide business loans for African Americans starting their own businesses. In 1858, he joined Henry Highland Garnet in founding the African Civilization Society to “promote the civilization and Christianization of Africa, as well as the welfare of her children in all lands.” The organization promoted the emigration of African Americans to Africa and worked with African American churches to set up sabbath and day schools in the Northeast and, after the Civil War, schools for freed African Americans in the South.⁶²

Jonathan Clarkson Gibbs (Class of 1856) served churches in Troy, New York, and Philadelphia. He became active in the abolitionist movement, working with Frederick Douglass and writing for anti-slavery publications. At one point he requested permission from his presbytery to immigrate to Africa, but at the insistence of his congregation that his services were needed here he withdrew his request. In Philadelphia he became a key figure in the local Underground Railroad. As the Civil War drew to a close, he moved to Charleston, South Carolina, to establish a school for freed African Americans. In 1867, he moved to Florida, where he helped draft the 1868 Florida Constitution. He served as secretary of state of Florida for four years and went on to become superintendent of public instruction for the state in 1873. Reports indicated that the standards of public education in Florida improved significantly during his term in office and that he worked hard to promote racial integration in the public schools.⁶³

George Collins (Class of 1870) was born in California and attended Oberlin College, graduating in 1865. He attended Princeton Seminary from 1867 to 1870. A letter in his alumnus file indicates that upon graduation he took a position at the Lincoln Mission in Washington, D.C., under the auspices of the American Missionary Association in New York City. During the Civil War there had been religious work begun in the camps around Washington, D.C., and after the war thousands of freedmen had ended up there. Various benevolent organizations and church groups provided food, clothing, and religious instruction for this population. Among these was the American Missionary Association, which set up the Colfax Industrial Mission in 1868 “for the education of colored children of Washington.” It was formally dedicated in 1870 and renamed the Lincoln Industrial Mission. Today the Lincoln Temple United Church of Christ stands on this site, considered the oldest African American Congregational Church in Washington, D.C. There is also an indication that Collins served as a tutor at Howard University, which likewise had been founded by the congregationalists shortly after the Civil War and was supported financially at that time by the Freedmen’s Bureau. Unfortunately, George Collins was not able to serve very long in his Washington, D.C. position, as the note in the alumnus record indicates that he died in 1871.⁶⁴

Thomas McCants Stewart (Class of 1881) was born of free parents in Charleston, South Carolina in 1853. Proving to be a good student, he went to Howard University at age 15. He eventually transferred to the University of South Carolina, one of the first African Americans to attend that institution, and graduated in 1875 with a Bachelor of Arts degree from the college and Bachelor of Laws degree from the Department of Law. He entered the practice of law and then served as a professor of mathematics at the State Agricultural College of South Carolina. He entered Princeton Seminary in 1878, serving as stated supply of the Mt. Pisgah African Methodist Episcopal Church in Princeton, and studied here until 1880, continuing his studies with President McCosh at Princeton College for another two years while also serving as pastor of the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church in New York City. In 1883, he set sail with fellow Princeton Seminary African American alumnus Hugh Mason Browne for Liberia, visiting Scotland, England, France, and Germany on the way. He took a position as professor of law and belles lettres in the College of Liberia and served as General Agent for Liberian Education. In 1886, he returned to North America and was admitted to the bar of the Supreme Court of the State of New York and thereafter to the bar of the Supreme Court of the United States in 1898.

His legal work was frequently commended in the official records of the courts. He served on the Board of Education for the Borough of Brooklyn and organized the Brooklyn Literary Union, of which he was president. Among his achievements in Brooklyn was to help establish an officially mixed-race public school with an African American supervisor of new teachers. In 1898, he moved to Hawaii, where he carried on an extensive legal practice and was appointed by the governor as one of five commissioners to draw up the Local Government Act for the Hawaiian Islands. In 1905, he conducted a lecture tour in Great Britain and then returned to Liberia in 1906. He was appointed an associated justice of the Liberian Supreme Court and was sent to Europe as deputy attorney general to help negotiate a boundary settlement between Liberia and the governments of France and Great Britain. In 1914, he returned to London, and in 1921, he moved to the Virgin Islands, where he continued his law practice. At his death in 1923, he asked to be buried wrapped in the Liberian flag. Among his publications was Liberia: The Americo- African Republic, published in 1886.⁶⁵

Matthew Anderson (Class of 1877) grew up in a home that had been a station on the Underground Railroad. After completing his studies at Oberlin College, he enrolled at the Western Theological Seminary in the Pittsburgh area, but after a short time there he applied to Princeton Seminary in 1874. Arriving at Princeton, he was mistaken at first for a workman come to do a job. Although he later recalled that there was some reluctance to give him a room in Alexander Hall (African American students had often roomed in town with African American families), his own insistence and the help and support of Princeton Seminary students living in Alexander Hall at the time led to his soon receiving a proper dorm room there. Anderson became the founding pastor of the Berean Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia. He took a holistic approach to the work of ministry. He once wrote, “I could never believe, that the work of a Gospel minister was simply preaching, in the commonly accepted sense of the term, but that it included everything, which tended to the development of the whole man.” He founded the Berean Savings Association so that African Americans could borrow money to buy homes. He founded the Berean Institute to teach job skills, such as plumbing, tailoring, carpentry, and home management. His wife, Caroline Still Anderson, daughter of the famous abolitionist William Still and one of the first African American women medical doctors, helped start prenatal classes and nurseries.⁶⁶

Another prominent 19th century African American alumnus of Princeton Seminary was Francis James Grimke (Class of 1878). Francis Grimke came to Princeton Seminary after the Civil War, having grown up in the system of slavery. He was the second of three sons born to the white planter Henry Grimke of Charleston, South Carolina, and his black slave, Nancy Weston, with whom he had set up a domestic relation following the death of his wife. Henry Grimke died in 1852, when the first two children of his second family were still young and the third had not yet been born. In order to protect the second family, he willed them to his white son and heir, the half-brother of Francis by Henry’s original wife. Henry’s intention was that they should live as free blacks, but in 1860 the son of the first wife claimed the boys as his slaves. He treated them poorly, and Francis ran away, offering himself as a valet to a Confederate officer. The officer was stationed in various places during the war, but when his outfit returned to Charleston, Francis was recognized as a runaway and put in prison. After again being treated poorly, Francis was sold to another Confederate officer, from whom he eventually was able to run away again and hide until the end of the Civil War gave him his freedom.

Francis Grimke and his brother did well in their schooling following the war at schools set up for free blacks in Charleston and then went on to Lincoln University in Pennsylvania for further studies. Henry Grimke had come from a large family, among whom were two sisters, Angelina and Sarah Grimke. They had become ardent abolitionists, joined the Society of Friends (Quakers), and moved from Charleston to Philadelphia before the war. When they discovered their African American relatives at Lincoln University, they helped support them through their education, acknowledging them as part of their family. Francis and his brother, Archibald, graduated from Lincoln University in 1870. Francis was in fact the class valedictorian. After teaching at Lincoln for a few years, he entered the law school at Howard University in 1874, but the following year decided to take up theological studies at Princeton Seminary. He married Charlotte Forten, a granddaughter of James Forten. The Fortens had been leaders of the free African American community in Philadelphia for years, and Charlotte was close friends with many of the leading abolitionists.

After graduating from Princeton Seminary, Grimke became pastor of the prominent Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church in Washington, D.C., a major African American congregation. With the exception of a few years in Jacksonville, Florida, he held this post throughout his ministerial career and used it to become a leading spokesperson for the African American community and its concerns until his death in 1937. He was the author of numerous published sermons and tracts, urging his people to fight for their rights. “It is our duty to keep up the agitation for our rights, not only for our sakes, but also for the nation at large. … If justice sleeps in this land, let it not be because we have helped to lull it to sleep by our silence, our indifference; let it not be from lack of effort on our part to arouse it from its slumbers. … Even Balaam’s ass cried out in protest when smitten by his brutal master and God gave him power to cry out, endowed him miraculously with speech in which to voice his protest,” he wrote. He called for an end to lawless lynching and other abuses of the Reconstructionist period and the early 20th century. He challenged segregation in the YMCA and publicly spoke out against Woodrow Wilson’s policy of segregating the various departments of the federal government. He also challenged racism as he experienced it in the Presbyterian church. He became one of the founders of the movements among African Americans that eventually gave birth to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).⁶⁷

A classmate of Francis Grimke in the Princeton Seminary Class of 1878 was Hugh Mason Browne. Browne was born in Washington, D.C., in 1851, and joined the Fifteenth St. Presbyterian Church there at age 16. He attended Howard University and came to Princeton Seminary in 1875. While at the Seminary, he served the Witherspoon Presbyterian Church in Princeton. After completing his work at the Seminary, he took an additional year of study at the seminary of the Free Church of Scotland in Edinburgh. He became the Charles Hodge Professor of Intellectual and Moral Philosophy at Liberia College, West Africa, serving from 1882-1884, but after becoming familiar with the educational situation in Liberia was convinced that the money spent on the college would be better spent on a system of common schools and first-class industrial schools. Returning to the United States, he became head of the department of physics in a segregated high school in Washington, D.C., where he instituted the laboratory method of teaching physics. In 1897, he was called to Hampton Institute in Virginia, where he developed the physics department and reorganized a summer school for teachers. He also patented a device to prevent water backflow in cellars during this time and devised the plan for Hampton Institute’s exhibit at the Paris Exposition of 1900. The exhibit won a gold medal. His next appointment was to the Colored High School and Colored Polytechnical School in Baltimore, where he was able for the first time to place them under the management of African American faculties. He was invited by the Society of Friends in Philadelphia to come and reorganize the Institute for Colored Youth, which had been set up in 1837 as an educational and training school for African Americans. Under his leadership this institute was relocated to an enlarged location in nearby Cheyney, Pennsylvania. He served the Institute as principal until 1913, increasing the academic offerings and establishing a summer school for African American teachers. Today the school is known as Cheyney University. Browne was also secretary of a “Committee of Twelve for the Advancement of the Interests of the Negro Race,” which among other achievements successfully lobbied to defeat bills that would have disenfranchised African American voters in Maryland. Following his retirement in 1913, Hugh Browne continued to serve as a consultant to Cheyney and to promote vocational education in the African American community. To further his knowledge in this area he made a trip to Germany to study the vocational education system in that country.⁶⁸

Daniel Wallace Culp was a member of the Princeton Seminary Class of 1879. Born into slavery in South Carolina in 1852, he developed an interest in study at an early age, at first under the tutelage of his master. Following the Civil War, his former master continued tutoring him. In 1869, he entered the Biddle Memorial Institute (now Johnson C. Smith University), becoming its first graduate in 1876. His abilities in mathematics and the languages astonished his teachers, and he advanced so rapidly beyond his classmates that he was soon put in a class by himself. In the fall following his graduation from Biddle he entered Princeton Seminary. Again he was regarded as one of the brightest students in his class and excelled in Hebrew and theology. He also took courses in philosophy and psychology at Princeton College with Princeton College President James McCosh. This led to a rather telling incident when several Princeton College students objected to his presence in the classroom and threatened to leave the college if Culp continued to attend the class. McCosh told them he would be sorry to see them go, but that under no circumstances would he exclude Daniel Culp from his class. While they all carried out their threat and left, all but one eventually returned to Princeton at the urging of their parents.⁶⁹

Following graduation from the Seminary, Daniel Culp served churches in South Carolina, Florida, Alabama, and Tennessee. While in Florida he also served as principal of Stanton Institute, one of the most well-regarded secondary schools for African American students in the state. After a time he became deeply concerned about the physical welfare of his people and resigned his pastorate to study medicine at the University of Michigan and at the Medical College of Columbus, Ohio. From 1891 onward, he practiced medicine in Tennessee, Georgia, and Florida until his death in 1918. During his time in Georgia he was elected by the city council as superintendent and resident physician of the Freedmen’s Hospital of that city. He also lectured widely and in 1902 edited Twentieth Century Negro Literature or a Cyclopedia of Thought on Vital Topics Relating to the American Negro.⁷⁰ Part of his motivation for publishing the book, which contained essays by a number of well-known African American writers, was to correct what he felt was widespread ignorance on the part of white people regarding the intellectual abilities of the African Americans. A second reason was to inform white people what African Americans themselves were thinking about America’s race problem. A third reason was to encourage intellectual consideration of important issues by the African American community itself and to inspire young African Americans by presenting the literary and scholarly work of contemporary African American authors.

Another outstanding 19th century African American alumnus of Princeton Seminary was William Alfred Byrd (Class of 1894). Born in South Carolina in 1867, he grew up in North Carolina and received his education at Biddle College. When he arrived at Princeton Seminary in 1891, he was the only African American student in his class. He would become not only an honor student, but treasurer of his class. After graduation he was told that after a year of service in the parish he might return to Biddle as its president, provided that he not speak out too forcefully concerning “certain things,” which his son understood to mean speaking out on issues concerning civil rights for African Americans in the American South. Refusing the offer under these conditions, he served for two years in rural congregations in North Carolina, and then moved to Arkansas where he became principal and chaplain of the Cotton Plant Industrial Academy, a secondary school for African Americans.

In 1905, William Byrd moved his family to Rochester, New York. At that time the Great Migration of southern African Americans to the North was still going on, and Byrd’s congregation became a significant focus of the African American community in Rochester. In 1905, there was a major conference of African American leaders in Niagara Falls, which eventually led to the establishment of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) a few years later. Among the leaders Byrd came to know in the developing movement were W.E.B. Du Bois. He was also a close friend of William Robeson, one-time pastor of the Witherspoon Church in Princeton, father of the actor and singer Paul Robeson, and another of the leaders of the young NAACP. Robeson encourage Byrd to move back to New Jersey, where he became pastor of the Lafayette Presbyterian Church in Jersey City in 1917. In addition to his pastoral work, Byrd continued his work for the African American community as a whole, and the NAACP branch in Jersey City became the largest in the nation under his leadership. He also helped establish the National Urban League. His outspokenness also led to some opposition, and when he pressed for more African American leadership in his presbytery he was dismissed, ostensibly on grounds that he had made repairs to the manse without consulting the elders. He went on to found a nondenominational Community Church, which became a center of community action and a place where visiting speakers of all kinds were welcomed. Some years later the presbytery voted to reinstate Byrd, but he declined and continued pastoring in his Community Church. “I know that I am a Presbyterian, whether you accept me or not,” he is reported to have said. Nevertheless, he held a long-standing affectionate regard for Princeton Seminary, and his son Franz Byrd established an award at the Seminary, given each year to the student who it was felt had contributed most significantly to the life of the Seminary during his or her years on the campus.⁷¹

The last African American to study at Princeton Seminary who had personally experienced slavery was Irwin William Langston Roundtree (Class of 1895). Born of slave parents in Georgia before the Civil War, he eventually went on to a very fruitful ministerial career. One of his early memories was of the slaves celebrating freedom from slavery by the singing of old plantation songs and handshaking, accompanied by prayer. Throughout his life he exhibited a deep desire for education. His early studies were at a little country school taught by an African American Union Army veteran following the war. He also learned from a white Methodist Sunday School teacher and availed himself of other teachers in his immediate neighborhood. As time went on he had to postpone his studies to work on the family farm, but he later moved to Florida, where he earned his living as a lumberman in connection with a sawmill and as a railroad worker. Saving his money, he was able to enter Cookman Institute in Jacksonville, which had been set up by the Methodists to educate African Americans. He also taught school in rural Florida in the African American community. He did further studies at the Baptist Institute in Live Oaks, Florida, and was licensed to preach by the African Methodist Episcopal Church. He went on to the preparatory program of Howard University, but his health failed him at this point, and after working a summer as a porter in Cape May, New Jersey, he returned to Florida. He was eventually able to attend Lincoln University, from which he graduated in 1886.

Irwin Roundtree served in the Virginia Conference of the African Methodist Episcopal Church following his graduation from Lincoln, and he was then approved for formal seminary studies. He entered Drew Theological Seminary in 1888, receiving his Bachelor of Divinity in 1893. He also took classes at Princeton Theological Seminary from 1892 to 1894, including courses in Hebrew and Arabic, and received a master’s degree from Princeton College as well, taking additional courses in the field of philosophy there. While pursuing these graduate courses he also pastored churches in Madison, New Jersey (1889-1890); Englewood, New Jersey (1891); Bridgeton, New Jersey (1892-1893); and Princeton, New Jersey (1893-1895). Following these years of advanced education, he served churches in Trenton, New Brunswick, and Burlington, New Jersey (1895-1898) and then was called to become a presiding elder of the New Jersey Conference of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. He served in this capacity from 1898 until 1915 and as pastor of the Mount Zion African Methodist Episcopal Church in Trenton from 1906 until 1931. He also served as a trustee of Wilberforce University, was a member of the Historical and Literary Society of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, was a commissioner for the Bordentown Industrial School under the state Board of Education, and was a representative to the World’s Temperance Conference in Chicago in 1892 and to the Federal Council of Churches. During the winter of 1929-1930, he had an opportunity to take a study leave at Oxford University in Great Britain. Roundtree was politically active in state and national politics, serving at one point as an alternate delegate to the Republican National Convention, as well as serving the church. He retired in 1931 and continued to live in Trenton until his death in 1948.⁷²

While this survey of Princeton Seminary alumni is not exhaustive, it is representative of the breadth of viewpoints on the matter of slavery in the 19th century. Alumni settled in the United States and abroad; they served churches, started schools, and engaged in various forms of ministry in the American North, South, and West. All of them were in some way shaped by the environment and ethos of the Seminary community. Some adopted similar views on colonization as their professors; others argued stridently for abolition and were prominent figures in the anti-slavery movement. Their stories, their activism, and their impact in the church and in society are another important—and equally complex—facet of the history of Princeton Seminary with regard to slavery.

42. See Appendix B.

43. “Board of Directors Minute Book,” Princeton Theological Seminary, May 16, 1825. The most complete study of the life and ministry of Theodore Wright to date is Daniel Paul Morrison, “Rev. Theodore Sedgwick Wright (1797- 1847) Early Princeton Theological Seminary Black Abolitionist.” A copy of the typescript of this work is located in the Special Collections Department, Princeton Theological Seminary Library. It contains an excellent transcription of the publications of Theodore Wright as well as transcriptions of published obituaries and accounts of his funeral.

44. The Miller Chapel incident is reported in a letter from Theodore Wright published in The Liberator for November 6, 1836. A full transcription is found in the appendix to the Morrison, “Rev. Theodore Sedgwick Wright,” 14-17.

45. The incident was reported by Ebenezer Davies, a British abolitionist who attended Wright’s funeral, in his American Scenes, and Christian Slavery: A Recent Tour of Four Thousand Miles in the United States (London: J. Snow, 1849). Letter XXIX. It is recounted in Morrison, “Rev. Theodore Sedgwick Wright,” 24.

46. Ibid., 51.

47. There have been a number of biographies published of Elijah Lovejoy, beginning in the 19th century with Joseph C. and Owen Lovejoy, A Memoir of the Rev. Elijah P. Lovejoy; who was murdered in defence of the liberty of the press, at Alton, Illinois, Nov. 7, 1837 (New York: J.S. Taylor, 1838), with an introduction by John Quincy Adams; and Henry Tanner, The Martyrdom of Lovejoy. An Account of the Life, Trials, and Perils of Rev. Elijah P. Lovejoy (Chicago: Fergus printing company, 1881). Twentieth century biographies include Melvin Jameson, Elijah Parish Lovejoy as a Christian (Rochester, N.Y.: Scranton, Wetmore & co., 1910); John Gill, Tide without Turning:  Elijah P. Lovejoy and Freedom of the Press (Boston: Starr King Press, 1958); Merton Lynn Dillon, Elijah P. Lovejoy, Abolitionist Editor (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1961); and Paul Simon, Lovejoy, martyr to freedom (St. Louis: Concordia, 1964). In addition, the Special Collections Department, Princeton Theological Seminary Library, has several contemporary accounts of the riot and subsequent trials in Alton and the commemorative address given by William Lloyd Garrison in Boston on July 4, 1838.

48. The two most complete examinations of the issue of slavery by Albert Barnes are An Inquiry into the Scriptural Views of Slavery (Philadelphia: Perkins and Purves, 1846) and The Church and Slavery (Philadelphia: Parry & McMillan, 1857).

49. The two most complete examinations of the issue of slavery by Albert Barnes are An Inquiry into the Scriptural Views of Slavery (Philadelphia: Perkins and Purves, 1846) and The Church and Slavery (Philadelphia: Parry & McMillan, 1857).

50. The two most complete examinations of the issue of slavery by Albert Barnes are An Inquiry into the Scriptural Views of Slavery (Philadelphia: Perkins and Purves, 1846) and The Church and Slavery (Philadelphia: Parry & McMillan, 1857).

51. The two most complete examinations of the issue of slavery by Albert Barnes are An Inquiry into the Scriptural Views of Slavery (Philadelphia: Perkins and Purves, 1846) and The Church and Slavery (Philadelphia: Parry & McMillan, 1857).

52. Charles Colcock Jones presents an interesting study of a Southern Presbyterian deeply concerned about slavery as a religious issue and wrestling with what his response should be. The existence of a large amount of documentary material in his case has made possible a number of valuable studies. Among his own writings are The religious instruction of the negroes in the United States (Savannah: Thomas Purse, 1842); Suggestions on the religious instruction of the negroes in the southern states (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication, 1847); and A catechism of Scripture doctrine and practice for families and Sabbath schools: designed also for the oral instruction of colored persons (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication, 1852). There is also a very large collection of Jones family correspondence and other related materials at Tulane University in New Orleans and additional material in the archives at the University of Georgia. Further, the University of Georgia has digitized and placed online a large collection of his manuscript sermons. These materials have been drawn upon in Robert Mason Myers, The Children of Pride (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972) and Erskine Clarke, Wrestlin’ Jacob: a portrait of religion in the Old South (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1979) and Dwelling place: a plantation epic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005). Another collection of Jones family correspondence has also been published by Robert Manson Myers, A Georgian at Princeton (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976). It is limited to correspondence between 1850 and 1852, a period of time when his son was attending Princeton College. The opening letters contain a very moving account of the final sickness and death of Jack, a long-time “servant” (Jones consistently uses this term for African-Americans he owned rather than the term “slave”). It speaks of his personal care for Jack as Jack lay dying: “I was with him night and day, and am worn down with anxiety and watching. Almost every dose of medicine he took and every spoonful of nourishment he took from my hands.” He was also simultaneously taking personal care of Jack’s wife, Marcia, who was also dying (both had contracted pneumonia), and when he needed to get some rest he hired someone to continue looking after her. Important academic studies of Charles Colcock Jones include Eduard Nuessnee Loring, Charles C. Jones: Missionary to Plantation Slaves 1831- 1847 (Ann Arbor: Xerox University Microfilms, 1976); Thomas Pinckney, “The Missionary Work of Charles Colcock Jones: Successes and Failures of the Union of Christianity and Slavery in the Early Middle Nineteenth Century” (Senior Thesis, Princeton University, 1993); and Lillian Young Nave, “Reverend Charles Colcock Jones: A Portrait of the Life of an Individual Trapped in the Intersection of Slavery and Christianity in the Antebellum South” (Senior Thesis, Williams College, 1995).

53. This story is recounted in Clarke, Wrestlin’ Jacob, 40-41, and is drawn from Jones’ own account of the experience.

54. “Dickey, John Miller” in the Alfred Nevin (ed.), Encyclopaedia of the Presbyterian Church of the United States of America (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Encyclopaedia Publishing Co., 1884). Further information about John Miller Dickey may be found in “John Miller Dickey.” Alumni/ae files, Special Collections, Princeton Theological Seminary Library; and in George B. Carr, John Miller Dickey, D.D. His Life and Times (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1929).

55. For further information on the history of Lincoln University see Horace Mann Bond, Education for Freedom: A History of Lincoln University, Pennsylvania (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976).

56. C. Van Rensselaer (ed.), Miscellaneous Sermons, Essays, and Addresses by the Rev. Cortlandt Van Rensselaer,D.D. (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott & Co., 1861), 247 and 270. This volume contains an introductory biographical memoir by his son and five of his writings on the subject of slavery. The biographical account gives strong testimony to his early concern with the situation of African American slaves, including testimony of a Southern plantation owner that “I believe his having devoted the first years of his ministry in that field of labour in Virginia [the welfare and religious instruction of Virginia slaves], did more to awaken in our masters a sense of duty to provide religious instruction to their slaves, than the efforts of any other individual.”

57. See Appendix A.

58. Samuel Blanchard How, Slaveholding not sinful. Slavery, the punishment of man’s sin, its remedy, the gospel of Christ: an argument before the General synod of the Reformed Protestant Dutch church, October, 1855 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Terhune, 1856). The extended quotation is from pages 49-50 of the document. See also, “Samuel Blanchard How.” Alumni/ae files, Special Collections, Princeton Theological Seminary Library.

59. “James Adair Lyon.” Alumni/ae files, Special Collections, Princeton Theological Seminary Library. The Special Collections Department of the Princeton Theological Seminary Library also has a small collection of his published pamphlets and sermons. The address on “Slavery, and the duties growing out of the relation” summarized in this section appeared in the Southern Presbyterian Review for July 1863.

60. Henry Jackson Van Dyke, The character and influence of abolitionism. The published version of the original sermon was bought out in several editions by different publishers, including George F. Nesbitt & Co. of New York City; D. Appleton of New York City; and Henry Polkinhorn of Washington, D.C. The Palmer quote is from the Appleton version, page 21, which contains more extensive footnotes than the Nesbitt version.

61. See Appendix A.

62. “Henry M. Wilson.” Alumni/ae files, Special Collections, Princeton Theological Seminary Library.

63. “Jonathan Clarkson Gibbs.” Alumni/ae files, Special Collections, Princeton Theological Seminary Library.

64. “George Collins.” Alumni/ae files, Special Collections, Princeton Theological Seminary Library.

65. “Thomas McCants Stewart.” Alumni/ae files, Special Collections, Princeton Theological Seminary Library. T. McCants Stewart, Liberia: The Americo-African Republic (New York: Edward O. Jenkins’ Sons, 1886).

66. Matthew Anderson, Presbyterianism. Its Relation to the Negro. Illustrated by The Berean Presbyterian Church, Philadelphia, with Sketch of the Church and Autobiography of the Author, (Philadelphia: John McGill White & Co., 1897). This book is thoughtful, critical, and very well written. The biographical section of this book includes Anderson’s experiences as a teacher for two years in the South under the Board of Freemen a few years after the Civil War (pp. 155-161) and provides an extended presentation about Anderson’s experiences as an African American student at Princeton Seminary in the 1870s (pp. 162-176). The story of his obtaining a proper room in Alexander Hall is found on pages 165-168. His overall estimation of his experiences is summed up “With the exception of a little weakness on the part of the seminary in regard to the Negro, which needs strengthening up, our impressions of Princeton are of the very highest kind” (p.168). See also “Matthew Anderson.” Alumni/ae files, Special Collections, Princeton Theological Seminary Library.

67. A good sampling of the writings of Francis Grimke can be found in Carter G. Woodson (ed.) The Works of Francis J. Grimke (Washington, D.C.: The Associated Publishers, Inc., 1942). This four-volume work contains addresses, sermons, transcriptions from notebooks, and correspondence. There is also a short biographical introduction and appreciation. Additional publications, including sermons and pamphlets may be found in the Special Collections Department of the Princeton Theological Seminary Library. A sampling of his thoughts on racial issues may be found in pamphlets such as “Equality of Rights for All Citizens, Black and White, Alike” (1909); “Gideon Bands” (1913); “Fifty Years of Freedom” (1913) and in sermons such as “The Negro and His Citizenship” and addresses such as “The Race Problem—Two Suggestions as to Its Solution, “both in Woodson, volume 3, pages 391-406 and pages 591-599. Longer biographical studies may be found in Henry Justin Ferry, Francis Grimke: Portrait of a Black Puritan (Ann Arbor: University Microfilms International, 1990) and Thabiti M. Anyabwile, The Faithful Preacher: recapturing the vision of three pioneering African American pastors (Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway Books, 2007).

68. “Hugh Mason Browne.” Alumni Files, Special Collections, Princeton Theological Seminary Library.

69. “Daniel Wallace Culp.” Alumni Files, Special Collections, Princeton Theological Seminary Library. The incident related to the class with President McCosh at Princeton College is told in Matthew Anderson, Presbyterianism. Its Relation to the Negro, 175-176.

70. D.W. Culp (ed.) Twentieth Century Negro Literature; or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating to the American Negro (Toronto, Canada: J.L. Nichols & Co., 1902).

71. William Byrd.” Alumni/ae files, Special Collections, Princeton Theological Seminary Library.

72. “Irwin William Langston Roundtree.” Alumni/ae files, Special Collections, Princeton Theological Seminary Library.

One of the central challenges of historical work involves locating people and issues in their own context and not seeing them as contemporaries of the researcher or the reader. This, of course, does not mean that judgments cannot be made about what people did or did not do. Nor does it mean that positions taken might be woefully inadequate or wonderfully creative in another context. Contemporary lessons and future directions should have reasonable grounding in historical context. How then do we begin to understand and interpret this complex history?

The Seminary’s founding professors and directors gave robust and sustained support for the colonization effort and its institutional expression in the American Colonization Society. In so doing, they sought to take an almost Aristotelian middle way between the extremes of support for slavery and abolition. Ample evidence points to the fact that everyone at Princeton Seminary in the 19th century saw slavery as an evil and a blight upon humanity in general and the United States in particular. Similarly, plenty of written and published material makes clear that the Seminary leaders perceived abolitionism as a threat to the unity of both church and state.

Their solution of gradualism aided and abetted by colonization aimed for a future beyond slavery. They sought to help African Americans to have the fully human life intended for them by God. In addition, they saw the mysterious hand of divine Providence at work in the history of slavery in America as a way to bring the Good News of Jesus Christ to the continent of Africa. These views were not exceptional among enlightened Protestant theologians and pastors in the first half of the 19th  century; many white spiritual and political leaders in this country thought along very similar or identical lines until the tensions in American society around slavery and race opened up into the apocalyptic abyss of the Civil War.

Critics of colonization and the ACS like William Lloyd Garrison clearly stand on the right side of history from a vantage point 200 years later in the 21st century. At the time, however, Garrison and his group of outspoken critics of both slavery and colonization were seen as fringe and fanatical. Moreover, they were in the minority. Even many of those who eventually went over to the abolitionists drew the line at racial intermarriage. Only a very small group of white abolitionists were both anti-slavery, pro-black, and in favor of a genuinely multiracial America. The Seminary leaders have to be seen in a context of massive and deeply ingrained white normativity at the heart of American culture.

Yet the question remains as to why the leading lights of Princeton Seminary, widely recognized among the greatest theological minds of the 19th century, seemed unable to imagine God’s transforming action to bring about an American society free from the scourge of both slavery and racism, even though they could imagine the fundamental transformation by divine action of the entire continent of Africa. Perhaps because of the privileged position that they occupied in American society, they assumed that the United States was already largely reflective of the values, practices, and norms of the reign of God while they assumed Africa was mainly pagan or demonic.

The question remains as to why the Seminary’s faculty members maintained such unwavering support across the course of six or seven decades. The colonization movement waned in the face of flagging support among the majority of whites in the 1830s, almost incalculable costs to realize the full extent of the colonization vision, and the dismal support for the effort on the part of those it was supposed to benefit. By the time Alexander wrote his massive tome on the history of colonization in Africa, the colonization movement’s heyday had long since come and gone. It was already old news by 1846. Why did Princeton Seminary leaders fail to reassess their theological and strategic assumptions and change course?

The deepest level of the relationship between Princeton Seminary and slavery has to do with race. White normativity and the panoply of assumptions that support it seem to have driven the limited theological imagination at work concerning slavery and the glaring contradictions between fears about black violence toward whites and romantic visions of black evangelization of Africa by the very same people they feared would rise up stealthily and cut their throats as they slept in their beds. Deeply embedded white normativity seems to have fused in the minds of the Seminary’s leadership with “civilization” and “progress” such that people of color—be they Native American or African American—could only rise to the level of “civilization” when they were driven away from white society long enough to see the light and become culturally white enough to interact with whites on terms set by whites.

Finally, questions as to the true meaning of “help,” “benevolence,” and “love” arise when reflecting on the involvement of the Seminary’s leadership in the colonization movement. The faculty and trustees were ostensibly concerned with “helping” blacks by sending them away to a continent that nearly all of them had never experienced and did not want to experience. The white “helpers” clearly did not take the voices of the black “helpees” very seriously. Instead, white leaders like those at the Seminary ended up blaming free blacks for being too stupid or too corrupt to celebrate white “benevolence” when it was offered to them. The behavior of overriding the expressed interests and needs of those being “helped” raises questions about the degree to which the “helpers” were really acting on behalf of those in need of help or in such a way as to serve their own interests.

While the Seminary leaders believed themselves to have been acting benevolently, even with Christian charity in their efforts, they failed to honor their black brothers and sisters as equally made in the image of God. They simply could not envision a world of radical equality, even as they condemned slavery in strong terms. The scope of their theological imagination was fundamentally distorted by assumptions about the superiority of their own culture.

Theological Reflections on Princeton Seminary’s History

As an institution of higher learning, Princeton Theological Seminary has a particular responsibility to seek the truth about its past. Pursuing truth and understanding the implications of history for contemporary reality are central values for higher education. As an institution related to the church, the Seminary has an additional responsibility to reckon with its history in a theological framework, making confession and repentance when necessary, recognizing the human failures and frailties that damage our relationship with God and the world God so loves.

In confronting this history, Princeton Theological Seminary must first acknowledge that its institutional history with regard to benefiting from slavery is sinful. Sin is not merely an individual infraction. Sin is violating the relational call to embody love and justice within community, especially measured by our engagement with the “least of these” in society. We do not exist for ourselves alone. We exist for each other, which is a form of ultimate worship to God. For much of the history of white denominations and churches in America, racism has not been denounced as sin. Historically, Princeton Seminary and its leaders did not regard forms of racial apartheid and disenfranchisement as sin, choosing to interpret this white supremacist form of social life as simply part of the cultural ethos of the era. When the Seminary confesses its historical connections to slavery, it also acknowledges the ongoing consequences of structural racism within its own institutional context.

In calling this racist history sin, it is important to understand precisely what is being acknowledged. Historically, the language of Christian faith at Princeton Seminary (and broader white society) was tied to narratives of white supremacy and segregation. Stitched into the fabric of white Christian piety and practice was the call to save the “heathen” and civilize the “savage,” which provided theological legitimation for grotesque forms of life such as slavery. Blacks were not seen as humans but as having the potential to become fully human based on their initiation into a European way of life. Unfortunately, this form of cultural intolerance and conquest was fundamentally understood as the Christian task, a task the leaders of Princeton Seminary privileged when the school first started in 1812. Consider the words of Archibald Alexander, first professor of Princeton Seminary. He delivered his inaugural address on August 12, 1812, affirming the “beneficial effects” of Christianity on other nations.⁷³  In his address, he asserted that European nations and missionaries have uplifted the wellbeing of the poor, dispossessed, and those who are inclined to be ferocious.⁷⁴ For Alexander, white Christian churches possessed a religious innocence, as evidenced in white churches’ accomplishments in subduing and training non-European peoples around the world in the ways of Christianity. This included “Christianizing” African Americans within the cruel, inhumane institution of slavery. Speaking about slavery and colonization through the language of innocence made it impossible to acknowledge slavery as sin. Therefore, to name the Seminary’s historical connections to slavery as sin is to reckon with how totalizing white supremacy and colonialism were for white Christian identity and practice.

In confessing this history, Princeton Seminary repents. Within the biblical witness, there are continual calls to repent when a community violates the commands of God to treat one’s neighbors with love and justice. Consider the Hebrew prophets Amos, Isaiah, and Malachi, who remind Israel to practice justice with the poor, the widow, and the stranger. The prophetic call of the Hebrew prophets is the call to protect the vulnerable within society, which is a form of worship and obedience to God. Similarly, in the gospels, Jesus presents numerous parables on how we might treat those who experience different forms of exploitation, precariousness, and deprivation. The Seminary’s leadership and faculty have not always remembered this basic Christian command, which is to love our neighbors as ourselves. Consequently, this institution is called to repent for misconstruing and ignoring the most fundamental task of Christian witness.

In addition, Princeton Seminary must repent from whiteness itself, that is, the totalizing effects of white supremacy as ideology and practice. In talking about racism, we often assume that this issue singularly affects people of color. However, the sin of racism has deeply affected the humanity of white communities. Racial hierarchy in this country was generated by whiteness, binding people of European descent to a category that would do profound violence to their own humanity. Whiteness is a form of structural sin that white people are embedded into, a system they did not choose but nevertheless benefit from. Princeton Seminary likewise participated in structures of whiteness through benefiting from the institution of slavery. Confession and atonement must be made for participating in and benefiting from structures of whiteness and the moral wounding and pain that whiteness has produced and continues to generate in the Seminary community.

Repentance not only means telling the truth about the sin of slavery but also involves “destroying … the dividing wall of hostility” (Ephesians 2:14, NIV). In Ephesians, the writer speaks about the mission of the Christian church, which is about enfleshing a new humanity in Christ that challenges and transcends previous religious, social, and cultural barriers. Princeton Seminary must now bear witness to a new moment, marked by the radical work of destroying the dividing wall of racial hostility characteristic of centuries of white Christian supremacy. The only way to embody and bear witness to this new moment is to intentionally pursue a justice- making and reconciling community.

This vision of a justice-making and reconciling community confesses that previous white Christian accounts of human fellowship have been grounded in a distorted vision of racial joining and belonging. People from vastly different social and cultural worlds, lands, languages, and places were drawn together inside a white Christian vision.⁷⁵ This vision not only provided a way of viewing nonwhite people, which inevitably led to social and economic oppression, but also provided and reinforced a basis of belief. It functioned as “articulated faith,” as Willie Jennings argues. That is, socially constructed categories of race were believed as biological fact, and in turn, this “truth” of racial difference informed white people’s vision of social, political, and even spiritual realities. In other words, it is the faith “that is believed (‘we are white, black, and everything in between’), and the faith that believes (‘I see people as white, black, and everything in between’).”⁷⁶ This racial faith produced and maintained racial hierarchy and exploitation.⁷⁷ Moving forward into the future, intentionally pursuing a justice-making and reconciling community means categorically rejecting the racial faith of white Christian identity that has previously marked the Seminary and America more broadly.

Concluding Reflections

As Princeton Theological Seminary looks towards its future, it must also look toward its past, mindful that our community encompasses not only those who teach and learn and serve here in the present but also those who have come before us. We inherit a legacy from this history, in its full complexity, with all of its blessing and burden. As we have seen, many of the board members and professors in the Seminary’s early years were complicit with the institution of slavery to various degrees. The institution itself benefitted from slavery indirectly, through the wealth of many of its donors who derived their income in a national economy in which slavery was a driving force. The Seminary’s leadership and many of its alumni played a significant role in the colonization movement, unable to advocate for the equality of blacks and whites in one nation under God. The founders and faculty members were embedded in a larger culture and structure of white normativity, and they did not challenge it, nor could they see beyond it.

We confess these moral failings unequivocally. Yet we do so not as morally superior agents casting judgment on the past, but as sinners likewise in need of God’s grace. As Theodore Wright (Class of 1828) remarked regarding the support for colonization even among the pious, “good men may err; men are the same that they ever were, finite and fallible; and bad principles are very frequently found among good men.”⁷⁸ The purpose of confession and repentance is to acknowledge our need for grace before God, which is a truth that requires proclamation in every generation. To be a covenant community means we must own the sins of the past if we are to repent and respond to the call to a new future together.

At the same time, part of the legacy that we inherit is also the story of those who were outspoken advocates for equality and called for the swift abolition of slavery. It is the story of the first African American graduates of the Seminary whose leadership promoted the cause of justice in the church and in the nation. Many alumni used their Seminary training to advance education and opportunity in the African American community. This too is part of the Seminary’s history, and we can learn from the example of these ancestors in the faith whose moral compass prompted them to work against injustice.

Princeton Theological Seminary’s historical connections to slavery are complicated and multifaceted, and we must never hesitate to tell the truth about our history in all of its complexity. As Francis Grimke (Class of 1878) proclaimed, “If justice sleeps in this land, let it not be because we have helped to lull it to sleep by our silence, our indifference; let it not be from lack of effort on our part to arouse it from its slumbers.” Speaking the truth is a Christian discipline. Only when we tell the truth about ourselves can we come before God in confession and repentance. This is part of what it means to be a covenant community, bound in relationship to God and to one another across the generations. May we who have inherited this history never permit justice to slumber among us.

73. James Moorhead, Princeton Seminary in American Religion and Culture (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing, 2012), xvii.

74. Ibid., xvii.

75. Willie Jennings, “A Response to A.J. Walton,” in Syndicate, published July 21, 2014, https://syndicate.network/symposia/theology/the-christian-imagination/

76. Ibid.

77. Ibid.

78. Wright, The Friend of Man, Vol. 3, No. 18, 17 October 1838.

Some recommended resources

General Background

James J. Gigantino II, The Ragged Road to Abolition: Slavery and Freedom in New Jersey, 1775-1865 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015)

Gordon Mikoski, “A Failure of Theological Imagination: Beginning to deal with the legacy of Princeton Seminary on matters of slavery and race,” Theology Today (July 2016): 157- 67.

James H. Moorhead, “Slavery, Race and Gender at Princeton Seminary: The Pre-Civil War Era,” Theology Today (Oct. 2012): 274-88.

Craig Steven Wilder, Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2013).

Sean Wilentz, “Princeton and the Controversies over Slavery” Journal of Presbyterian History (Fall/Winter 2007): 102-11.

Statements by Princeton Seminary Professors and the President of the Board of Directors

Archibald Alexander: History of Colonization on the Western Coast of Africa (Philadelphia: 1846; second edition 1849).

Ashbel Green: “Resolution of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church” on the subject of slavery (1818). Minutes of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America from its organization A.D. 1789 to A.D. 1820 inclusive (Philadelphia: 1847), 692-694.

Charles Hodge: various articles in the Biblical Repertory and Princeton Review, especially “Slavery” 8/2 (April 1836); 268-305; “West India Emancipation” 10/4 (October 1838) 602-644; “President Lincoln” 37/3 (July 1865) 435-458. It is also interesting to see the portions of the 1836 article which were cut or modified at the beginning and the end when it was reprinted in Augusta, Georgia, in 1860 in Cotton is King, and Pro-slavery Arguments, along with other writings on slavery, by E.N. Elliott, president of Planters’ College, Mississippi.

Secondary on Charles Hodge: Allen C. Guelzo “Charles Hodge’s Antislavery Moment” in Stewart & Moorhead (eds.), Charles Hodge Revisited (Grand Rapids: 2002); David Torbett, Theology and Slavery: Charles Hodge and Horace Bushnell (Macon, Georgia: 2006) esp. pp. 91- 114, where he deals with the question of development of Charles Hodge’s thinking on the subject of slavery and explores the issue “Did Hodge Change His Mind?”

Alexander T. McGill: “The Hand of God with the Black Race: A Discourse Delivered before the Pennsylvania Colonization Society” (Philadelphia: 1862); American Slavery, as Viewed and Acted on by the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (Philadelphia: 1865); “Patriotism, Philanthropy, and Religion: An Address before the American Colonization Society, January 16, 1877” (Washington City: 1877).

Samuel Miller: “A Discourse Delivered April 12, 1797, at the Request of and Before the New-York Society for Promoting the Manumission of Slaves, and Protecting Such of Them as Have Been or May Be Liberated” (New York: 1797); “A sermon, preached at Newark, October 22, 1823, before the Synod of New Jersey, for the benefit of the African School, under the care of the Synod” (Trenton: 1823).

Statements by Others Connected to Princeton Seminary

Matthew Anderson: Presbyterianism. Its Relation to the Negro. Illustrated by The Berean Presbyterian Church, Philadelphia, with Sketch of the Church and Autobiography of the Author (Philadelphia: 1897).

Albert Barnes: Inquiry into the Scriptural Views of Slavery (Philadelphia: 1846; 1857); The Church and Slavery (Philadelphia: 1857).

Daniel Wallace Culp: Twentieth Century Negro Literature or a Cyclopedia of Thought on Vital Topics Relating to the American Negro (Toronto: 1902).

Francis Grimke: The Works of Francis Grimke, ed. by Carter G. Woodson (Washington, D.C.: 1942).

Samuel Blanchard How: Slaveholding Not Sinful (New Brunswick: 1856).

James Adair Lyon: “Slavery, and the duties growing out of the relation,” Southern Presbyterian Review (July 1863).

Henry Jackson Van Dyke: The Character and Influence of Abolitionism (several editions published in New York, Washington, D.C. and Charleston: 1860 and 1861).

Cortlandt van Rensselaer: Miscellaneous Sermons, Essays, and Addresses by the Rev. Cortlandt van Rensselaer, D.D. (Philadelphia: 1861).

Material for Biographical Studies

John Miller Dickey: George B. Carr, John Miller Dickey, D.D. His Life and Times (Philadelphia:1929).

Robert Finley: Isaac V. Brown, Biography of the Rev. Robert Finley, D.D., of Basking Ridge N.J.: with an account of his agency as the author of the American Colonization Society: also a sketch of the slave trade; a view of our national policy and that of Great Britain towards Liberia and Africa (Philadelphia: 1857) (an earlier version was published in 1819 in New Brunswick); see also Finley’s “Thoughts on the Colonization of Free Blacks” (Washington City, 1816?).

Francis Grimke: Henry Justin Ferry, Francis James Grimke, portrait of a Black Puritan (New Haven: 1970).

Charles Colcock Jones: The Religious Instruction of the Negroes in the United States (Savannah: 1842); Suggestions on the Religious Instruction of Negroes in the Southern States (Philadelphia: 1847); Religious Instruction of the Negroes: An Address delivered before the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church, at Augusta, Ga., Dec. 10, 1861; Robert Manson Myers, The Children of Pride; a true story of Georgia and the Civil War [selected from the family papers of the Rev. Dr. Charles Colcock Jones (1804-1863) of Liberty County, Georgia] (New Haven: 1972); Eduard Nuessnee Loring, Charles C. Jones: Missionary to Plantation Slaves 1831-1847 (Ann Arbor: 1976); Thomas Pinckney, “The Missionary Work of Charles Colcock Jones: Successes and Failures of the Union of Christianity and Slavery in the Early Middle Nineteenth Century” (Senior thesis, Princeton University, 1993); Lillian Young Nave, “Reverend Charles Colcock Jones: a portrait of the life of an individual trapped in the intersection of slavery and Christianity in the antebellum South” (B.A. thesis, Williams College: 1995); Erskine Clarke, Dwelling Place: a Plantation Epic (New Haven: 2005); Robin Manson Myers, A Georgian at Princeton (New York: 1976).

Elijah Lovejoy: There are a number of biographies of Elijah Lovejoy which have been published over the years. From the 19th century see Memoir of the Rev. Elijah P. Lovejoy: who was murdered in defence of the liberty of the press, at Alton, Illinois, Nov. 7, 1837, by Joseph C. and Owen Lovejoy; with an introduction by John Quincy Adams (New York: 1838) and Henry Tanner, Martyrdom of Lovejoy. An Account of the life, trials, and perils of Rev. Elijah Lovejoy (Chicago: 1881). Twentieth century biographies include Melvin Jameson, Elijah Parish Lovejoy as a Christian (Rochester: 1910?); Nelson Miles Heikes, Sketch of the life of Elijah Parish Lovejoy (Albion, ME: 1923); Norman Dunbar Palmer, The Conversion of Elijah Parish Lovejoy and its Results (Waterville, ME: 1947); John Gill, Tide without turning: Elijah P. Lovejoy and freedom of the press (Boston: 1958); Merton Lynn Dillon, Elijah P. Lovejoy, Abolitionist Editor (Urbana, IL:1961); and Paul Simon, Lovejoy, Martyr to Freedom (St. Louis: 1964). For contemporary accounts see Leonard Worcester, A Discourse on the Alton Outrage (Concord, NH: 1838); Edward Beecher, Narrative of the Riots at Alton (original printing 1838; reprint New York: 1970); William S. Lincoln, Alton Trials (New York: 1838).

Betsey Stockton: Eileen F. Moffett “Betsey Stockton: Pioneer American Missionary” International Bulletin of Missionary Research (April 1995); John A. Andrew III “Betsey Stockton: Stranger in a Strange Land” Journal of Presbyterian History (Summer 1974); Constance K. Escher “She Calls Herself Betsey Stockton” Princeton History (no. 10: 1991) [Although generally good, be aware that Constance Escher is incorrect in implying here that Betsey Stockton ever attended “classes in theological studies at Princeton Theological Seminary”; she did receive a broad educational background in the home of Ashbel Green, the first president of the Seminary’s Board of Directors and further education, including certainly some basic theological education, at the home of the Presbyterian minister and educator Nathaniel Todd, who was related by marriage to Ashbel Green, and she attended Sabbath School classes taught by Princeton Seminary students, including Michael Osborn (Class of 1822.) She may very well have received some tutoring from other students at Princeton College and at the Seminary at various points during her Princeton years. She remained very close to the family of Charles S. Stewart (Class of 1821) throughout her adult life. It is also clear that she would have heard the sermons of Archibald Alexander and others connected with the Seminary at various Princeton worship services, including a sermon by Princeton Seminary student Eliphalet Gilbert (Class of 1816) which Green specifically mentions as being influential on her in his letter to the American Board.] The surviving portions of Betsey Stockton’s journal of her voyage to Hawaii have been reprinted on the African American Religion: A Documentary History website: (http://www3.amherst.edu/~aardoc/Betsey_Stockton_Journal_1.html) There are currently two full-length biographies of Betsey Stockton underway as of this date.

Theodore Wright: Daniel Paul Morrison, “Rev. Theodore Sedgwick Wright (1797-1847) Early Princeton Theological Seminary Black Abolitionist, with an appendix containing transcription of the publications of Theodore Sedgwick Wright” (Research paper, Princeton, NJ: 2005)

Institutions

American Colonization Society: The literature on the American Colonization Society is immense and both its contemporaries and later historians have taken divergent views in evaluating it. An excellent historiographical review of published studies of the American Colonization Society displaying the changing scholarly views on the American Colonization Society may be found beginning on page 413 of Marie Tyler-McGraw, An African Republic: Black and White Virginians in the Making of Liberia (Chapel Hill: 2007). Some recent treatments include Philip John Staudenraus, The African Colonization Movement, 1816-1865 (New York:1961); Eric Burin, Slavery and the peculiar solution: a history of the American Colonization Society (Gainesville, Fl.: 2005); Ousmane K. Power-Greene, Against Wind and Tide: The African American Struggle against the Colonization Movement (New York: 2014); and Beverly C. Tomek and Matthew J. Hetrick (eds.), New Directions in the Study of African American Recolonization (New York: 2017), which gathers together a diversity of current and sometimes opposing scholarly views on the ACS and its activities. The records of the American Colonization Society are deposited at the Library of Congress. Of particular value regarding the opinions and activities of the American Colonization Society in New Jersey is Historical Notes on Slavery and Colonization: with Particular Reference to the Efforts which have been made in favor of African Colonization in New-Jersey (Elizabethtown: 1842)

Ashmun Institute/Lincoln University: This important African American educational institution was founded in 1854 to provide higher education for African Americans by Princeton Seminary alumnus John Miller Dickey (Class of 1827). The opening address was given by Cortlandt Van Rensselaer (Class of 1833), who donated $50,000 to the founding of the school. An account of its founding may be read in George B. Carr, John Miller Dickey, D.D. His Life and Times (Philadelphia: 1929) and in Horace Mann Bond Education for Freedom: A History of Lincoln University (Princeton: 1976). Princeton Seminary alumni continued to be connected with this institution for many years after its founding.

As we grapple with this history and its implications for race relations on our campus and in the world in the decades following until the present day, we must come to terms with the legacy of our community’s sin.  The committee’s historical audit has focused upon the Seminary’s interaction with slavery and hence has dealt chiefly with the years between 1812 and the Civil War.  But legacies of racism and assumptions of white normativity have a history beyond that era.  As Matthew Anderson’s initial difficulty in securing on-campus housing in 1874 illustrates (see above), antebellum prejudices persisted at the Seminary after the end of slavery. Moreover, Anderson’s success does not appear to have permanently reversed the practice of encouraging the Seminary’s relatively few black students to board in Princeton’s African American community.  In 1911, when Benjamin Warfield (as presiding officer of the faculty) remarked to his colleagues “that if another colored student came there was no objection to having him room in the dormitory,” his comment seems to have marked a departure from custom and infuriated at least one member of the faculty.¹

By the 1960s and 1970s, there were hopeful signs at Princeton Seminary of a more inclusive vision of justice. In 1965, for example, some students and faculty alike went to Selma, Alabama, to march on behalf of civil rights.  The Association of Black Seminarians was organized on campus in 1968. In 1969, the Seminary made its first permanent appointment of a black faculty member in the person of Geddes Hanson and two years later called Edler Hawkins, a distinguished African American pastor serving in the Bronx, to a professorship.  In 1965, Ulysses B. Blakeley (ThM ’48), a Presbyterian pastor and synod executive, was the first African American appointed to the Princeton Seminary Board of Trustees, serving a three-year term as alumni trustee.  In 1970, Milton Galamison (ThM ’49), a prominent African American leader in the movement for school integration in New York City and pastor of the Siloam Presbyterian Church in Brooklyn, joined the Board of Trustees.

These parts of the Seminary’s history serve as reminders that the work commenced by this audit could profitably move on to later eras and subjects. The legacy of our history in the 19th century has had painful and redemptive repercussions across the generations until the present day.  We still have much work to do as a community of faith and learning in order to understand our history and present realities so that we can move forward into the future to which God calls us.

Many institutions of higher education have been engaged in similar historical audits of their own participation in slavery in America.  These reports typically lead to conversations and eventually recommendations for memorializing and taking responsibility for the wrongs committed.  As an institution of higher education of the church, Princeton Seminary has a theological framework for reconciling our history with the commitments of Christian faith. Our faith tradition calls us to repentance after making confession. In making confession, we tell the truth about our history before God and before the community of faith.  In making repentance, we seek to make substantive changes in our way of life as an act of contrition before God and those we continue to hurt through the legacy of our community’s sins.

Our proposal is that a process be established to develop a Seminary-wide conversation about this report and the ongoing legacy of our engagement with slavery. Through this process suggestions for specific actions to take in response will certainly arise from all quarters of the Seminary community.  Accordingly, we propose the following:

Tell the truth in all of its complexity.

• Publish this report and distribute it widely among the Seminary community.
• Make the report publicly accessible online in a format that may include other relevant archival material.
• Hold public forums beginning in the fall of 2018 on this historical audit of the Seminary’s relationship to slavery and its enduring legacy of racism on our campus. Trustees, faculty, students, alumni, and administrators should be a part of the conversation that develops around these forums.

Encourage further dialogue and scholarly inquiry about the implications of this history for the Seminary, the church, and the academy.

• Hold an academic conference on the historical audit that will solicit scholarly papers and publish the proceedings in an edition of Theology Today so that this scholarly exchange can be shared broadly.
• Engage scholarly expertise from those outside the Seminary community to solicit their input to our conversations and recommendations for responses.

Make confession and repentance as a community.

• Offer liturgical and artistic events that allow for confession, repentance, and envisioning a new way of life together.
• Seek broad input from the Seminary community about recommendations for institutional responses to this report and appropriate ways to memorialize this history.

A task force representing faculty, administrators, students, alumni, and trustees should be organized to oversee the public events and discussions of this report. It will receive proposals from the Seminary community for responses to our findings and make a formal set of recommendations to the Board of Trustees.

1. Bradley J. Gundlach, “’Wicked Caste’: Biblical Authority, and Jim Crow,” Journal of Presbyterian History 85 (Spring/Summer 2007), 28-47; quote on 42 from a letter by J. Gresham Machen to his mother

Download Report (pdf)