But relating the small college town to the War Between the States? Isn’t that the reserve of another college town, about 170 miles to the west, called Gettysburg?
Over the course of my research, I’ve concluded that the university and town of Princeton were intimately involved in the events leading up to and including the Civil War. In fact, the town is still home to one of New Jersey’s last standing “plantations,” with a masters’ house, slave quarters, formal gardens and all. It’s called Morven, home of Princeton’s greatest historical family, the Stocktons.
Today it’s primarily remembered and cited as one of the state’s first governor mansions and the home of several generations of Stocktons – one who was even a signatory of the Declaration of Independence. But slave plantation it was, at least until New Jersey gradually began to abolish slavery in the early 1800’s. Even after that, in the tumultuous years leading up to the Civil War, it was home to one of the South’s, and Black Slavery’s greatest, most powerful and vocal of champions, “Commodore” Robert F. Stockton.
Visiting Morven today, one wouldn’t really guess that the estate was ground zero for much of the Pro-Slavery effort in the Garden State in the months leading up to the Civil War. As a social studies teacher my students know well that New Jersey was a Northern State, a state that remained in the Union once the fighting began. What they don’t know – and what most state residents do not understand – is just how close it was, especially amongst New Jersey’s elites – in pushing for the state to remain ‘neutral’ in the conflict, or even advocating for its dissolution with some portions joining the South.
Let’s wind the clock back in our town to January of 1860; same location, different time. Right off Nassau Street, like today, stood the Stockton estate. There lived New Jersey’s most famous and admired citizen, Robert F. Stockton. Stockton was one of the greatest naval heroes of the Mexican War. A relentless leader and a man dedicated to Manifest Destiny, Stockton was one of the key people behind the successful American invasion and occupation of California in 1847-48. After the war he used his fame to become one of New Jersey’s U.S. Senators before retiring to private business in the 1850’s. After that he immersed himself in maintaining and expanding the family fortune, but never really gave up politics.
Like many New Jerseyans, especially from the state’s central and southern portions, Stockton cherished white supremacy and the wealth that Black Slavery had brought the slave-owning southern elite. His writings demonstrate a typical, though inaccurate sort of literary ideal of the South. Time and again Stockton defined the region as one ideally arranged in a mutually beneficial social system of thankful, friendly “servants” and paternal, even caring masters.
Stockton wasn’t alone in his positive sentiments towards slavery and the South. Princeton University was a major destination for the southern elite, educating hundreds of young southern men in the decades leading up to the Civil War. So strong were the university’s ties with the South that in June of 1864 the New York Times published a comprehensive list of Princeton graduates (and their assumed fates) then-fighting for the Confederacy.
Returning to January of 1860, Stockton, like millions of Americans, was clearly troubled over the rising possibility of disunion. But unlike his so-called “fellow northerners” in places like New York and Boston who rallied against the growth and persistence of Black Slavery and all of its unspeakable brutalities, Stockton published an article that made his sentiments clear. The Commodore’s heart, and his politics, was firmly in defense of the South.
In a New York Times article, the former New Jersey Senator and Princeton resident blamed the entire crisis on the North. The degree of this blame was comprehensive and reads like a textbook review of the causes of the Civil War.
From his comfortable, regal residence at Morven, Stockton demanded that the North enforce – and embrace – the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. This now infamous act required the Federal Government to actively chase, capture and “return” runaway slaves to their “rightful” masters. Additionally, the act, for reasons that I do not have time to fully explain here, actually made it much easier to kidnap and enslave free black people by depriving them of any courtroom rights.
Stockton also demanded that the Northern states accept, follow and enforce one of most hideous Supreme Court decisions in our history, the Dred Scott Case. In that 1857 case the High Court, citing the Federal Bill of Rights no less, obliterated years of regional compromise in the West and opened all U.S. territories to slavery. The decision flatly stated that African Americans had no rights that whites needed to observe. Additionally, by connecting the practice of slavery directly with the U.S. Bill of Rights, many Southerners saw the decision as transforming every state into a slave state.
Stockton accused northerners, and especially Republicans, of hoping and perhaps planning for a genocidal war between slaves and masters, between black and white, on the scale of the Haitian Revolution of the early 1800’s. Stockton called that event “tragic,” though it resulted in not only Haitian independence from France but also the freedom of hundreds of thousands of black slaves. To further prove his point, the Princeton luminary pointed to the recent failed Virginia raid of John Brown as proof that a larger conspiracy to destroy the White South – to “drench” it in blood - was afoot.
Much of this, while sad to read from the perspective of a modern historian, is not surprising. Many northern leaders felt this way. But what did astonish me was what he went on to stipulate and propose. Stockton wrote that he hoped that, in the event of disunion, New Jersey and its immediate neighbors would join the Southern states in creating a new republic. Here’s how he put it:
“In this defensive attitude of the South, I, for one, will stand by them as a friend, to the last gasp of my existence, and if a dissolution of the Union is inevitable, then I would have the lines of separation drawn along the Hudson and the [Great] lakes, rather than the Potomac and Ohio [Rivers]. I have no doubt that in such an event the Northwestern States would unite with New Jersey…and the South. I will stand by them, because they are right…on these bulwarks we will plant out standard and defy the hosts (i.e. armies) of the fanatics.”
Fellow Princeton and New Jersey residents, review that quote from above. Those aren’t the words of Jefferson Davis, the then-future president of the Confederacy. That is not the writing of Robert E. Lee, future commander of Confederate forces. Those are the words of New Jersey’s then greatest living leader and politician, Commodore Robert F. Stockton.
Southerners were surely heartened when they read Stockton’s words, and who knows…perhaps those arguments added to the overconfidence that many demonstrated when they indeed attempted to break away from the Union and create their own nightmarish republic for slavery.
To his credit, Stockton never did join the Confederacy, and even lived to see it fall before his own death in 1866. But his words from 1860 are important ones, because they serve to remind us that the war’s causes for Union and abolition, especially from the perspective of certain elites in Princeton, were not universal ones. Not at all. So perhaps it is fitting that we begin to associate our small college town with the violent breakout of events leading up to the Civil War, because some of its most notable of residents certainly contributed to them.
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