Princeton University Press has just released the updated edition of what it calls the “definitive single-volume compendium of all things Princeton.”
The book’s author, Robert K. Durkee, can also be summed up with the “all things Princeton” phrase. He was a Princeton undergraduate in the 1960s, a reporter and editor for the Daily Princetonian, columnist for the Princeton Alumni Weekly, vice president for public affairs, and vice president and secretary from 2004 through 2019.
Just as its 1978 predecessor, Princetonian Alexander Leitch’s “The Princeton Companion,” did, the volume encapsulates the university’s history, traditions, characters, and world-recognized figures.
The new book’s 400-plus alphabetically arranged entries also cover the university’s transformation from an education center that traditionally favored white males into an internationally known coeducational, multiracial academic and research center.
In the following excerpt, Durkee chronicles the origins of the school and the often-flawed individuals who brought the university to Princeton:
The College of New Jersey was founded by three lay Presbyterians and four ministers whose moderate religious views were considered radical if not heretical by the elders of the church. Six of the seven founders graduated from Yale, while one of the ministers graduated from Harvard. The leader of the group, a pastor in Elizabethtown, New Jersey, was Jonathan Dickinson, who would become the College’s president.
With no college between Yale in Connecticut and William & Mary in Virginia, the founders felt it was urgent to establish one in the middle colonies. Their charter broke new grounds in welcoming students “of every religious denomination” and assuring them “free and equal liberty . . . notwithstanding any different sentiments in religion.” The College’s location in a thinly populated province required it to look elsewhere for students. By drawing its students from 12 of the 13 colonies, the College was poised to become a national institution as soon as there was a nation.
The seven founders were granted a charter on October 22, 1746. They selected five additional trustees and, on April 27, 1747, elected Dickinson as president. The College held its first classes in his parsonage a month later. When Dickinson died in October, the College moved to the Newark parsonage of one of its other founders, Aaron burr Sr., who was elected its second president. When the legitimacy of the initial charger was challenged because it had been granted by an acting governor, a new charter was issued on September 14, 1748, by the duly installed royal governor, Jonathan Belcher.
This charter increased the number of trustees to 23. At the time, even in the northern colonies, many landowners, merchants, and ministers owned slaves, and in one of its many findings about the connections between the College and slavery, The Princeton and Slavery Project found that 16 of these 23 early trustees had “bought, sold, traded, or inherited slaves.” This was also true for its first nine presidents.
Eight weeks after the new charter was granted, on November 9, the College held its first commencement, conferring six bachelor’s degrees and its first honorary degree. The honorary degree was presented to Belcher, an important early benefactor who gave the College his library of 474 volumes, 10 framed portraits of kings and queens of England (its first art collection), and a portrait of himself.
As the College began outgrowing its quarters in Newark, the trustees looked for a location “more sequestered from the various temptations attending a promiscuous converse with the world” and nearer to the center of the province. In the winter of 1752-53 they chose the agrarian village of Princeton over the town of New Brunswick, after Princeton more than met the stipulations of the trustees to provide 1,000 pounds, 10 acres of cleared land, and 200 acres of woodland for fuel.
The citizens of Princeton primarily responsible for this were all slaveholding landowners. Principal among them was Nathanial FitzRandolph who, with his wife, Rebeckah, gave the four-and-a-half acres that became the initial campus. The town of Princeton had been settled in the late 17th century on the historic homeland of the Lenni Lenape Native Americans; the FitzRandolphs’ land was along the south edge of a Lenape trail that had connected the Raritan and Delaware rivers. Today, FitzRandolph’s gift is commemorated by a ceremonial front campus gate that was long kept closed except during reunions and commencements until the Class of 1970, at its graduation, called for it to be opened permanently “as a symbol of the University’s openness to the local and worldwide community.”
The trustees constructed the largest academic building in thr colonies, which they proposed naming for Belcher. He persuaded them to name it Nassau Hall in honor of King William the Third of the royal house of Nassau — a king regarded as a champion of religious freedom and political liberty.
The trustees also constructed a home for the president, which is now named MacLean House in honor of Princeton’s 10th president, John Maclean Jr. 1816, the first president who never owned slaves. Today the names of 16 enslaved African American men, women, and children who lived and worked there between 1757 and 1822 are commemorated on a plaque in front of the house. In 1766, six of them were sold at an estate sale on the front lawn following the death of President Samuel Finley.
Nassau Hall opened its doors in 1756. Shortly thereafter the trustees bought land to the east, south, and west, widening its frontage on the town’s main street and adding a back campus that reached what later generations came to know as McCosh Walk. Today the University’s 600-acre main campus is part of the 1,000 acres it owns in Princeton. In the 1920s, the University began to acquire lands in neighboring West Windsor, where it now owns more than 520 acres, and in the 1950s, it purchased more than 835 acres in nearby Plainsboro. The Plainsboro lands include the home of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory, the world’s leading center for fusion energy research.
Nassau Hall, a national historic landmark since 1960, was designed to house the entire college: The first state legislature of New Jersey held its inaugural meeting there in 1776.
Nassau Hall was a major flashpoint in the Battle of Princeton that helped turn the tide of the Revolutionary War in favor of the Americans, and, when the town of Princeton briefly became the new country’s provisional capital in the summer of 1783, Nassau Hall served as its capitol building.
The fledgling college attracted many students who played leading roles in the founding of the country. Around 1765 two debating societies, the Plain Dealing Club and the Well-Meaning Club, were established; they were succeeded in 1769 and 1770 by the American Whig Society and the Cliosophic Society. In their early days, the societies provided an arena in which future leaders of the republic, including James Madison 1771 (Whig) and Arron Burr Jr. 1772 (Clio), honed their skills of disputation and persuasion. Today, Whig Clio remains the country’s oldest college library and debating society.
In 1768 John Witherspoon arrived from Scotland as Princeton’s sixth president, and his presidency of 26 years was longer than all of his predecessors combined.
During Witherspoon’s presidency, the College became known as the “seedbed” of the Revolution. Witherspoon was the only college president and the only clergyman to sign the Declaration of Independence and for six years was a leading member of the Continental Congress. Madison stayed on after graduation to study with him, making Madison Princeton’s first graduate student.
In addition to Madison (president) and Burr (vice president), Witherspoon taught nine cabinet officers, 21 senators, 29 members of Congress, three justices of the Supreme Court, and 12 governors. Five of the nine Princeton graduates among the 55 members of the Constitutional Convention had been his students.
Like other early Princeton presidents, Witherspoon had a complex relationship to slavery. As a minister in Scotland, he baptized an enslaved man and in the early 1770s, he privately tutored two free Black men. In 1792 John Chavis, a free Black man from Virginia, began private lessons with him. The Princeton and Slavery Project found that his teachings gave a generation of students “a language for challenging slavery.” But Witherspoon also owned slaves, and in 1790 he chaired a committee that recommended that the state take no actions to abolish slavery in New Jersey.
Witherspoon’s immediate successor was Samuel Stanhope Smith 1769, the first graduate of the college to serve as president.
The New Princeton Companion, Robert K. Durkee, 584 pages, $60, Princeton University Press.
Excerpted from THE NEW PRINCETON COMPANION © 2022 by Robert K. Durkee. Reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press.
