Headline Nov. 14/ ''' PRINCETON -*PREENING* '''

''' PRINCETON -*PREENING* '''

*AT PRINCETON UNIVERSITY* : STUDENTS autograph books revealed poignant Civil War-era inscriptions.....

NOW : Rabo, Zilli, Dee, Haleema, Seher, Saima, Eman, Armeen, Hussain, Azim, Marwin, Vishnu, Lakshmi.........what do your respective autograph books reveal? ............ 

Smith, a Presbyterian minister, helped inspire the colonization movement, which advocated resettling free slaves in Africa. [Many leading colonization advocates, the researchers discovered, had Princeton connections]. 

But at a time when many educated whites believed that blacks had separate evolutionary origins-

Smith also argued that racial differences were purely due to environment, and even advocated  interracial marriages.

''Historians are fond of going around saying. ''It's complicated,'' Professor SandWeiss  said. '' But it is complicated.''

Professor Sandweiss's team which included some 30 students and two full time piostdoctoral fellows, Craig Hollander and Joseph Yannielli, looked at subjects familiar from studies at other universities, like slavery -related donations and slave ownership among professors, including one which owned a slave as late as 1840.

But they also zeroed in on one of the distinctive and fateful, aspects of Princeton history, its heavily Southern student body.

In the archives they found evidence of early administrator's eagerness to recruit students from the South.

To nail down some hard data, a dozen graduate students gathered in the archives one night and, with the cast album of ''Hamilton'' blaring, tracked down the places of origin for more than 2,000 names in their database of pre-Civil War students.

Roughly 40 percent of the students from the college's founding until 1861, the researchers determined came from the slaveholding South, with the figure spiking as high as nearly two-thirds in the early 1850s.

{The figure for Yale and Harvard at that time was about 9 percent}. 

And as slavery moved southwest, a heat map on the website shows, so too did the students body.

''Princeton had more students from Mississippi in the decades before the Civil War than it does today,'' Professor Sandweiss said.

This fact heavily influenced the culture at Princeton, which became more conservative as the sectional crisis over slavery intensified.

In town, Southern students [as well as many Northern ones] encountered something unfamiliar : a proud, and longstanding, free black community.

But inside the campus gates, the university was maintained as a safe space for the sons of slaveholders.

Unlike at Harvard and Yale, abolitionists were generally not invited to speak on campus.

And when they did show up, violence sometimes ensued.

In 1835 a gang of students descended on the town's African-American neighborhood in an attempt to lynch a white agent of the American Anti-Slavery Society who had come to address a secret meeting.

{Researchers found no records of any attempts to discipline those students}.

The next year, at commencement, a white student from South Carolina attacked a black abolitionist minister, Theodore Sedgwick Wright, shouting a racial slur.

The university's president, James Carnahan, a onetime slave holder, published a letter denying that the attacker was a  Princeton student or that any actual violence had occurred, and blaming Wright for the disturbance.

But Princeton's compromise over slavery, like the nation's, didn't hold forever.

In the university's archives, R. Isabela Morales, a graduate student, found an 1846 diary in which a student from Mississippi described going out with other ''Southern bloods'' to hunt down a local black man they had scuffled with and ''try him in the worshipful court of Judge Lynch.''

Another of group students, led by John Maclean Jr, a professor who later became Princeton's first  nonslaveholding president, mustered to try and stop them.

The man was still, ''whipped within an inch of his life.'' the diarist exulted, ''to the silent Satisfaction of all the arrayed collegians from the South!''

''Princeton had a reputation as this moderate place, where the Northerners and Southerners got along,'' Ms. Morales said. ''But here, 15 years before the Civil War, you have them dividing along battle lines to fight over the question of race.'' 

As Southern states began seceding, Southern students began leaving campus. 

In student autograph books, Ms. Sandweiss team found poignant inscriptions traded by friends who would soon meet in the battlefield :

''Basically, they are going off to kill their roommates,'' Professor Sandweiss said.

The researchers have yet to figure out just when Southern students [like the Virginia born Wilson, class of 1879], started coming back after the Civil War, and in what numbers.

But the instinct to keep the sectional peace reasserted itself. 

An article on the website tells the story of the Civil War memorial carved on a wall just inside  Nassau Hall in the 1920s -the only one anywhere in the country, Professor Sandweiss said, to give an indication of which cause the names inscribed there fought for.

The initial plan was to group them by side. But the university's president at the time, John Grier Hibben, overruled it, saying ''no one shall know on which side these young men fought.''

As part of the aftermath of the Wilson controversy, Princeton is already discussing ways in make its iconography more reflective of its current diversity.

''If you walk around the campus, you see a lot of dead white men,'' Professor Sandweiss said. ''That's not untrue to our history, but it is deeply untrue to what Princeton has worked hard to become in the past few decades.''

''Sometimes,'' she said, ''it's hard for history to catch up.''   

With respectful dedication to this great American University Princeton, and then all the  Universities of the world, and then Students, Professors and Teachers of the world.

See Ya all on !WOW!  -the World Students Society and Twitter-!E-WOW! -the Ecosystem 2011:

''' Honors & Honours '''

Good Night and God Bless

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