Who was Richard Stockton?
Few details about Richard Stockton appear in notes and minutes about the institution鈥檚 founding. Indeed, it seems as though the college鈥檚 first Board of Trustees and its first President, Richard Bjork, primarily agreed to name the college for him in 1969 because of Stockton鈥檚 status as one of New Jersey鈥檚 signers of the Declaration of Independence.
Richard Stockton was born in 1730 and raised in one of New Jersey鈥檚 wealthier families. His family鈥檚 estate, Morven, which he inherited in the 1750s, was just outside of Princeton, and he attended the College of New Jersey, later Princeton University, to study law. Many details of his legal career, and his role in the second Continental Congress, are well documented. So too is his ownership and use of enslaved people. Records of these people appear in tax records of the time, and although Stockton intimated that he would free his enslaved laborers when he died, he chose not to do so. Instead, he bequeathed them to his wife Annis in 1781. His reputation is called into question even further because he signed an oath of loyalty to the Crown after signing the Declaration of Independence.
In the 1990s, the campus community began to discuss whether it was appropriate to keep the Richard Stockton name, given his status as an enslaver and possible traitor. When the college became a university in 2015, the task force assembling the application to the state recommended keeping the Stockton name because of its historic associations for alumni and prospective students, but suggested removing Richard from the title to distance the university from the man who - as far as records indicate - never owned land or traveled to southern New Jersey. Discussions around the name continue to this day.
