Enlightenment · North America · Culture

1746

Princeton University Chartered

October 22, 1746

Presbyterians sympathetic to the Great Awakening received a charter for the College of New Jersey, later moved to Princeton. It was the fourth college in the colonies. Revivalist enthusiasm had bred a reformist Ivy. Its students would include two signers of the Declaration and a future president, James Madison. The campus at Nassau Hall became, briefly, the capital of the United States during the Revolutionary War.