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Albert Baldwin Dod (1805-1845) was a Princeton professor and a slaveholder at the time of the 1840 census.

James Moore Wayne (1790-1867), a Princeton graduate from Georgia, personally owned slaves and served on the Supreme Court that denied African Americans citizenship in the 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford case. Yet he remained a strong Unionist during the Civil War, embodying the dissonant relationship between slavery and liberty in the United States.

John Maclean Jr., Princeton’s tenth president (1854-1868), was a non-slaveholder and held moderate antislavery views. His commitment to attracting southern students to the college and reducing sectional tension on campus, however, contributed to Princeton’s conservatism in the years leading up to the Civil War.

Of Princeton's more than 160 endowed professorships and lectureships, four honor men who derived their fortunes from slave labor or contributed to the legacy of slavery in New Jersey and the United States.

In June 1846, more than a dozen Southern students mobbed, whipped, and nearly killed an African American man in Princeton—but only after fighting off another group of classmates who opposed them. This brief flashpoint of violence, in which Princeton students came to blows after dividing along regional lines, revealed the tensions over race and slavery present even at a college known for its moderate conservatism.