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Princeton students and their families lived in the Mississippi area decades before statehood in 1817. From the 1790s to the Civil War, Mississippians at the College of New Jersey came from elite families who built their wealth on cotton and slave labor.

A firm majority of Princeton's founding trustees (sixteen out of twenty-three) bought, sold, traded, or inherited slaves during their lifetimes.

In 1824, Philip Lindsley—a pioneer of education in the antebellum period—delivered one of the most forceful condemnations of slavery in Princeton’s history. After relocating to the South, however, Lindsley gradually abandoned his antislavery principles, owning slaves himself and defending the institution as beneficial to enslaved people.

Princeton’s early students from Kentucky reflected their state’s ambivalent attitude toward slavery. Though many Kentuckians opposed the institution and the state never seceded from the Union, slavery did not end in Kentucky until the passage of the 13th Amendment in 1865. Prominent state and national leaders from Kentucky, including Princeton alumni, also supported the Confederacy during the Civil War.

Princeton affiliates helped to establish Liberia as an African colony for Black American emigrants. Robert Wood Sawyer (Class of 1838) served as a missionary among the Kru people, in the territory south of the colony.