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News about the College of New Jersey and its students—including their connections to the South—spread across the country through multiple forms of print media.

Runaway slaves from the Princeton area used sophisticated knowledge of the late-18th and early-19th century’s changing legal and political landscape when they planned their escapes, forcing slave-owners to acknowledge their resourcefulness and determination to liberate themselves.

Cezar Trent, one of the elite free Black citizens of antebellum Princeton, was the employee of a prominent landowner, the object of a town resident's published recollections, and a slave owner himself.

Under the leadership of President Witherspoon, the College of New Jersey launched an ill-fated campaign to secure donations from slaveholding planter elites in the West Indies.

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