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Between 1746 and 1865, about 40% of Princeton students arrived from the slaveholding South. As college leaders recruited elite southerners, enrollment tracked the geographical spread of the slave economy.

In 1835, the Alumni Association of Nassau Hall responded to financial crisis with a fundraising campaign among Princeton alumni. Many of the donors who responded were southerners with ties to slavery.

Thomas Carter Ruffin, Princeton alumnus and later Chief Justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court, propounded the legal doctrine of slave-owners’ absolute power over their human property in the 1829 case State v. Mann.

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.

Princeton-educated ministers and teachers established schools across Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee, South Carolina, and Georgia in the 18th and early 19th centuries.