Nathan Lord

Nathan Lord (November 28, 1793 – September 9, 1870) was an American Congregational clergyman and educator who served as president of Dartmouth College for more than three decades.

Biography Nathan Lord was born in Berwick, Maine. He graduated from Bowdoin College in 1809, and attended Andover Theological Seminary, serving afterwards as a pastor at the Congregationalist Church in Amherst, Massachusetts for twelve years.

In 1828 he became the sixth president of Dartmouth College serving in this capacity from 1828 to 1863. Lord brought the college out of debt and made controversial changes to the curriculum. His "non-ambitious system" banned all academic honors and distinctions and enjoyed the support of the Trustees of Dartmouth, but faced significant criticism.

He was a founding member of the American Anti-Slavery Society, and in 1833 served as the Vice President of the New Hampshire delegation to the National Anti-Slavery Convention. He admitted black students to Dartmouth College and was a friend of William Lloyd Garrison. However, after Garrison challenged the Bible on its alleged endorsement of slavery, deeply religious Lord began to question his support of the abolitionist movement and its cause.

His views on slavery changed dramatically by the time he gave a eulogy for John Quincy Adams in 1848. In this address, and in later pamphlets published throughout the 1850s (e.g. A Letter of Inquiry, A True Picture of Abolition), he came to see slavery as "not a moral evil", but as a blessing, "an ordinance of...God", which "providentially found a settlement in this country". which he blamed on abolitionists, his youngest son, Nathan Lord Jr., (1831–1885), was a colonel of the 6th Regiment of Vermont Volunteers in the Civil War.