On July 24, 1863, Rev. Nathan Lord resigned the presidency of Dartmouth College, an office he had held for thirty-five years. He gave it up rather than retract his defense of slavery: a defense he had grounded in Scripture rather than morality, and one that had made him a liability to the College in the eyes of the Dartmouth Board of Trustees and a favorite target of the abolitionist press. In the Northern public, Lord had become a pariah for his regular defences of slavery throughout the 1850s and an outright villain by the middle of the Civil War through his belief that Northern abolitionists had caused the conflict with their heresy and hypocrisy. However, in the period after his resignation, Lord was commended by some privately as a martyr. Over the following months, letters and money arrived from friends, former Dartmouth colleagues, and admirers who saw his resignation as a display of noble principle.Lord had not always been slavery’s champion; in an 1839 letter he called it a “moral and political evil” and stated that it was the “obligation of all men to attempt the immediate and entire removal of it.”1 By the 1850s, though, he had become perhaps the most prominent clerical apologist for slavery in New England. The trustee Amos Tuck, a Dartmouth graduate and a founder of the Republican Party in New Hampshire, brought before the Board’s 1863 annual meeting the resolutions of the Merrimack County Conference of Churches, which regretted the “popular prejudice” that Lord’s views had drawn and urged the trustees to consider a change in the presidency; Tuck then chaired the committee whose report reaffirmed the college’s loyalty to the Union. When the Board adopted it, Lord produced a resignation he had drafted a week earlier, read it to the members, and walked out.
Lord had, in a sense, seen this outcome in advance. Four years earlier, in a letter on John Brown’s raid at Harper’s Ferry that was printed in the Richmond Whig, Lord had written that the Northern men who reasoned about slavery’s divine right as he did were “frequently maligned” and so “retire, for the most part, to their secret places, and wait to be justified.”2 This characterization would later be reaffirmed as prophecy through his own experience with the Board and Northern press, but also by the quiet support which he received after his resignation.The first to write was Joel Parker, the Harvard law professor and former New Hampshire Chief Justice, who had himself recently left the Dartmouth board. Days after the resignation, Parker congratulated Lord on being “well out of the concern” of an institution he expected only to “grow worse and worse.” The trustees, he wrote, were “a miserable board” now handed to “radical politicians, and radical ministers,” and Tuck in particular was “an ambitious party politician” and “a very coarse man besides.”
Two days later, writing from Hamilton, Canada West, an admirer by the name of Benjamin Douglass expressed “profound indignation” at the action that had forced the resignation and wrote to “honor your determination to stand fast by God’s truth.” Noting that friends in New Hampshire were already arranging “to free you from pecuniary cares,” Douglass offered more than sympathy: “I beg you would do me the honor to accept the small amount enclosed as a slight token of my esteem and affection.”
That support soon became organized, and it drew in the most eminent of Lord’s defenders. In November 1863, former U.S. president Franklin Pierce wrote to Samuel Morse, the inventor of Morse code, asking him to contribute to a life annuity fund for Lord and his wife. Lord’s situation, Pierce urged, “constitute[d] the strongest possible appeal”: here was “the only eminent and aged clergyman” who had “firmly withstood the onslaught of that fanaticism which had brought ruin upon our country,” a man who had staked his office and livelihood “for the maintenance of truth and the Constitution.” That stand had made him “a shining mark for abolition insolence and detraction” and, to Pierce, a “Brave, unselfish, venerable Man.” The following January, a Boston committee presented Lord and his wife with an annuity of twelve hundred dollars, raised, its organizers wrote, “with remarkable cheerfulness and hearty good will.”These letters complicate the tidy story of the college’s removal of a pro-slavery president. Lord’s arguments were indefensible, and the trustees who eased him out stood on the right side of the war. But the correspondence shows that Lord did not experience his resignation as a reckoning. Supported by men who called his stubbornness courage and his defeat a sacrifice, Lord was proud to resign his office rather than his beliefs, writing to his nephew that he was “as free and happy as a bird, except for regret at seeing Dartmouth prostituted to a vile idolatry.” While the public record remembers a president forced out for defending slavery, the private record preserves the network of respectable men who made certain he paid as little as possible for it, and who were sure that history would prove him right.
You can view the letters from Parker (Mss 863454), Douglass (DP-6, Box 6625), Pierce (Mss 863456.1), Lord (Mss 863429), and the Boston committee (MS-510, Box 1, Folder 43); the 1863 Board of Trustees' meeting minutes (DA-1, Box 2117); Amos Tuck's report (Mss 863940); and Nathan Lord's pro-slavery manifesto, A True Picture of Abolition (MS-510, Box 1, Folder 27), by requesting them online and then visiting Rauner Library.
Posted for Bradley Edington '27, recipient of a Historical Accountability Student Research Fellowship for the 2026 winter term. The Historical Accountability Student Research Program provides funding for Dartmouth students to conduct research with primary sources on a topic related to issues of inclusivity and diversity in Dartmouth's past. For more information, visit the program's website.
1 Nathan Lord, letter to the editor, Vermont Chronicle (Bellows Falls, VT), July 10, 1839, https://www.newspapers.com/image/489365266/.
2 Nathan Lord to J. M. Conrad, December 1, 1859, printed in Richmond Whig (Richmond, VA), December 16, 1859, https://www.virginiachronicle.com/?a=d&d=RWH18591216.1.1
