Nathan Lord

Dartmouth College President

Nathan Lord, born in 1793 in Berwick, Maine, had a mother whose first, or “Christian,” name was Mehitable. The all-knowing Internet tells us that Mehitable is a biblical name, which sets the tone for our Nathan Lord story. Come to think of it, so does Lord.

Nathan Lord graduated from Bowdoin College at sixteen, taught for a while at Phillips Exeter Academy,^* studied theology, and became a preacher in Amherst, New Hampshire. He also became a trustee of Dartmouth College, about eighty miles to the northwest. After a throat ailment put an end to his preaching career, he was elected president of Dartmouth, in 1828.

To all who knew him, Nathan Lord was a model of piety, a fine Christian, a true believer in the sense that he believed that the Bible was the direct, faultless word of God. He was also the only college president in New England to be an out-of-the closet abolitionist, and in 1833 was elected vice president of the American Anti-Slavery Society.

But then a funny thing happened, and we don’t mean funny ha-ha. A fellow abolitionist pointed out that the Bible not only condones slavery, it even stipulates a set of rules for how slaves should be treated. Said the fellow abolitionist to Lord—and we’ll take the liberty of modernizing his speech—“If it’s between the Bible and antislavery, I’ll take antislavery.”

This blew poor Lord’s mind. It never occurred to him that the Bible wasn’t, you know, dictated by God, or however that was supposed to work, and perfect in every particular. So he embarked on a period of intense Bible study to see what he could discover re: slavery. What he discovered was that slavery is just dandy, as long as you approach it with proper biblical etiquette.* And so Lord, True Believer that he was, “pivoted” on slavery. It was now, he concluded, a Good Thing as long as it was executed according to biblical precepts. Which meant that you shouldn’t be mean to them. Which meant that you could buy and sell them, separate families, force them to work from dawn to dusk for zero compensation, and condescend to them until the cows came home, and then force them to tend to the cows. As long as you weren’t mean to them.

He then wrote a thirty-five-page letter, broadcast to others of his ilk—which is to say, ministers of the Gospel—explaining that he’d changed his mind: slavery’s cool, slavery’s good for the slaves, disregard previous deeply held conviction. His ilk promptly wrote or yelled back that he was full of shit. He then wrote another letter, conceding that the current version of slavery was pretty bad, but the ideal biblical version was really nice, especially for the Negroes, whom slavery helps by disciplining and Christianizing them. Do note that, other than wishing to enslave them, Lord had no particular grievance with black people; he went so far as to admit them to Dartmouth, the only such institution at the time to do so.

Then, in 1863, he went and blocked Dartmouth’s board of trustees from presenting an honorary degree to the antislavery president of the USA, Abraham Lincoln. This was especially foolish, as Amos Tuck, a powerful Dartmouth trustee,* was not only the founder of the Republican Party but a close friend of Lincoln’s. After meeting to discuss the Lincoln fiasco, the trustees and faculty issued a statement that was in effect a vote of no confidence in Lord, who promptly resigned.^*

The Civil War ended in 1865. As you may know, the antislavery side won. Nathan Lord died in 1870, which gave him five years to ponder what it means when the proslavery Lord of the Bible (never mind the proslavery Lord of Dartmouth) gets His supernatural Ass overruled so dramatically.