| Honorific Prefix: | The Reverend |
| Nathan Lord | |
| Order: | 6th |
| President of Dartmouth College | |
| Term Start: | 1828 |
| Term End: | 1863 |
| Predecessor: | Bennet Tyler |
| Successor: | Asa Dodge Smith |
| Birth Date: | 28 November 1793 |
| Birth Place: | Berwick, Maine |
| Death Place: | Hanover, New Hampshire |
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.
Nathan Lord was born in Berwick, Maine.[1] 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.[2] Lord was able to bring the college out of debt, improve the overall curriculum, and raise admission levels.
He was a founding member of the American Anti-Slavery Society,[3] and in 1833 became its vice president.[4] 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 ceased his support of the abolitionist movement and its cause.[5]
His views on slavery changed dramatically; he came to see it as "not a moral evil", but as a blessing, "an ordinance of...God",[6] which "providentially found a settlement in this country".[6] These views, and his opposition to the Civil War,[7] which he blamed on abolitionists,[4] brought a storm of controversy, earning him the enmity of several members of the Dartmouth Board of Trustees, including Amos Tuck (1835), a founding member of the Republican Party and close friend of Abraham Lincoln.
Matters came to a head in 1863 when the Trustees were deadlocked on awarding an honorary degree to President Lincoln, and Lord broke the tie by voting against it. The Trustees issued a statement: "Neither the trustees nor the Faculty coincide with the president of the College in the views which he has published, touching slavery and the war; and it has been our hope that the College would not be judged a partisan institution by reason of such publications."[4] Lord, 70, tendered his resignation.
He continued as an active member of the Dartmouth College community in Hanover, New Hampshire, until his death in 1870.
He married Elizabeth King Leland (1792-1870) and they had ten children;[8] his youngest son, Nathan Lord Jr., (1831-1885), was a colonel of the 6th Regiment of Vermont Volunteers in the Civil War.[9]