In a recent opinion article in these pages, Unai Montes-Irueste ’98 wrote that “Dartmouth’s sixth President Nathan Lord was an abolitionist and admitted Black students to Dartmouth before the Civil War.”
Whatever the author’s intentions, it appears that he did not read to the bottom of Nathan Lord’s Wikipedia page. A longer skim would have revealed that Lord changed his mind about slavery in the 1840s and became an ardent anti-abolitionist. Dartmouth’s sixth president was infamous for several pamphlets defending slavery, including “A Letter of Inquiry” and “A True Picture of Abolition.”
Despite his support for slavery, Lord remained president of Dartmouth for more than a decade after changing his mind. Not until he overrode the abolitionist trustee Amos Tuck, a member of the Class of 1835, to deny Abraham Lincoln an honorary degree from Dartmouth in 1863 did Lord face backlash and resign from the College. (I wrote my undergraduate thesis on this topic, which you can find here.)
Unfortunately, Montes-Irueste is not the first to obfuscate this ugly chapter in Dartmouth’s history, whether intentionally or unintentionally. Historians of the College have always tended towards hagiography, especially on the subject of the early presidents. Lord’s own great-grandson Arthur Lord, a member of the Class of 1910, wrote a long and loving biography of his ancestor in a 1955 issue of the Dartmouth Alumni Magazine titled “Even Disagreeing with Him was Pleasant.” Arthur mentioned Nathan’s anti-abolitionism but papered over it, preferring to focus on his long and accomplished tenure as president of the College, his active and expansive intellect and his care for the students.
Elements of this hagiographical style remain even today. The inauguration of the president of the College, for example, includes the transfer of various objects of ritual importance to the “Wheelock Succession,” including a silver bowl that originally belonged to John Wentworth and a series of commemorative chairs decorated in needlepoint that celebrate the achievements of each president of the College, made after they leave office. And yes, Nathan Lord’s chair sits among them.
Thankfully, the needlepoint design is not hagiography. Though you wouldn’t notice it immediately, there are four critiques against Lord’s anti-abolitionism in the symbolism on the chair. First and most obviously, his silhouette is surrounded by shackles in an explicit reference to his views on slavery. Second, Lord’s wooden cane is depicted on the left, which he often carried and which symbolized to the students his strict and overbearing discipline. Third, the horn represents the tradition of students to make a racket below the windows of unpopular professors at night, Lord among them. Last, the soldier in the bottom right is a “Dartmouth Zouave,” a volunteer unit of soldiers formed in 1861 to support the Union war effort which was modeled off the French light infantry regiments called Zouaves.
Lord’s ugly history does not mean that we should reject Dartmouth’s past wholesale. As the needlepoint chair demonstrates, critique is only possible when we immerse ourselves in the details of history. Amnesia follows rejection all too quickly.
Instead, I want to echo the spirit of Montes-Irueste’s exhortation to “have a Dartmouth Dialogues about Dartmouth.” Our college’s history deserves to be scrutinized more than ever. The stories we tell about our past shape our understanding of the present and our designs for the future. At the moment, Dartmouth’s institutional memories and identities weigh on us. This college has variously been a place of righteous activism and systemic injustice, world-leading innovation and bankrupt moralizing. Thankfully, Dartmouth’s own tradition of scholarly dialogue gives us the tools to evaluate these pasts, neither valorizing the good nor erasing the bad.
What remains for us today is to sift the good from the bad. Our motto vox clamantis in deserto is an age-old cry for justice. Though that mission has been abused, we all still cry out for justice. When we find ourselves in a moral wilderness, Dartmouth promises to make straight our way and guide us home. The rituals of the college — the scholarship of our professors, the lively classroom debates, the summer days on the Green — aim towards a heavenly vision of justice, an earth made new.
We can never be too careful in our retelling of history. Truth only emerges on the horizon of relentless dialogue, of unending embattled conversations about what we hold dear. Here’s to a Dartmouth Dialogues about Dartmouth.
Will Bryant is a member of the Dartmouth College Class of 2024. Guest columns represent the views of their author(s), which are not necessarily those of The Dartmouth.
