First. We recognize and acknowledge with grateful pride, the heroic sacrifices and valiant deeds of many of the sons of Dartmouth, in their endeavors to defend and sustain the Government against the present wicked and remorseless rebellion; and we announce to the living, now on the battlefield, to the sick and maimed in the hospitals and among their friends, and to the relatives of such of them as have fallen in defense of their country, that Dartmouth College rejoices to do them honor, and will inscribe their names and their brave deeds upon her enduring records.

Second. We commend the cause of our beloved country to all the Alumni of this Institution; and we invoke from them, and pledge our own most efficient and cordial support, and that of Dartmouth College, to the Government, which is the only power by which the rebellion can be subdued. We hail with joy, and with grateful acknowledgments to the God of our fathers, the cheering hope that the dark cloud which has heretofore obscured the vision and depressed the hearts of patriots and statesmen, in all attempts to scan the future, may in time disappear entirely from our horizon; and that American slavery, with all its sin and shame, and the alienations, jealousies, and hostilities between the people of different sections, of which it has been the fruitful source, may find its merited doom in the consequence of the war which it has evoked.¹Board of Trustees of Dartmouth College (24 July 1863), quoted in John King Lord, A History of Dartmouth College, 1815-1909 (Concord, N.H.: The Rumford Press, 1913), 324.

The board adopted these motions 150 years ago this morning in an effort to get president Nathan Lord to resign. Although Lord had been an abolitionist during the 1840s, by the time of the war he had come to believe that slavery was justified by the Bible. He resigned later in the day.

To my ear, the text has some of the sense of the Gettysburg Address, which it predates by about four months.

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