George Dana Boardman was born on August 18, 1828, in Tavoy, Burma (now Myanmar).

He was an American clergyman. The son of the Baptist missionaries George Dana Boardman Sr. and Sarah Hall, he returned to the U.S. as a boy and attended first Worcester Academy (1846), then Brown University, where he graduated in 1852. In 1855, he graduated from the Newton Theological Institution and became pastor of the Baptist church in Barnwell, South Carolina. His views on the slavery question impelled him to exchange his charge in 1856 for a church further north. He was pastor of the Second Baptist Church in Rochester, New York, until 1864, and pastor of the First Baptist Church, Philadelphia, from 1864 to 1894. In 1899, he established the permanent lectureship known as the "Boardman Foundation in Christian Ethics" at the University of Pennsylvania. He belonged to several American and European peace organizations, e.g., the Pennsylvania Peace Society; the Universal Peace Union; the British National Peace Society; La Société de la Paix, France; the International Bureau de la Paix, Berne, Switzerland; and the International Arbitration and Peace Association. Boardman sent his 1890 pamphlet, “The Disarmament of Nations,” to the czar of Russia, Queen Victoria, and the archbishop of Canterbury. He was also president of the American Baptist Missionary Union and a founding member of the Brotherhood of the Kingdom in 1892, a group of the leading thinkers and writers of the Social Gospel movement at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries.

In 1855, he married Ella Catharine Covell. He died on April 28, 1903, in Atlantic City, New Jersey.