William Ellery Channing

William Ellery Channing 1780-1842, American Unitarian minister and author, b. Newport, R.I. At 23 he was ordained minister of the Federal St. Congregational Church in Boston, where he served until his death. He was a leader among those who were turning from Calvinism, and his sermon at Jared Sparks's ordination in Baltimore (1819) earned him the name "the apostle of Unitarianism." In 1820 he organized the Berry St. Conference of Ministers, which in 1825 formed the American Unitarian Association. Channing's plea was for humanitarianism and tolerance in religion rather than for a new creed. Not only a great preacher but a lucid writer, Channing influenced many American authors, including Emerson and other transcendentalists and Holmes and Bryant. Channing was not by nature a controversialist and never allied himself with the abolitionists, but his writings on slavery helped prepare for emancipation. In his denunciations of war, his discussion of labor problems, and his views on education, he was ahead of his time. His works (6 vol., 1841-43) passed through many editions.

Bibliography: See his Life … with Extracts from His Correspondence (ed. by W. H. Channing, 3 vol., 1848); biographies by J. W. Chadwick (1903), M. H. Rice (1961), and J. Mendelsohn (1971); R. L. Patterson, The Philosophy of William Ellery Channing (1952, repr. 1972).

Channing, William Ellery (1780–1842), an American Unitarian clergyman, exercised a marked influence on American intellectual life, and is considered a forerunner of the transcendentalists. His Remarks on American Literature (1830) calls for a Literary Declaration of Independence.

His nephew, also William Ellery Channing (1818–1901), poet and Transcendentalist, is remembered largely as the friend of Emerson and of Thoreau, whose biography Channing wrote.

Channing, William Ellery (1818–1901), nephew of the elder W.E. Channing, ran away from Harvard to devote his life to poetry. His first recognition came when Emerson wrote an article on his poetry for The Dial. In order to be near Emerson he moved to Concord with his wife Ellen, the sister of Margaret Fuller. There he became an intimate of Thoreau and wrote the first biography, Thoreau, the Poet‐Naturalist (1873, enlarged 1902), as well as editing several posthumous volumes of his friend's writings. Channing's own first volume of Poems (1843) is said by James Russell Lowell in his Fable for Critics to plunder the “orchard” of its editor, Emerson. During succeeding years, Channing wrote his Poems, Second Series (1847), The Woodman (1849), Near Home (1858), The Wanderer (1871), Eliot (1885), and John Brown and the Heroes of Harper's Ferry (1886). Thoreau called Channing's style “sublimoslipshod,” and other friends deplored his insistence upon printing his “native wood‐notes wild,” which his thoroughgoing Transcendentalism would not let him polish or revise.