William Ellery Channing
1780–1842 · Unitarian (United States) · Boston, Massachusetts
William Ellery Channing (1780–1842), minister of the Federal Street Church in Boston for nearly forty years, was the acknowledged leader of American Unitarianism. His Baltimore sermon of 1819 at the ordination of Jared Sparks defined the Unitarian position against Calvinism, and his later discourses on self-culture and on slavery carried his moral influence far beyond his own denomination.