William Ellery Channing (1780-1842) was born in Newport, Rhode Island and graduated from Harvard College in 1798. He served on the board of the Harvard Corporation from 1813 to 1826, where he worked for the establishment of the Divinity School, which occurred in 1816. A Unitarian minister, Channing served as the pastor of the Federal Street Church in Boston from 1803 until his death in 1842. In 1819 he gave the landmark Unitarian sermon, Unitarian Christianity, on the occasion of the ordination of Jared Sparks in Baltimore, Maryland, which upon publication sold thousands of copies. Also known as the Baltimore sermon, the delivery of Unitarian Christianity stands as one of the defining moments in the history of Unitarianism in America.

A believer in the abolitionist movement, he penned The Duty of the Free States in 1842, which was a rebuttal to Daniel Webster's teachings concerning the national slave laws.

Channing died in Old Bennington, Vermont and is buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts.