Editing William Ellery Channing (section)

===Early life===
Channing, the son of William Channing and Lucy Ellery, was born April{{nbsp}}7, 1780, in [[Newport, Rhode Island]]. He was a grandson of [[William Ellery]] (1727–1820), a signer of the [[United States Declaration of Independence]], Deputy Governor of Rhode Island, Chief Justice, and influential citizen. As a child, he was cared for by the formerly enslaved woman [[Duchess Quamino]], who  later influenced his views on [[abolitionism]].<ref name=Mendelsohn1971>{{Cite book |last=Mendelsohn |first=Jack |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=qjaiBZFRsw8C |title=Channing: The Reluctant Radical |publisher=Little, Brown & Co |year=1971 |isbn=0-933-840-28-4 |pages=209}}</ref> He became a [[New England]] [[Liberalism|liberal]], rejecting the [[Calvinism|Calvinist]] doctrines of [[total depravity]] and [[divine election]].

Channing enrolled at [[Harvard College]] at a troubled time, particularly because of the recent [[French Revolution]]. He later wrote of these years:

{{quote|College was never in a worse state than when I entered it. Society was passing through a most critical stage. The French Revolution had diseased the imagination and unsettled the understanding of men everywhere. The old foundations of social order, loyalty, tradition, habit, reverence for antiquity, were everywhere shaken, if not subverted. The authority of the past was gone.<ref name=Broaddus22>Broaddus, Dorothy C. ''Genteel Rhetoric: Writing High Culture in Nineteenth-Century Boston''. Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina, 1999: 22. {{ISBN|1-57003-244-0}}.</ref>}}

Graduating first in his class in 1798, he was elected commencement speaker though he was prohibited by the Harvard College faculty from mentioning the [[French Revolution|Revolution]] and other political subjects in his address.<ref name=Broaddus22/>