The Biographical Dictionary of America/Alger, William Rounseville

ALGER, William Rounseville, clergyman, was born at Freetown, Mass., Dec. 30, 1822. He obtained, by his own labor, the means to acquire an academical education, and then entered the Cambridge theological school, from which he was graduated in 1847. He was ordained to the Unitarian ministry, and became pastor of the Mount Pleasant Unitarian society in Roxbury, Sept. 8, 1847. In 1852 Harvard college conferred on him the degree of A.M. He resigned the pastorate of the Mount Pleasant church in 1855, and answered a call from the Bulfinch street society of Boston. Two years later he accepted an invitation to deliver a Fourth of July oration, on "The Genius and Posture of America," before the civil authorities of Boston, and created a sensation by roundly denouncing the slave-owners of the south and the upholders of slavery in the north. This oration was ill-timed and radical. The board of aldermen refused the speaker the customary vote of thanks. The Massachusetts house of representatives elected him chaplain in 1869, and in the autumn of that year his church united with Theodore Parker's congregation and organized a society, which held free services in Boston music hall, where he preached to crowded houses until he sailed for Europe, in 1870, for rest and recreation. While in Paris his health gave way, as the result of arduous overwork, and he was granted a year's leave of absence to recruit. He returned to this country, in May, 1872, and continued to preach in Music hall. In 1874 he accepted a call from the church of the Messiah in New York city, and ministered there until 1878, when he removed to Denver, Col., and from there in 1880 to Chicago, and in 1881 to Portland, Me., where the next year he abandoned the ministry and returned to Boston. Among his books are: " A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life" (1861); "Poetry of the Orient" (1856); "The Genius of Solitude" (1861); "The Friendships of Women" (1867); "The School of Life" (1881); "The Sources of Consolation in Human Life"; "Life of Edwin Forrest" (1877); "A Symbolic History of the Cross of Christ" (1881); and "Prayers offered in the Massachusetts House of Representatives during the session of 1868" (1869), printed by request.