Alexander, James Waddell

ALEXANDER, JAMES WADDELL: Presbyterian; b. near Gordonsville, Louisa County, Virginia, Mar. 13, 1804, eldest son of Archibald Alexander; d. at Red Sweet Springs, Virginia, July 31, 1859. He was graduated at Princeton in 1820, studied theology there and served as tutor, was licensed in 1824, and was pastor in Virginia till 1828, when he became pastor at Trenton, N. J. He was editor of The Presbyterian, Philadelphia (1832), professor of rhetoric and belles-lettres at Princeton (1833), pastor of Duane Street Presbyterian Church, New York (1844), professor of ecclesiastical history at Princeton Seminary (1849), recalled to his old church in New York, now reorganized as the Fifth Avenue Church (1851). Perhaps the best known of his writings were the Plain Words to a Young Communicant (New York, 1854) and Thoughts on Preaching (1864). Some of his translations of German hymns (such as Gerhardt’s O Sacred Head now Wounded), first published in Schaff’s Deutsche Kirchenfreund, have passed into many hymn-books.

Bibliography: Forty Years’ Familiar Letters of James W. Alexander, ed. Rev. John Hall of Trenton, 2 vols., New York, 1860.