Doane was born in Boston, and named for his father's best friend, the Rev. William Croswell. When he was born, his father, the Rev. George Doane, was Rector of the prominent Trinity Church, Boston, located on Copley Square. Within a year, his father was elected second Bishop of New Jersey. The family settled in the see of Burlington, New Jersey, which had been settled largely by Quakers in colonial times and also has the oldest Episcopal church in the state. Doane attended the private Episcopal Burlington College there, founded in 1846 by his father. He graduated from Burlington College, where he and two friends had co-founded the fourth, or "Delta" chapter of the fraternity Delta Psi. It became known as St. Anthony Hall for a building it used after moving to the University of Pennsylvania in nearby Philadelphia. After college, Doane became an Episcopal priest. Like his father, he became involved in the Oxford Movement, which sought to restore richness of practice to the liturgy.
Clergy
Doane was ordained a deacon on March 6, 1853, by his father at his home parish of St. Mary's. Shortly thereafter, he married the former Sarah Katharine Condit, daughter of Joel W. and Margaret Harrison Condit of Newark, New Jersey, and his two children were born in Burlington, Eliza Greene in 1854, and Margaret Harrison in 1858. After he was ordained a priest in 1856 in the same church, he was called to St. Barnabas Free Church in Burlington. He served there until 1860. In 1863, Doane accepted a call to St. John's Church, Hartford, Connecticut, and he served there during the American Civil War. His parishioner Mark Twain pulled a joke on Doane, claiming, "I have... a book at home containing every word" of Doane's sermon that Sunday, then sent him an unabridged dictionary. Doane was called to Albany, New York in 1867 to serve "the venerable parish of St. Peter's, Albany." The General Convention of 1868, in New York City, founded a new diocese of Albany. Doane was elected the first bishop at the organizational convention of the diocese in St. Peter's Church. His election had "strong opposition," because he was a "young rector," but also because "the evangelical element... looked upon Mr. Doane as a high churchman, his ritualistic practices...." adopted as part of the Oxford Movement influence.
Doane had a large diocese, and spent many years in visitation, establishing churches, and confirming persons. For many years his biggest project was supervising the building of the Cathedral of All Saints, his major legacy. He got the land donated by the wealthy Erastus Corning. The cathedral was incorporated in 1873, and the laying of its cornerstone on a downtown site on June 3, 1884, took place "with impressive ceremony." With construction complete enough for the building to be used, the Cathedral of All Saints was dedicated in 1888. Doane liked Gothic architecture for Episcopal churches for its spiritual quality. Until that time, smaller Episcopal churches had served as seats of the bishop. The "cathedral idea"—the concept that a bishop's main church is more than a parish church, and is the "Mother church"—had not yet taken hold in the United States. It is sometimes called the "Pioneer Cathedral" because of that. Doane and the congregation planned a cathedral complex, to include convent, cloister, hospital and school. He established the girls' school in 1870, and the convent and hospital in 1874. Much of the building was paid for in a gift by his friend, J. Pierpont Morgan. The church is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. By 1890 Bishop Doane was in charge of the "Foreign Chapels" of the Episcopal Church. In keeping with his plans for the cathedral and Oxford Movement traditions, Doane established an ambitious music program at the cathedral. In the late 19th century, he founded a boy's choir school and the Cathedral Choir of Men and Boys. Doane was active in speaking out against the women's suffrage movement, which he opposed on the grounds that God had given men dominion over women and that women's 'natural' place was in the home caring for their children. He wrote that "an enlarged unqualified suffrage... an aggravated misery threatening danger". So influential were his views that suffragist Ellen Battelle Dietrick's last book, Women in the Early Christian Ministry —in which she offered a refutation of Christian teachings that relegated women to second-class status—was subtitled "A Reply to Bishop Doane, and Others". Doane died at the age of 81 in New York City in 1913, while traveling. His Coadjutor, Richard Henry Nelson, succeeded to the position of bishop of Albany.
