Robert Macdonald was born in the Scottish city of Perth in 1813 and attended the University of St Andrews, where he was converted. He became a close friend of Robert Murray M‘Cheyne and the Bonar brothers, and served as a minister first in the Perthshire village of Logiealmond. He then exercised a near twenty-year ministry in Blairgowrie before moving in 1857 to the Free Church congregation in North Leith, near Edinburgh, during which time he served as Moderator of the Free Church of Scotland in 1882. He continued as senior minister of North Leith until his death in 1893.