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Thomas Paine Moncure Daniel Conway Biography & Facts

Moncure Daniel Conway (March 17, 1832 – November 15, 1907) was an American abolitionist minister and radical writer. At various times Methodist, Unitarian, and a Freethinker, he descended from patriotic and patrician families of Virginia and Maryland but spent most of the final four decades of his life abroad in England and France, where he wrote biographies of Edmund Randolph, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Thomas Paine and his own autobiography. He led freethinkers in London's South Place Chapel, now Conway Hall. Family Conway's parents descended from the First Families of Virginia. His father, Walker Peyton Conway, was a wealthy slave-holding gentleman farmer, county judge, and state representative; his home, known as the Conway House, still stands at 305 King Street (also known as River Road), along the Rappahannock River. Conway's mother, Margaret Stone Daniel Conway, was the granddaughter of Thomas Stone of Maryland (a signer of the Declaration of Independence), and in addition to running the household, also practiced homeopathy, learned from her doctor father. Both parents were Methodists, his father having left the Episcopal church, his mother the Presbyterian, and they hosted Methodist meetings in their home until a suitable church was finally built in Fredericksburg. An uncle, Judge Eustace Conway, advocated states' rights in Virginia's General Assembly (as did Walter Conway). Another uncle, Richard C.L. Moncure, served on what later became the Virginia Supreme Court, was a layman in the Episcopal Church, and became known for his integrity and hatred of intolerance. His great-uncle, Peter Vivian Daniel, served on the United States Supreme Court, where he upheld slavery and the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, including in the Dred Scott Decision of 1857. Two of his three brothers later fought for the Confederacy. His opposition to slavery reportedly came from his mother's side of the family, including his great-grandfather Travers Daniel (justice of the Stafford Court, died 1824) and his mother herself (who fled to Easton, Pennsylvania, and lived with her daughter and son-in-law Professor Marsh after the Civil War broke out) as well as from his boyhood experiences. Nonetheless, during his youth, Moncure Conway briefly took a pro-slavery position under the influence of a cousin, Richmond editor John Moncure Daniel, himself a protege of Justice Daniel. Early life Conway was born in Falmouth, Virginia. After attending the Fredericksburg Classical and Mathematical Academy (alma mater of George Washington and other famous Virginians), Conway followed his elder brother to Methodist-affiliated Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, graduating in 1849. During his time at Dickinson, Conway helped found the college's first student publication and was influenced by Professor John McClintock, which caused him to embrace Methodism as well as an anti-slavery position, although that controversy was starting to split the denomination. In Fredericksburg, uncle Eustace funded the pro-slavery Southern Conference faction and his father the at-least-theoretically anti-slavery Baltimore Conference faction. While in Cincinnati as discussed below, Conway married Ellen Davis Dana. She was a fellow Unitarian, feminist, and abolitionist. The couple had three sons (two of whom survived childhood) and a daughter during their long marriage, which ended with her death from cancer in 1898. Despite the previous tension with his own family over his opposition to slavery, Moncure Conway nevertheless brought his bride to meet them, during which Ellen broke a Southern social constraint by hugging and kissing a young slave girl in front of family members; after this, it would take 17 years before Conway reconciled with his family. Career After studying law for a year in Warrenton, Virginia, partly out of a moral crisis caused by seeing a lynching of a Black man whose retrial had been ordered by the Court of Appeals, Conway became a circuit-riding Methodist minister. Conway had self-published his first pamphlet in 1850, "Free Schools in Virginia: A Plea of Education, Virtue and Thrift, vs. Ignorance, Vice and Poverty", but had been unable to convince local politicians to follow his recommendations, particularly as the pro-slavery faction believed such universal education influenced by Northern mores. His Rockville Circuit included his native state and Washington, D.C., through Rockville, Maryland, where he became acquainted with the Quaker Roger Brooke, whom he considered his first avowed abolitionist, despite his familial relation to the jurist Roger Brooke Taney. In 1853, after being reassigned to a circuit around Frederick, Maryland, and shortly after his beloved elder brother Peyton died of typhoid fever and his assistant Becky of another, Moncure Conway left the Methodist church and entered the Harvard University school of divinity to continue his spiritual journey. Before graduating in 1854, he met Ralph Waldo Emerson and fell under the influence of Transcendentalism, as well as became an outspoken abolitionist after discussions with Theodore Parker, William Lloyd Garrison, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Wendell Phillips. In America After graduating from Harvard, Conway accepted a call to the First Unitarian Church of Washington, D.C., but he was invited to seek another position after enunciating abolitionist views. Moreover, when Conway returned to his native Virginia, his rumored connection with an attempt to rescue the fugitive slave Anthony Burns in Boston, Massachusetts (whose master Conway had known in Stafford, Virginia, before their move to Alexandria and was ultimately purchased by an abolitionist and set free) aroused bitter hostility among his old neighbors and friends and family. Conway fled being tarred and feathered in 1854. Nonetheless, almost at once, Conway was invited to preach sermons at the Unitarian congregation in Cincinnati, Ohio. He served as minister at that anti-slavery congregation from late 1855 until after the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861. However, when in 1859, he announced to the congregation that he no longer believed in miracles or Christ's divinity, a third of the congregation left, but the "Free Church" survived. Conway also edited a short-lived liberal periodical, The Dial, in 1860-1861, linking his emerging spiritual views to his Transcendentalist background. In Cincinnati, he became more acquainted with Jews and Catholics, and counseled against discriminating against them because of their religions. A story he published in The Dial was grounded in Arthurian legend, and explained how Arthur's sword Excalibur came into George Washington's possession, and then was passed on to John Brown, who used it in his raid on Harpers Ferry. Civil War Conway had become editor of the anti-slavery weekly Commonwealth in Boston, and in 1861, Conway published semi-anonymously The Rejected Stone; or Insurrection vs. Resurrection in America, identifying himself only as.... 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