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Title: Moncure Conway Portrait
Source: Moncure Conway Foundation
More informationMoncure Conway was a Methodist
minister, Unitarian minister, abolitionist, free thinker, and prolific writer who the
historian John d'Entremont describes as "the most thoroughgoing white male radical
produced by the antebellum South." Born into a prominent Virginia slaveholding
family, he nevertheless became an outspoken critic of the South's "peculiar
institution," anguishing over how to reconcile his background with his antislavery
convictions in his younger years. He first openly allied himself with abolitionists
in July 1854 in the wake of the capture in Boston, Massachusetts, of fugitive slave
Anthony Burns, whom Conway
claimed to have known in Virginia. During the American Civil War (1861–1865), Conway accompanied
thirty-one of his father's slaves, all of whom had escaped to Washington, D.C., on a
harrowing train ride to freedom in southwestern Ohio. There he established what came
to be known as the Conway Colony; many African Americans continue to live in the area
and identify their ancestors as Virginia slaves. In addition, Conway traveled in high
literary circles, authoring as many seventy published works, including popular
book-length arguments against slavery and important biographies of Nathaniel
Hawthorne and Thomas Paine.
Moncure Daniel Conway was born on March 17, 1832, in Stafford County, the son of county magistrate Walker Peyton Conway, whose relatives included the families of former United States presidents James Madison and George Washington. His mother, Margaret Stone Daniel, was the granddaughter of Thomas Stone, Maryland signatory of the Declaration of Independence. An uncle, Judge Eustace Conway, served as an important states' rights advocate in the Virginia General Assembly. His great uncle, Peter Vivian Daniel, was an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States (1842–1860) who sided with the majority in both the 1847 decision that affirmed the constitutionality of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 and in the Dred Scott decision (1857), which ruled, in part, that African Americans could never become U.S. citizens.
In 1849, Conway earned an AB degree from Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, after which he studied law in Warrenton, Virginia. In 1850, he wrote Free Schools in Virginia: A Plea of Education, Virtue and Thrift, vs. Ignorance, Vice and Poverty, which blamed the state's economic problems on its poor educational system. He distributed the self-financed pamphlet among prominent state politicians, but they ignored its recommendations. In 1851, he entered the Methodist ministry as a circuit-riding preacher in Maryland.
Title: Anthony Burns, Portrait
Source: the Library of Congress Prints
and Photographs Division,
[LC-USZ62-90750]
More informationBeginning about 1852, however, Conway began
to move toward Unitarianism and abolition. In large part he was influenced by the
women in his family, who encouraged him to be true to himself. This was in stark
contrast to his "icy" father and his uncle Eustace Conway, who, according to
d'Entremont, "threatened to have him drummed out of town." His transition away
from the "peculiar" dogmas of southern culture also coincided with his discovery
of the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, with whom he opened a correspondence in
1851, and the pacifist teachings of the Quakers. His new politics led him in 1853
to what was then the national hotbed of reform, eastern Massachusetts, including
Boston, Concord, and Cambridge. There he cultivated an important relationship with
Emerson and, in 1854, earned a BD from Harvard Divinity School.
While Conway was at Harvard, a runaway slave named Anthony Burns, also from Stafford County, Virginia, was arrested in Boston under the provisions of the controversial Fugitive Slave Act (1850). After failing to free him through legal channels, abolitionists stormed the jail. A deputy sheriff was killed in the melee and the subsequent trials made national headlines. At the 1854 Fourth of July rally where the fiery abolitionist editor William Lloyd Garrison famously burned a copy of the U.S. Constitution, Conway emerged for the first time as an open ally of the abolitionists. He gave a speech declaring that "in Virginia, they not only had slaves, but every man with a conscience, or even the first throbbings of a conscience, is a slave."
In 1855 Conway was ordained a minister of the prestigious First Unitarian Church in Washington, D.C., a congregation that included at least one Supreme Court justice. There he delivered sermons so fervently antislavery that he was dismissed in 1856. Later the same year he became minister of the First Unitarian Church of Cincinnati, Ohio, and in 1858 wed Ellen Davis Dana. Their happy marriage would produce three sons and a daughter.
Conway gradually abandoned Unitarianism for free thought. When he told his congregation in 1859 that he no longer believed in miracles or Christ's divinity, a third of its members promptly left. Conway's new "Free Church" survived, however, burnishing his reputation as a noteworthy young intellectual. He traveled the North lecturing on free thinking and abolition and in 1860 founded the Dial, a short-lived literary and journalistic monthly that reflected Conway's own brand of apostasy and whose title paid homage to the defunct Transcendentalist organ of the 1830s and 1840s. He also cultivated friendships with literati and reformers, including the writer Henry David Thoreau, the abolitionist Wendell Philips, the radical Unitarian minister Theodore Parker, Massachusetts's antislavery senator Charles Sumner, New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley, and Julia Ward Howe, future author of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic."
Title: Moncure Conway to
Abraham Lincoln
(correspondence)
Source: the Library of Congress,
Manuscript Division
More informationIn 1861, Conway wrote The Rejected Stone; or, Insurrection vs. Resurrection in America, an
ardent if anonymous plea for emancipation (the book identified its author only as
"a Native Virginian"). Published in three editions, the book was popular enough
that copies were distributed to Union soldiers at the beginning of the Civil War.
The following year Conway delivered the seventh in the Smithsonian Abolition
Lecture series aimed at pressuring the administration of U.S. president Abraham Lincoln to adopt the
emancipation of slaves as the war's objective. Conway's lecture even helped win
him, along with moderate Unitarian minister William Henry Channing, a meeting with
Lincoln, who invited Conway to challenge him publicly on the point. "Don't spare
me," Conway recalled Lincoln as having told him. In The Golden
Hour (1862), another book-length plea for emancipation, Conway did not.
Often addressing Lincoln directly, he argued that abolition would cripple the
Confederate war effort and hasten peace.
In the years to come, Conway continued fighting for his cause. Late in July 1862, he led thirty-one of his father's slaves, all of whom had escaped to Washington, D.C., on a sometimes-dangerous train ride to Yellow Springs, Ohio. The last leg of the trip while still in slave territory began late in the evening, he recalled in his 1904 autobiography, and at first, the men, women, and children in his group neither slept nor talked.
"At last, when the name of a certain [train] station was called out," he wrote, I observed that every eye danced, every tongue was loosened, and, after some singing, they all dropped off to sleep. It was not until the next day that I learned that the station which had wrought such a transformation was the dividing line between the slave and the free states. How they knew it I cannot divine; it was a small place, but there the shadow of slavery ended.
Title: Eliza and Dunmore Gwinn
Source: Moncure Conway Foundation
More informationThe freed people settled along the Little
Miami River, and Conway checked in on them periodically over the years. Dunmore
and Eliza Gwinn, who had been house slaves for the Conway family and who had run a
cake-and-candy store in Georgetown, helped to found the First Anti-Slavery Baptist
Church, now First Baptist, in Yellow Springs.
Conway's father effectively disowned him for his actions, but the rest of his family, like the nation, was split. While his two younger brothers fought for the South, his mother and sister were less sympathetic with the Confederacy and spent most of the war in Easton, Pennsylvania, where Conway's brother-in-law taught at Lafayette College. Conway himself moved from Cincinnati to Concord, Massachusetts, in September 1862, and was hired as co-editor of the new antislavery weekly, Commonwealth. (The other editor was Franklin Sanborn, a New Hampshire–born journalist and reformer who had been a member of the "Secret Six," a committee that helped to fund John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859.)
In 1863, while on a speaking tour in England, Conway's antislavery passion—not to mention his frustration with Lincoln's sometimes overly cautious approach to emancipation—caused him to run afoul of his own government when he attempted to bargain with the Confederate envoy to Britain, James Murray Mason. Conway, who claimed falsely to speak for the abolition movement, offered to support disunion if Confederates agreed to free their slaves. It was a proposal that did not come with the approval of the Lincoln administration, or anyone else for that matter. Confederates took pleasure in Conway's misstep, while abolitionists back home, most of whom had become thoroughgoing wartime nationalists, howled in protest. Conway, fearful of having his passport revoked, meekly apologized to U.S. secretary of state William H. Seward. In the meantime, Conway was drafted into the Union army—likely the work of a political enemy—but paid a fee to avoid service.
Title: Moncure and Ellen Dana
Conway, Cabinet Card
Source: Moncure Conway Foundation
More informationBanished first from Virginia and then from
America, Conway lived as an expatriate for much of the rest of his life. He became
the minister of London's South Place Chapel, one of the oldest free thought
organizations in Britain, where he served from 1864 until 1885, and again from
1893 until 1897. (The group's Conway Hall, built in Red Lion Square in 1924, is
named for him.) He also continued to write, publishing frequently on philosophy
and religion, working as a war correspondent during the Franco-Prussian War
(1870–1871), engaging in literary criticism, and writing articles for British and
American magazines. While living in Brooklyn and New York from 1885 until 1893, he
authored biographies of Edmund Randolph (1888), Nathaniel Hawthorne (1890), and,
in two volumes, Thomas Paine (1892). He was the London literary agent for Walt
Whitman, Mark Twain, Louisa May Alcott, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and the
American agent for Robert Browning.
Conway left London permanently in 1897 and moved to New York, where his wife died of cancer on Christmas Day of that year. This event, coupled with what he accurately saw as American imperialist intentions in the Spanish-American War (1898), provoked a final move to Paris. He labored on a never-completed biography of the theologian John Calvin, wrote two volumes of autobiography (1904), and completed a memoir of his 1883–1884 trip to India (1906). Conway died of a stroke during the night of November 14–15, 1907.
Email SignupFirst published: November 6, 2008 | Last modified: August 26, 2010
![Title: Anthony Burns, Portrait
Source: the Library of Congress Prints
and Photographs Division,
[LC-USZ62-90750]](/img/display_media.php?mets_filename=evm00000733mets.xml&resolution=thumb "Title: Anthony Burns, Portrait
Source: the Library of Congress Prints
and Photographs Division,
[LC-USZ62-90750]")
