Moncury Daniel Conway

Background

Born in rural Virginia, on March 17, 1832, Moncure Daniel Conway grew up in an upper-class family under the heavy hand of his father, a high-powered planter.

Education

As a young adult, Conway adhered to his father’s desires for his son by attending a strict Methodist college and then law school. Conway then spent a year traveling with a Methodist ministry in Maryland. Soon, however, he began to question the ministry’s literal teaching of the Bible. Deciding to leave behind the South and his father after the death of his brother in 1852, Conway moved up north to Massachusetts where he attended Harvard Divinity School and study the Unitarian faith.

Career

Conway completed the Harvard program and became a Unitarian minister in 1854. His first ministry position was in Washington D.C. where he delivered controversial sermons on the subject of abolition. He moved on to a pulpit in Cincinnati where he began to question the Unitarian religion itself. Continuing to study and reflect on transcendentalist writings, he became the editor of a publication called Dial, a revival of the original transcendental journal.

Conway’s increasingly liberal sermons met with mixed reactions in his Cincinnati parish. He began to study and consider principles from Eastern religions. It was an interest that he continued to explore throughout his life and later write about in the book, My Pilgrimage to the Wise Men of the East, published in 1906. In it, he takes a close look at a variety of different religions that he came into contact with during his travels to India.

In 1862, Conway rejected the title of Unitarian, feeling its teachings had become too didactic and did not give individuals enough freedom to explore and question their spirituality.

Leaving his pulpit in Cincinnati in 1862, Conway changed his focus from religion to promoting the cause of emancipation. In addition to lecturing and writing on the subject, he became the editor an antislavery publication, the Commonwealth, in Boston. He even aided some of his father’s slaves in their escape to freedom in Ohio.

Conway’s family split during the Civil War, with his brothers and father remaining in the south on the side of the Confederacy and his sister and mother moving to Pennsylvania and supporting the anti-slavery cause. The war and the turmoil in his family eventually took a personal toll on Conway, and he arranged to visit England in 1863 for an abolitionist speaking tour. In England, however, his desire for the war to the end got him into trouble when he suggested to John Mason, a Confederate envoy to England, that he could persuade members of the abolitionist movement to support secession by the southern states if they would agree to free their slaves. Not having the proper authority to offer this kind of bargain, Conway could have been prosecuted by the U.S. government. However, President Lincoln chose to ignore this lapse in judgment.

In England, Conway found not only an escape from war-torn American but a new home for the next twenty years. There he resumed his work as a minister when he was offered a position at the liberal, freethinking South Park Chapel in London. Under Conway’s unconventional leadership the chapel thrived. His open and individualistic approach appealed to many Londoners.

During his time in London, Conway found time to concentrate on writing. He published several books that were academic studies of religious subjects. The Sacred Anthology, published in 1874, was a collection of quotes from a cross-section of world religions and philosophies. He also wrote an exploration of ideas about the devil throughout history entitled Demonology and Devil Lore (1879). In 1881, he published a study of the story The Wandering Jew. Returning to America in 1885, Conway moved to New York City and continued to write, taking an interest in literary biography. He published biographies about Edmund Randolph, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and his most important work in this genre, The Life of Thomas Paine, published in 1892.

In 1892, Conway was asked to return to South Place Chapel. However, the death of his wife, Ellen Dana, in 1897, brought him back to New York, where he stayed until the United States declared war on Spain in 1898. Conway, who was dedicated to the peace movement, took offense at what he considered an overly aggressive move, and decided to become an expatriate. He settled in Paris, the city that he considered the most civilized of place to live.

Conway spent the last ten years of his life working on a biography of John Calvin that he never completed and writing his own autobiography.

Achievements

• Moncure Conway is known as 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 S."
  
  Conway Hall in Holborn, London is named in his honor.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Autobiography: Memories and Experiences of Moncure Daniel Conway, in Two Volumes

    (Autobiography of one of America foremost abolitionists wh...)

  • Demonology and Devil-Lore: A Thorough Study on Devils and Demons

    (This two-volume work from 1879 is a comprehensive study o...)

  • The American Crisis

    (The American Crisis is a collection of articles that were...)

  • The golden hour
  • Tracts for To-day
  • The Life Of Thomas Paine, Vol. II.
  • Pine and Palm. A Novel
  • The Age of Reason - Thomas Paine
  • The Sacred Anthology: A book of ethnical scriptures

Views

Conway's liberal views went beyond questions of religion to include his strong belief in abolition, the rights of women, and even in new scientific ideas like evolution.

In Massachusetts, Conway met and befriended the transcendentalist writer Ralph Waldo Emerson whose work he had already encountered and admired. Emerson’s philosophy had a profound effect on Conway’s process of reconsidering many of his youthful values, and he would eventually come to think of the writer as his “spiritual father.”

Quotations: “A pilgrimage from pro-slavery to anti-slavery enthusiasm, from Methodism to Free thought, implies a career of contradictions.”

Membership

Conway was a member of Clementia's "Pen and Pencil Club", at which young writers and artists read and exhibited their works.

Personality

Quotes from others about the person

• “Conway was among the leading pre-Darwinism advocates of evolutionary theory as it applied to human origins, race, and intellectual development.” - J. Wade Caruthers
  
  “The work shows Conway in the ripeness of his powers, and in the enjoyment of his fearless independence as a freethinker, but never playing the part of a scoffer.” - Percy F. Bicknell
  
  “Conway's role, he felt, was to inspire people toward religious inquiry and to provide them with religious knowledge. But he told nobody what to believe.” - John d’Entremont

Connections

In 1858, Conway married Ellen Davis Dana. The couple had three sons and a daughter.

Father:

Walter Peyton Conway

Mother:

Margaret Stone Daniel Conway

Wife:

Ellen Davis Dana

Son:

Eustace Conway

Son:

Emerson Conway

Daughter:

Dana Conway

Son:

Milfred Conway

Friend:

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Acquainted:

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Acquainted:

Henry David Thoreau

Acquainted:

Theodore Parker

Acquainted:

Margaret Fuller

References

• Moncure Conway 1832-1907
• Autobiography: Memories and Experiences of Moncure Daniel Conway
• Southern Emancipator: Moncure Conway: The American Years, 1832-1865