Moncure D. Conway
Moncure D. Conway | |
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Born | Falmouth, Virginia, U.S. | March 17, 1832
Died | November 15, 1907 Paris, France | (aged 75)
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Moncure Daniel Conway (March 17, 1832 – November 15, 1907) was an American
Family
Conway's parents descended from the
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)[4] 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.[5]
While in
Career
After studying law for a year in
In America
After graduating from Harvard, Conway accepted a call to the
Nonetheless, almost at once, Conway was invited to preach sermons at the
Civil War
Conway had become editor of the anti-slavery weekly Commonwealth in
In 1862, during the Union occupation before the devastating Battle of Fredericksburg in December of that year, Conway returned home to Falmouth and learned that his family's house had been spared from destruction because of its association with him, although it was commandeered for use as a hospital for wounded soldiers (at which Walt Whitman would work as a nurse).[14] That year, Conway published another powerful plea for emancipation, The Golden Hour (1862). On New Year's Day, 1863 (also called Emancipation Day, because President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, news of which reached Boston by telegraph), Conway with fellow abolitionists Julia Ward Howe, Amos Bronson Alcott, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., George Luther Stearns and Wendell Phillips unveiled a marble bust of John Brown at Stearns' home.[15]
Also in 1862, after spending more and more time away from his church advancing the abolitionist cause, and growing dissatisfied with the theological, liturgical, and social conservatism of mainstream Unitarianism, Conway left that denomination's ministry, and he maintained an uneasy and uncertain relationship with Unitarianism in America and subsequently in England until he and Ellen made a clean break.[citation needed]
London
In April 1863,
Rather than go back to America, where Conway no longer felt welcome as a suspected traitor to his childhood Virginia friends and neighbors and he paid someone to take his place after being drafted to serve in the Union army, Conway traveled to Italy. There, he reunited with his wife and children in
Conway also abandoned
Conway remained the leader of South Place until 1886, when Stanton Coit took his place. Under Coit's leadership, South Place was renamed to the South Place Ethical Society. However Coit's tenure ended in 1892 in a losing power struggle, and Conway resumed leadership until his death.
Conway attended the salon of radicals Peter and Clementia Taylor at Aubrey House in Campden Hill, West London. He also was a member of Clementia's "Pen and Pencil Club", at which young writers and artists read and exhibited their works.[18] Conway moved to Notting Hill to be near the Taylors at Aubrey House.[18]
In 1868, Conway was one of four speakers at the first open public meeting in support of women's suffrage in Great Britain. His many literary and intellectual friends included Charles Dickens, Robert Browning, Thomas Carlyle, Charles Lyell, and Charles Darwin. In 1878, he attempted to personally endow a new, non-denominational women's college at the University of Oxford; frightened at this prospect, Anglicans made haste to instead create Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, which was the first women's college at Oxford.[19]
In the 1870s and the 1880s, Conway returned occasionally to the United States, where he reconciled with his Virginia family in 1875 and toured in the West about Demonology and the famous Englishmen he knew. In 1897 Conway and his terminally-ill (from cancer) wife Ellen returned from London to New York City to fulfill her wish of dying on American soil; she died on Christmas Day; their son Dana also died that year. As the Spanish–American War approached, Conway turned toward pacifism and became disaffected with his countrymen, moving to France to devote much of the rest of his life to the peace movement and writing. However, he occasionally returned to Fredericksburg, which had come to admire his cultural accomplishments. Conway also traveled to India and wrote about it shortly before his death.
India
Conway visited India and described his experiences in My Pilgrimage to the Wise Men of the East, 1906.[20]
He visited Helena Blavatsky in 1884 and denounced the Mahatma letters as fraudulent. He suggested that Koot Hoomi was a fictitious creation of Blavatsky.[21] Conway wrote that Blavatsky "created the imaginary Koothoomi (originally Kothume) by piecing together parts of the names of her two chief disciples, Olcott and Hume."[22]
Death
Conway died alone, at 75, in his apartment in Paris. His corpse was found on November 15, 1907, and was ultimately returned to Westchester County, New York, for burial in Kensico cemetery.
Legacy
Works
- Tracts for To-day (1858) online edition
- The Natural History of the Devil (1859)
- The Rejected Stone: or, Insurrection vs. Resurrection in America, By a Native of Virginia (1861) online edition
- The Golden Hour (1862) online edition
- Testimonies Concerning Slavery (1864) online edition
- The Earthward Pilgrimage (1870) online edition
- Republican Superstitions as Illustrated in the Political History of America (1872) online edition
- Christianity (1876) online edition
- Idols and Ideals, with an Essay on Christianity (1877) online edition
- Demonology and Devil Lore (2 vols., 1878) online edition
- A Necklace of Stories (1880) online edition
- Thomas Carlyle (1881) online edition
- The Wandering Jew (1881) online edition
- Emerson at Home and Abroad (1882) online edition
- Travels in South Kensington: with Notes on Decorative Art and Rrchitecture in England (1882) online edition
- Lessons for the Day (1882) online edition
- The Saint Patrick Myth (1883)
- Pine and Palm: A Novel (2 vols., 1887) online edition
- Life and Papers of Edmund Randolph (1888) online edition
- Life of Nathaniel Hawthorne (1890) online edition
- George Washington's Rules of Civility: Traced to their Sources and Restored (1890) online edition
- The Life of Thomas Paine with an unpublished sketch of Paine by William Cobbett (2 vols., 1892) online edition
- The Writings of Thomas Paine (1894) online edition
- Solomon and Solomonic Literature (1899) online edition
- Autobiography, Memories and Experiences (2 vols., 1904) online edition
- My Pilgrimage to the Wise Men of the East (1906) online edition
See also
References
- ^ "Conway, Moncure Daniel (1832–1907)". Virginia Humanities.
- ^ a b "Moncure Daniel Conway (1832-1907)". Dickinson College.
- ^ a b Pope, Sarah Dillard. "Aboard the Underground Railroad-- Rush R. Sloane House".
- ^ Autobiography p. 7
- ^ Autobiography p. 63
- ^ Autobiography pp. 78-81
- ^ a b "Conway, Moncure Daniel (1832–1907)".
- ^ Autobiography pp. 92-94
- ^ "Moncure Conway". Archived from the original on September 3, 2019. Retrieved November 12, 2015.
- ^ Goolrick, John T., Historic Fredericksburg: The Story of an Old Town, Richmond: Whittet & Shepperson, 1922, p. 99.
- ISBN 9781843845232.
- Quarles, Benjamin, The Negro in the Civil War, Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1953, p. 30.
- ^ a b "From 1850s Virginia, an Abolitionist Hero Emerges (washingtonpost.com)". The Washington Post.
- ^ Autobiography pp. 316-318
- ^ Kytle, Ethan J., Romantic Reformers and the Antislavery Struggle in the Civil War Era, Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2014, p. 260.
- ^ a b Goolrick p. 100
- ISBN 978-1-108-05061-6. Retrieved August 27, 2013.
- ^ ISBN 978-1-4021-6692-1. Retrieved December 1, 2012.
- ^ Schwartz, Laura. "Religion and the Women's Colleges". Women at Oxford 1878-1920. University of Oxford.
- ISBN 0-7914-3854-6
- ^ Conway, Moncure D. (1906). My Pilgrimage to the Wise Men of the East. Houghton, Mifflin and Company. pp. 201-202
- ISBN 0-19-507658-3
Sources
- Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). . Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.
- Dictionary of Unitarian & Universalist Biography Archived August 12, 2013, at the Wayback Machine - Article by Charles A. Howe
- Burtis, Mary Elizabeth. Moncure Conway, 1832-1907. New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press, 1952.
- d'Entremont, John. Southern Emancipator: Moncure Conway: The American Years, 1832-1865. Oxford University Press, 1987.
- Easton, Loyd D. Hegel's First American Followers: The Ohio Hegelians: J.D. Stallo, Peter Kaufmann, Moncure Conway, August Willich. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1966.
- Good, James A., ed. Moncure Daniel Conway: Autobiography and Miscellaneous Writings. 3 volumes. Bristol, UK: Thoemmes Press, 2003.
- Good, James A., ed. The Ohio Hegelians. 3 volumes. Bristol, UK: Thoemmes Press, 2004.
- Walker, Peter. Moral Choices: Memory, Desire, and Imagination in Nineteenth-Century American Abolition. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978.
- Wilson, J. G.; Fiske, J., eds. (1900). . Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography. New York: D. Appleton.
External links
- Moncure Conway Foundation Archived January 13, 2015, at the Wayback Machine
- Moncure Conway in Encyclopedia Virginia
- Works by Moncure D. Conway at Project Gutenberg
- Works by or about Moncure D. Conway at Internet Archive
- Works by Moncure D. Conway at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
- Wandering Jew and Wandering Jeweess screenplays