Moncure D. Conway

Moncure Daniel Conway (March 17, 1832 – November 15, 1907) was an American abolitionist as well as at various times a Methodist, Unitarian and Freethought minister. The radical writer descended from patriotic and patrician families of Virginia and Maryland 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, as well as his own autobiography, and led freethinkers in London's South Place Chapel.

Conway was born in Falmouth, Stafford County, Virginia, to parents descended from the First Families of Virginia. His father Walter Peyton Conway was a wealthy slave-holding gentleman farmer, county judge and state representative, whose home, known as the Conway House, still stands at 305 King Street (a.k.a. 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 as well as a layman in the Episcopal Church and became known for his integrity and hatred of intolerance; and 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 Moncure Conway's 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, d. 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.

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