Moncure Daniel Conway | Biography

Moncure Daniel Conway (17 March 1832-15 November 1907) is considered one of the major disciples of Hegelian philosophy in nineteenth-century America, and an interpreter of David Friedrich Strauss and Ferdinand Christian Baur. As a spokesman of "Natural Religion," he was among the leading pre-Darwinian advocates of evolutionary theory as it applied to human origins, race, and intellectual development. During his fifty years as minister, public speaker, author, and editor, he was close to the large events and the leading personalities of his times. Outspoken and somewhat erratic, his life was, in his own words, "A pilgrimage from pro-slavery to anti-slavery enthusiasm, from Methodism to Freethought." He was born in Stafford County, Virginia, attended Fredericksburg Academy, and was graduated from Dickinson College, a Methodist school in Pennsylvania. Upon his return to the South he became a Methodist circuit rider in the Rockville, Maryland, district of Baltimore during which time (1850-1852) he read some of Ralph Waldo Emerson's essays and listened to the debates on slavery and other issues in the Congress. Because of this influence he left Methodism, went to Cambridge, Massachusetts, visited Concord, became acquainted with Nathaniel Hawthorne, Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, absorbed some of Margaret Fuller's lingering influence, and listened to Theodore Parker preach in Boston. These influences took him to Harvard Divinity School and into the Unitarian Ministry in 1856. During a brief ministry in Washington, D.C., where he spoke out against slavery, he came into contact with leading political figures and knew Walt Whitman. Asked by his congregation to leave in 1856, he was invited to be minister of the First Congregational Church in Cincinnati, Ohio, where he was married to Ellen Davis Dana in 1858. Here he found an anti-slavery congregation and a congenial community where he worked closely with Rabbi Stephen Wise, became acquainted with William Dean Howells, and often invited Emerson and Parker as visiting speakers. Conway helped make Cincinnati a cultural center during the pre-Civil War years. In 1860 he became editor of the Dial, patterned after the original Transcendental journal. However, the magazine ceased publication after one year. In 1862 Conway left Cincinnati and returned to Boston to edit the Commonwealth, an abolitionist journal. In the war years he had frequent meetings with Charles Sumner, Horace Greeley, and other leaders, including President Lincoln. During the dark days of the war, he accepted a call to the Ethical Society of South Place Chapel, London. Here he spent virtually the rest of his career, establishing a friendship with Thomas Carlyle and other leading minds of England and Europe. He also became the official greeter of leading Americans as they began their European tours. He attracted some notoriety in 1863 by suggesting to John Mason, a confederate envoy in England, that if the Confederacy abolished slavery, the abolitionists would cease their support of the Civil War and urge the recognition of the Confederacy by the United States. He received much criticism for this single-handed diplomacy, but the Lincoln government chose to ignore it rather than prosecute him under the Logan Act. Shortly before his death in Paris in 1907, Conway returned to New York to work on his memoirs and biographical sketches of Edmund Randolph and George Washington. He is remembered as an early advocate of free schools in pre-Civil War Virginia. His real contribution to literature, religion, and history was his "rediscovery" of Thomas Paine, his natural religion, his autobiographical accounts of abolitionism, the return of the escaped slave, Anthony Burns, and his vignettes of the American Transcendentalists.