Conway, Moncure Daniel

▪ American clergyman

born March 17, 1832, Stafford county, Virginia, U.S.

died November 15, 1907, Paris, France

 American clergyman, author, and vigorous abolitionist.

      Conway was born of Methodist slaveholding parents and educated at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, graduating in 1849. While serving in the Methodist ministry he was converted to Unitarianism, but because of his outspoken abolitionist views he was dismissed from his first Unitarian pastorate, in Washington, D.C., in 1856. He moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, and became active in abolitionist causes, even settling a colony of fugitive slaves at Yellow Springs, Ohio.

      In 1862 he became co-editor in Boston of the Commonwealth, an antislavery paper. During the Civil War he went to England to lecture on behalf of the North. Conway contributed to journals in both England and the United States and wrote more than 70 books and pamphlets on a great variety of subjects. His scholarly works include Life of Thomas Paine, 2 vols. (1892) and The Writings of Thomas Paine, 4 vols. (1894–96). His Autobiography (1904) is valuable for sketches of important 19th-century figures.

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