Autobiography and Miscellaneous Writings by Moncure Daniel Conway

A collection of the writings of Moncure Daniel Conway (1832-1907), an American idealist, abolitionist, pacifist and freethinker. It includes his autobiography, and facsimile letters from Arnold, Browning, Whitman, Carlyle, Emerson, Gladstone and others. There is an introduction by James A. Good.

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Moncure Daniel Conway (1832-1907) is an important figure in the history of the Ohio Hegelians, the anti-slavery movement, pacifism, transcendentalism and freethought. After his graduation in 1849, Conway spent one year as a circuitriding Methodist minister. Too theologically liberal for the Methodist church, in 1852 Conway moved to Boston where he began a life-long friendship with his mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson, studied at the Harvard Divinity School, and served as editor of "The Dial" and "The Commonwealth". Conway was dismissed from his first pulpit at a Unitarian church in Washington, DC because of his anti-slavery sermons. Later, he lectured in England during the Civil War, arguing the case of the abolitionist North. Besides editing and contributing essays to many periodicals, he was the author of over 70 books, including a particularly influential biography of Thomas Paine (1892). Conway's life-story is interesting and unusual in its own right. His "Autobiography" tells how he helped his father's fugitive slaves to settle in Yellow Springs, Ohio during the Civil War, and how he gradually lost his religious faith.
It also charts his dealings with such leading figures as Emerson, Thomas Carlyle, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Annie Besant, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Andrew Carnegie. Conway's "Addresses and Reprints, 1850-1907" contains miscellaneous writings and speeches on public affairs, philosophy and literature. These three volumes are introduced by James A. Good and should be of interest to historians of 19th-century America in all its aspects.