Virginia Vignettes

Moncure Daniel Conway was a Unitarian minister and abolitionist who was once described as “the most thoroughgoing white male radical produced by the antebellum South.” Born in Stafford County to a slave-owning family related to presidents George Washington and James Madison, Conway turned to abolitionism and Transcendentalism in his early 20s and moved to Boston to attend Harvard Divinity School. While there, a runaway slave he happened to have known in Virginia, Anthony Burns, was captured, and Conway observed abolitionists’ various attempts to free him, which eventually became violent and made national headlines. The Boston abolitionists even called on him to spy on Burns’ master, all of which alarmed Conway’s father. He was worried that his own slaves might get ideas, and he threatened to disown his son for his politics. In the end, the elder did disown the younger when, during the Civil War, Conway rounded up a number of his father’s slaves, who had escaped to Washington, D.C., and smuggled them to Ohio. There he founded the Conway Colony near Yellow Springs, where African Americans today still track their lineage back to Stafford County, Virginia.

Further Reading:

John d’Entremont, Southern Emancipator: Moncure Conway: The American Years, 1832-1865 (1987)

Albert J. Von Frank, The Trials of Anthony Burns: Freedom and Slavery in Emerson’s Boston (1998)

This Vignette Provided By

Brendan Wolfe is Associate Editor of Encyclopedia Virginia.