Moncure conway autobiography of a face

Metropolitan Museum Cleveland Museum of Art. Internet Arcade Console Living Room. Open Library American Libraries. Search the Wayback Machine Search icon An illustration of a magnifying glass. Sign up for free Log in. It appears your browser does not have it turned on. After studying law for a year in Warrenton, Virginia , partly out of a moral crisis caused by seeing a lynching of a Black man whose retrial had been ordered by the Court of Appeals, [ 6 ] Conway became a circuit-riding Methodist minister.

Moncure conway autobiography of a face

Ignorance, Vice and Poverty", but had been unable to convince local politicians to follow his recommendations, particularly as the pro-slavery faction believed such universal education influenced by Northern mores. Before graduating in , he met Ralph Waldo Emerson and fell under the influence of Transcendentalism , as well as became an outspoken abolitionist after discussions with Theodore Parker , William Lloyd Garrison , Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Wendell Phillips.

Moreover, when Conway returned to his native Virginia, his rumored connection with an attempt to rescue the fugitive slave Anthony Burns in Boston, Massachusetts whose master Conway had known in Stafford, Virginia, before their move to Alexandria and was ultimately purchased by an abolitionist and set free aroused bitter hostility among his old neighbors and friends and family.

Conway fled being tarred and feathered in Nonetheless, almost at once, Conway was invited to preach sermons at the Unitarian congregation in Cincinnati, Ohio. He served as minister at that anti-slavery congregation from late until after the outbreak of the Civil War in However, when in , he announced to the congregation that he no longer believed in miracles or Christ's divinity, a third of the congregation left, but the "Free Church" survived.

In Cincinnati, he became more acquainted with Jews and Catholics, and counseled against discriminating against them because of their religions. Conway had become editor of the anti-slavery weekly Commonwealth in Boston , and in , Conway published semi-anonymously The Rejected Stone; or Insurrection vs. Resurrection in America , identifying himself only as a "Native of Virginia".

The book was published in three editions and ultimately handed out to Union soldiers after the start of the American Civil War. During the next year, Conway advocated abolition, including in a Smithsonian lecture series in Washington, D. While in Washington, DC, Conway located thirty-one [ 12 ] of his father's slaves who had fled from Virginia into Georgetown.

Conway secured train tickets and safe-conduct passes for them and escorted them on a dangerous trip through Maryland to safety in Yellow Springs, Ohio , where he believed they would be safe because of the town's accepting culture. In , during the Union occupation before the devastating Battle of Fredericksburg in December of that year, Conway returned home to Falmouth and learned that his family's house had been spared from destruction because of its association with him, although it was commandeered for use as a hospital for wounded soldiers at which Walt Whitman would work as a nurse.

Also in , after spending more and more time away from his church advancing the abolitionist cause, and growing dissatisfied with the theological, liturgical, and social conservatism of mainstream Unitarianism, Conway left that denomination's ministry, and he maintained an uneasy and uncertain relationship with Unitarianism in America and subsequently in England until he and Ellen made a clean break.

In April , [ 2 ] fellow American abolitionists sent Conway to London to convince the United Kingdom that the American Civil War was primarily a war of abolition and to not support the Confederacy. Under English influence, Conway eventually contacted James Murray Mason , representative of the Confederate States of America to Britain "on behalf of the leading antislavery men of America," offering withdrawal of support for prosecution of the war in exchange for emancipation of the slaves.

Mason publicly rejected the overture, embarrassing Conway's sponsors, who quickly and angrily withdrew support. Seward , who could have caused revocation of his passport for attempting to speak as a private citizen for the US government. Rather than go back to America, where Conway no longer felt welcome as a suspected traitor to his childhood Virginia friends and neighbors and he paid someone to take his place after being drafted to serve in the Union army, Conway traveled to Italy.

There, he reunited with his wife and children in Venice before moving back to London. There, in , he became minister of the South Place Chapel serving in —65 and —97 as well as leader of the then named South Place Religious Society in Finsbury, London. Conway continued writing and publishing, including articles in both British and American magazines and traveled to Paris and even Russia.

Conway also abandoned theism after his son Emerson died in His thinking continued to move from Emersonian transcendentalism toward a more humanistic Freethought. He conducted funeral services for his friend Artemus Ward and preached memorial at memorial services for many other famous literary figures. The death of his wife and his own declining years in Paris close the work, which also tracks his ardent anti-war stance and the sad rejection of his long-standing faith in progress.

He was an American abolitionist, Unitarian clergyman, and author. He graduated from Dickinson College in , studied law for a year, and then became a Methodist minister in his native state. Conway's eloquent prose and thoughtful reflections make this autobiography a must-read for anyone interested in history, philosophy, or the human experience.

This first volume of his autobiography covers roughly the years of his birth through the end of the US Civil War. MP3 Download Download mp3 files for each chapter of this book in one zip file Wikipedia - Moncure D.