The New York Times, November 17, 1907. PAGE NUMBER 19
Author Suddenly Passes Away in Paris from an Internal Hemorrhage.
HIS CAREER REMARKABLE
Took Both Sides on Slavery and Embraced Three Faiths — His Body to be Cremated.
PARIS, Nov. 16. — The Rev. Dr. Moncure D. Conway, the distinguished American author, died here last night. He had come here several weeks ago, after a visit to Andrew Carnegie at Skibo Castle, had taken a modest apartment on the Rue Villedo, and intended to sail for the United States to-day. He had been ailing for several days, but the physicians who were called in attributed his illness principally to his advanced age. He was found dead in bed, and the physicians said he had died from an internal hemorrhage. The cause of it has not been established.
Dr. Conway’s friends in Paris have taken charge of the body. In accordance with the request of his relatives in America it will be cremated Monday at Père La Chaise Cemetery.
Moncure Daniel Conway, the Unitarian minister and writer, was born in Stafford County, Va., March 17, 1832. His father was a prominent politician of Virginia. He was educated at the schools in Fredericksburg, Va., and at Dickinson College, Pennsylvania, from which institution he was graduated in 1849. After studying law, he became a writer for The Richmond Examiner, taking an extreme Southern view on all questions.
Mr. Conway then entered the Methodist ministry. Soon thereafter he came under the influence of a settlement of Quakers and entered the Divinity School at Cambridge, Mass. He was graduated in 1854, and returned to the South with changed views regarding slavery. A little later, on learning of the mob murder of a free negro named Grayson at Culpeper Court House, he characterized it as something that would read better among the records of the Spanish Inquisition than in the full light of the nineteenth century.
When he returned to Falmouth he was obliged to leave because he befriended a fugitive slave, and went to Washington, where he became the pastor of the Unitarian Church, from which pastorate he was dismissed on account of his radical anti-slavery discourses. He next went to Cincinnati as pastor of the Unitarian Church there. In Ohio he continued his anti-slavery sermons. After a short time in Boston, in 1863 Mr. Conway went to England to speak for the Northern cause, and in less than a year he had become the pastor of South Place Chapel, London, where he remained until 1884, when he returned to the United States. While in London he contributed to the leading British and American magazines, as well as to several of the best known of the London daily newspapers.
Mr. Conway became a warm admirer and friend of Abraham Lincoln, and left many interesting reminiscences of that friendship. He wrote many books, among the best known being the “Pilgrimage to India,” published in 1907; “The Earthward Pilgrimage,” “Idols and Ideals,” “Demonology and Devil Lore,” “The Wandering Jew,” “The Sacred Anthology,” “George Washington and Mount Vernon,” “Lives of Edmund Randolph, Thomas Paine,” and works on Emerson, Hawthorne, and Thomas Carlyle; “Barons of the Potomac and Rappahannock,” “Emerson at Home and Abroad,” “Pine and Palm,” “Prisons of Air,” “Republican Superstitions,” “Solomon and Solomonic Literature,” and his autobiography.
He was a member of several learned societies in London, lectured occasionally at the Royal Institute, and in New York was a member of the Savile, Omar Khayyam, New Vagabonds, Savage, Century, and Authors’ Clubs.