Moncure Conway (American National Biography)

The Civil War found Conway's pro-Union sister and mother in Pennsylvania, his pro-Confederate father in Richmond, and his two brothers in the Confederate army. He supported the Union on the condition that President Abraham Lincoln show progress toward a policy of emancipation. His views were expounded in two powerful propagandistic books, The Rejected Stone (1861) and The Golden Hour (1862), prompting Boston abolitionists to make him coeditor of a new antislavery weekly, The Commonwealth. Just before moving to Massachusetts in September 1862, Conway rendezvoused in Washington, D.C., with thirty-three slaves newly escaped from his father, and resettled them in Ohio. This, and subsequently the Emancipation Proclamation, raised his spirits momentarily, but increasingly the war anguished and depressed him. With his family divided, his boyhood haunts the scenes of savage fighting, and nationwide emancipation not fully achieved, Conway determined to leave the country. He did so in April 1863 on the pretext of making a speaking tour in England. Shortly thereafter, he sent for his family. He would live in London for the next twenty-two years.