Curiously enough, no more memory is left to Fredericksburg of Archibald
McPherson than the tombstone under the mock orange tree in St. George's
Church, the tablets to his memory in the old charity school on Hanover
Street (now the Christian Science Church) and a few shadowy legends and
unmeaning dates.
He was born in Scotland and died in Fredericksburg in 1854. He was a
member of St. George's Church and vestry.
But what manner of man he was, the few recorded acts we know will convey
to every one. He established a Male Charity School with his own funds
principally, and took a deep interest in it, and, dying, he left the small
fortune he had accumulated by Scotch thrift "to the poor of the town," and
provided means of dispensing the interest on this sum for charity
throughout the years to come. Most of this fund was wiped out by
depreciation of money, etc., during the Civil War.
_Men of Modern Times_
_Soldiers, Adventurers and Sailors, Heroes and Artists, mingle here._
A prophet without honor in his own country was Moncure Daniel Conway
because, a Fredericksburger and a Southerner, he opposed slavery. But his
genius won him world praise, and later, honer in his own country.
Born in 1832, near Falmouth, to which village his people moved later, the
child of Walker Peyton Conway and Marguerite Daniel Conway he inherited
from a long line of ancestry, a brilliant intellect and fearlessness to
tread the paths of freedom.
The difficult studious child was too much for his teacher, Miss Gaskins,
of Falmouth, so he was sent, at the age of ten, to Fredericksburg
Classical and Mathematical Academy, originally John Marye's famous school,
and made rapid progress.
His hero was his great uncle, Judge R. C. L. Moncure, of Glencairne, and
his early memoirs are full of loving gratitude for the great man's
toleration and help. The Methodism of his parents did not hold him, for he
several times attended the services at St. George's Church.
The wrongs of slavery he saw, and after he entered Dickinson College, at
Carlisle, in his fifteenth year, he found an anti-slavery professor,
McClintock, who influenced him and encouraged his dawning agnosticism. His
cousin, John M. Daniel, editor of the Richmond Examiner, became, in 1848,
a leading factor in Conway's life, encouraging his literary efforts and
publishing many of his contributions.
All beauty, all art appealed to him. Music was always a passion, and we
also find constant and quaint references to beautiful women and girls. It
seemed the superlative compliment, though he valued feminine brains and
ability.
His great spiritual awakening came with his finding an article by Emerson
and at the age of twenty, to the delight of his family, he became a
Methodist minister.
His career as such was not a success. After one of his sermons, in which
he ignored Heaven and Hell, his father said: "One thing is certain, Monk,
should the Devil aim at a Methodist preacher, you'd be safe."
He moved to Cambridge. The prominence of his Southern family, and his own
social and intellectual charms gave him entre to the best homes and
chiefest among them, that of his adored Emerson, where he met and knew all
the great lights of the day. His slavery opinions, valuable as a Southern
slave owner's son, made him an asset in the anti-slavery propaganda of the
time.
[Sidenote: _Conway's Famous Friends_]
Among his friends were the Thoreaus, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Oliver Wendell
Holmes and Agassiz.
I must hurry over the charm of those college days to Moncure Conway's
first Unitarian Church, in Washington. So pronounced were his sermons on
anti-slavery that his father advised him not to come home on a visit. He
did come and had the humiliation of being ordered from Falmouth under pain
of tar and feathers, an indignity which cut him to his soul. His success
in Washington was brilliant, but he found trouble, owing to his
abolitionist opinions, and had to resign. In 1856 he accepted a call to a
Cincinnati church, whose literary and artistic circles made much of the
new preacher. The wealth of that larger population enabled Conway to
establish several charitable homes. He married there Ellen Davis Dana, and
there published his first book, "Tracts For Today." He edited a paper, The
Dial, to which Emerson contributed.
He went to England to the South Place Chapel, London, an ethical society,
and the round peg seemed to have found its proper hole at last. Here he
labored for twenty years, and became known through all Europe. His
personal recollections of Alfred Tennyson, the Brownings their courtship;
of Carlyle, are classics. A very interesting light is thrown on Freud. He
was intimate with the whole pre-Raphaelite school and gives account among
others of Rossetti and his lovely wife, all friendships he formed in Madam
Brown's charming home.
Burne Jones, Morris, Whistler, Swinburne, Arthur Hughs, DeMaurier (was
there ever such a collection of genius in one country) are all described
in Conway's vivid pen pictures. Artemus Warde was his friend, and Conway
conducted the funeral services over that world's joy giver, and in his
same South End Chapel, preached memorial addresses on Cobblen, Dickens,
Maurice, Mazzanni, Mill, Straus, Livingstone, George Eliot, Stanley,
Darwin, Longfellow, Carlyle, the beloved Emerson, Tennyson, Huxley and Abe
Lincoln, whom he never admired, though he recognized his brain and
personality. He accused him of precipitating the horrible war for the sake
of a flag and thus murdering a million men.
Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) and his wife visited England in 1872 and
Moncure Conway and his wife knew them intimately and afterwards visited
them in this country. Joseph Jefferson, John Motley, George Eliot, Mrs.
Humphrey Ward (whose book, Robert Elsmere, he flays) and W. S. Gilbert,
all were his friends. The man was a genius, a social Voltaire; a master of
thought and phrase. Where before did an exile from his own country ever
achieve a friendship circle where the names now scintillate over all the
world?
[Sidenote: _He Travels Through Russia_]
He visited Paris in 1867 and the story of his travels in Russia later are
full of charm, of folk lore and religious mysticism. But before long we
find him back in his South Place Chapel. His accounts of several woman
preachers there are interesting, as is that of Annie Besant--the wondrous
before-her-time--whom Mrs. Conway befriended in her bitter persecution by
her parson husband for agnosticism. In 1875 Conway returned to America,
and Falmouth town, grieving over the war ravages and his lost boyhood
friends. He toured through the West, lecturing on Demonology, and the
great Englishmen he knew. The death of his son, Dana, and of his wife in
1897, were blows, and his remaining years were spent in Europe with
several visits between to his brother, Peter V. D. Conway, of
Fredericksburg, and friends in America. His life ended in 1907 in Paris. A
great man, a brilliant and a brave one. He fought for his beliefs as
bravely as ever did any warrior or explorer in unknown lands.
[Illustration: BEAUTIFUL "BELMONT"
_On Falmouth Heights, Now the Home of Mr. and Mrs. Gari Melchers_]
[Sidenote: _A Great American Artist_]