Moncure Daniel Conway (March 17, 1832 - November 15, 1907) was an American abolitionist as well as at various times a Methodist, Unitarian and Freethought minister. The radical writer descended from patriotic and patrician families of Virginia and Maryland spent most of the final four decades of his life abroad in England and France, where he wrote biographies of Edmund Randolph, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Thomas Paine, as well as his own autobiography, and led freethinkers in London's South Place Chapel Conway was born in Falmouth, Stafford County, Virginia, to parents descended from the First Families of Virginia.[2] His father Walter Peyton Conway was a wealthy slave-holding gentleman farmer, county judge and state representative, whose home, known as the Conway House, still stands at 305 King Street (a.k.a. River Road) along the Rappahannock River.[3] Conway's mother Margaret Stone Daniel Conway was the granddaughter of Thomas Stone of Maryland (a signer of the Declaration of Independence), and in addition to running the household, also practiced homeopathy learned from her doctor father. Both parents were Methodists, his father having left the Episcopal church

An appeal for the immediate abolition of slavery.

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In Fighting for the Higher Law, Peter Wirzbicki explores how important black abolitionists joined famous Transcendentalists to create a political philosophy that fired the radical struggle against American slavery. In the cauldron of the antislavery movement, antislavery activists, such as William C. Nell, Thomas Sidney, and Charlotte Forten, and Transcendentalist intellectuals, including Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, developed a "Higher Law" ethos, a unique set of romantic political sensibilities—marked by moral enthusiasms, democratic idealism, and a vision of the self that could judge political questions from "higher" standards of morality and reason. The Transcendentalism that emerges here is not simply the dreamy philosophy of privileged white New Englanders, but a more populist movement, one that encouraged an uncompromising form of politics among a wide range of Northerners, black as well as white, working-class as well as wealthy. Invented to fight slavery, it would influence later labor, feminist, civil rights, and environmentalist activism. African American thinkers and activists have long engaged with American Transcendentalist ideas about "double consciousness," nonconformity, and civil disobedience. When thinkers like Martin Luther King, Jr., or W. E. B. Du Bois invoked Transcendentalist ideas, they were putting to use an intellectual movement that black radicals had participated in since the 1830s.