Author Description

By his thirty-third birthday, Moncure Conway was a Virginian who had abandoned the South, a minister who had rejected Christianity, an aristocrat who had embraced radical abolitionism and feminism, and one of the first American expatriates. He would live another forty-two years as an important transatlantic writer, reformer, and freethought minister, but in his American years he had already lived a lifetime and made his mark. This study of the antebellum South's most radical upper-class white male, whose life--until now--has eluded capture by historians, illuminates the demands of the antebellum Southern gentry, the nature of the abolitionist movement, the boundaries of 19th-century organized Christianity, and the tragic personal impact of the American Civil War. D'Entremont recounts Conway's dramatic career as social reformer, religious radical, and associate of such luminaries as Emerson, Wendell Phillips, Theodore Parker, Walt Whitman, and William Dean Howells. The book climaxes with the Civil War, which saw Conway, an abolitionist with two brothers in the Confederate army, agonized by his conflicting commitments to emancipation and peace. A brilliant portrayal of one of the most intriguing public figures in American history, Southern Emancipator combines important contributions to Southern history, women's history, and the history of antebellum reform and the American Civil War.