The Golden Hour (1862) by Moncure D. Conway (Original Classics)

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