Eustace Conway (17 September 1820– 20 May 1857), member of the Convention of 1850– 1851, was born in Stafford County and was the son of John Moncure Conway, longtime county clerk, and Catherine Storke Peyton Conway. His nephew Moncure Daniel Conway became an expatriate Virginia writer, reformer, and abolitionist. Remembered by contemporaries as dark and handsome, Eustace Conway read law in Stafford County with his brother-in-law Richard Cassius Lee Moncure, later a member of the Convention of 1850– 1851 and president of the Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals, and by January 1843 he was practicing law in Fredericksburg. He enjoyed a successful legal career and in 1850 owned four taxable slaves and two town lots valued at $4,900. On 27 June 1842 Conway executed a marriage bond in Northumberland County and on that date or soon thereafter married Maria Tayloe Tomlin. They had three sons (one of them born after Conway's death) and two daughters, and at the time of his death he was also the guardian of two young male kinsmen.
House of Delegates
Conway served as secretary of a Fredericksburg meeting in April 1841 to mark the death of William Henry Harrison and may have had Whig leanings at the beginning of his political career, but he became an ardent Democrat. In 1847 he won election to the first of three consecutive one-year terms representing Spotsylvania County in the House of Delegates. During the 1847– 1848 session Conway served on the Committees of Privileges and Elections and of Schools and Colleges, and during the 1848– 1849 session he sat on the Committee of Roads and Internal Navigation and chaired the Committee on the Banks of the Commonwealth.
During Conway's second term, sectional divisions deepened as Congress debated whether to exclude slavery from the territories the United States had acquired during the Mexican War. In response to the Wilmot Proviso, an unsuccessful amendment twice introduced in Congress that would have barred slavery from the Mexican Cession, Conway moved that the General Assembly declare that Congress had no power to legislate respecting slavery, that the territories belonged equally to all the states, that citizens could not be prevented from immigrating there with their chattel property, and that the southern states would view any attempt by Congress to abolish slavery or the slave trade in the District of Columbia as a direct attack. After a select committee of which Conway was a member amended and reported his resolutions, he defended them on 13 January 1849 in a speech in the House of Delegates. Arguing that southerners were entitled to equal protection under the Constitution, he declared that Congress could not prohibit masters from taking their slaves into the territories "any more than they can exclude the Yankee with his wooden clocks, nutmegs or other traps." Conway's resolutions passed the House seven days later by a 117 to 13 vote.
Conway maintained his high profile during the revision of the Code of Virginia that summer. He served on one conference committee and chaired another to hammer out differences between the House and Senate. As floor manager he moved several sections of the Code revision through the House. Conway's role in modifying the judicial sections of the Code earned him a place on the Committee for Courts of Justice during the 1849– 1850 session.
Convention of 1850– 1851
Campaigning on the regular Democratic ticket in August 1850, Conway finished third of eleven candidates vying for five seats representing the district of Caroline, Hanover, King William, and Spotsylvania Counties at a convention that met from 14 October 1850 until 1 August 1851 to revise the state constitution. He served on the important Committee on the Basis and Apportionment of Representation. Conway supported some reforms, such as popular election of the governor and allowing the governor to seek a second term, but opposed two key reforms advocated by western delegates to extend the suffrage to all white males regardless of property qualifications and to reapportion the General Assembly. His opposition derived from his Calhounite belief that the highest goal of government was to secure individual rights and protect the minority from the tyranny of the majority. Conway missed thirty-two days of the convention and did not vote in the committee of the whole on 16 May 1851 on a key compromise on reapportionment of the legislature that shifted the balance of power away from slaveholding easterners. He opposed the legislative compromise on 21 May and on 31 July voted with the minority against the final version of the constitution, which won ratification later that year.
Later Career
In 1852 Conway attended the Democratic National Convention in Baltimore. Some insiders credited him with suggesting to the Virginia delegation the name of Franklin Pierce, ultimately the successful candidate, after the thirty-fourth ballot. That November, Conway chaired a committee that invited James Buchanan to Fredericksburg to celebrate the Democratic victory. He also attended the 1856 Democratic National Convention in Cincinnati.
Conway lost a bid for election to the Fredericksburg city council in March 1855 when the American (Know Nothing) Party swept all twelve council seats, although he received the most votes of any Democrat in the race. Often a member of local groups that promoted the city's economic development, Conway was a director of the Fredericksburg Water Power Company in 1854 and president of the city's branch of the Bank of Virginia from 1854 until his resignation early in 1857. In 1849 he began several years of service on the board of visitors of the College of William and Mary. At age fourteen Conway had experienced religious conversion at a Prince William County camp meeting. Later he taught the Sabbath school at Fredericksburg's Methodist Episcopal church for many years. In 1850 he chaired the building committee for the erection of a new church. Also a leader of the Young Men's Christian Association of Fredericksburg, Conway bequeathed that organization $20 per annum for five years to help educate the town's indigent male youths.
On 19 February 1857 Conway won election over five other declared candidates to succeed John Tayloe Lomax as judge of the Eighth Judicial Circuit, comprising the counties of Caroline, Essex, Hanover, King and Queen, King George, King William, Lancaster, Northumberland, Richmond, Spotsylvania, and Westmoreland. Within weeks of holding his first court in Caroline County on 2 March, he began to suffer from an excruciating and disfiguring soft cancer in his left cheek. Treatment in Baltimore, which may have included removal of a portion of his upper jaw, did not alleviate the condition, and Eustace Conway died at his Fredericksburg home on 20 May 1857. He was buried in Fredericksburg City Cemetery and honored within the month by a lithographic portrait, engraved by the artist John Adams Elder and sold in local stores for $1 each.
Sources Consulted:
Birth date on gravestone; biographies by nephew Peter Vivian Daniel Conway in Fredericksburg Daily Star, 26 July 1899 (with birth dates of 14 and 17 Sept. 1820), and in Fredericksburg Free Lance, 1 Aug. 1899 (with birth date of 17 Sept. 1820), by L. S. Marye in Fredericksburg Daily Star, 14 Sept. 1915, and in W. Preston Haynie, "Portraits in the Courts Building: A Link to the Past," Bulletin of the Northumberland County Historical Society 39 (2002): 33–34 (portrait); variant birth date of 19 Sept. 1820 in S. Bassett French MS Biographical Sketches, Accession 21332, Library of Virginia, and in S. Bassett French Papers II, Swem Library, College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Va., copied in most secondary sources; Northumberland Co. Marriage Bonds; Journal of the House of Delegates of the Commonwealth of Virginia, 1848–1849 sess., esp. 136–138, 140, 171–175, and appended Doc. 43; Remarks of Mr. Conway, of Spottsylvania, on the Subject of Slavery in the Territories and in the District of Columbia, in Reply to Mr. Scott, of Fauquier, Made on the 13th January, 1849 (1849), quotation on 12; Richmond Enquirer, 27 Aug., 3 Sept., 13 Sept. 1850; Register of the Debates and Proceedings of the Va. Reform Convention (1851), 178–179; Journal, Acts, and Proceedings of a General Convention of the State of Virginia [1851], 227, 419; Supplement, 1850–1851 Convention Debates, no. 16; Fredericksburg Virginia Herald, 22 Mar., 3 May 1855; Fredericksburg News, 25 Dec. 1856, 23, 26 Feb. 1857; Fredericksburg Weekly Advertiser and Chronicle of the Times, 28 Feb., 7 Mar., 15 Aug. 1857; will and estate accounts in Fredericksburg Corporation Court Will Book, F:261–263, 384–403; obituaries in Daily Richmond Enquirer (reprinting in part no longer extant Fredericksburg Democratic Recorder, 20 May 1857) and Richmond Daily Dispatch, both 22 May 1857; obituaries and memorial resolutions in Fredericksburg Weekly Advertiser and Chronicle of the Times, 23 (with birth date of 15 Sept. 1820), 30 May 1857, and Fredericksburg News, 25 May 1857.
Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by Sara B. Bearss.
How to cite this page:
Sara B. Bearss,"Eustace Conway (17 September 1820– 20 May 1857)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2006 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Conway_Eustace, accessed [today's date]).
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