NAWSA GENERAL CORRESPONDENCE Miller, Leo

Rushford, N.Y. June 19, 1874
Henry B. Blackwell Esq.
Dear Sir: Your postal
card note is received; & judging from its spirit
as well the letter, you evidently think I have
intentionally appropriated the ideas of your
campaign speech. If you can afford
to make such an accusation I certainly
can afford to [bear?] it. I never liked
a quarrel & we shall have none over
this. But a few words of explanation.
You say you expressed these ideas all
through the Woman Suffrage Campaign in
Kansas & at the "various" meetings we
attended together in Vt. Your Kansas
speeches may have been reported, but
I never saw one if they were: I was
not interested in the question at that time.
As the "various" meetings we attended
together, they amount to just two, no more - 
at Brattleboro & St. Johnsburry. At
those meetings you made [no] several
short, ten- or fifteen-minute speeches, but
no "set speech," as they are called, though
Mrs. Stone did at both places.
Now it is very possible you uttered
these ideas on these two occasions, & they
passed into my mind like hundreds of other
things we read & hear; & when some two
years after I sat down in my room to write
a lecture on Woman's Political Rights, these
ideas with other may have found expression;
but I never dreamed at the time that I was
[*Leo Miller Rushford NY On June 24 / 74*]


writing out anything I had ever heard
you utter, & yet I admit that I might
have heard you advance similar ideas.
You wonder why I should have written
you on the subject at all. It was because
I wanted to be fair, & honorable, & do as
I would be done by. Till I saw your
published speech, I had not the remotest
thought but what the ideas, or rather the application
of them, were [??] original with me.
If there is anything I pride myself on it
is in being original, [??] in giving the public something
new. It was for this reason that I
had hesitated till within the last two months about
including in my forthcoming work anything on the
question of Woman's Rights, because so much
had been said on that subject; & I have
returned to my first impression & shall
leave it [??] out altogether. As a matter of
courtesy, I recognize your prior claim even if
you have no "copyright," & if I made use
of any of your thoughts I did it unconsciously.
As to its being almost "verbatim" like your own, that
I am sure, cannot be. I hope soon to get access to
a file of the journal so as to make a comparison with your
reported speech. Both writing on the same
subject - the history of governmental development - 
[the] [we] the use of certain words in the description
is unavoidable; & that is probably all [that]
that a comparison will show.
With many wishes for the success
of your noble efforts. I am 
Respectfully Yours
Leo Miller
[*Leo Miller?*]

Transcribed and reviewed by contributors participating in the By The People project at crowd.loc.gov.