Moncure Daniel Conway (1832–1907)—whom Clemens may have first met the previous evening—was born in Virginia and raised as a Methodist. He graduated from Dickinson College at age seventeen, and served for a time as a Methodist preacher. He soon rejected Methodism, however, and entered Harvard Divinity School, becoming pastor of the Unitarian Church in Washington upon graduation. Dismissed because of his antislavery views, he was next called to the First Congregational Church in Cincinnati. While in Ohio he wrote for several periodicals, and edited The Dial, A Monthly Magazine for Literature, Philosophy, and Religion. He then moved to Concord, Massachusetts, where he edited the Commonwealth, an antislavery newspaper. Shortly after traveling to England in 1863 to lecture for the Northern cause, he accepted the pastorate of South Place Chapel in Finsbury, a London suburb. Conway continued to write for various magazines and newspapers, and in 1870 published The Earthward Pilgrimage (London: John Camden Hotten). Since 1870 his correspondence for the Cincinnati Commercial, on virtually all topics of current interest—politics, the arts and sciences, fashionable events—had earned him a wide reputation as a journalist (Burtis, 129–30, 246).

In this paraphrased “post card,” almost certainly written on Sunday, 22 September, Clemens explained that he was sending an eleven-page draft of his speech of 21 September at the Savage Club, presumably in response to a request from Conway. He made a few revisions in his manuscript and enclosed it with the next letter, of the same date.