ENPages That Mention University of Virginia
Draft of Letter to U. S. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, 6 May 1865
Copy to Secy Stanton
University of Va May 6. 1865.
Sir,
The name subscribed to this letter was not unfamiliar to you, where thirty three years ago, we were fellow-students at College. If you retain any recollection of him who bears it you may perhaps, be not {be} disinclined to read what follows.
And I beg [?] to say say at the outset that I have no favors to ask for myself personally, wish only to present to you, as a cabinet minister, the view which I take from my stand-point, of that which concerns what I must now call our Common Country.
I trust that I do my old school-fellow simple justice when I assume that he had no resentments to gratify, nor passions to indulge in the exercise of the functions of his high place, and that he [w]ould be sincerely gratified to be an agent in the hands of Providence, in restoring permanent peace to this distracted Country, and establishing {in} the Union once more on a stable basis of mutual confidence, and good-will.
That the people of Virginia would voluntarily & spontaneously return to the Federal Union had they a free choice, is too much to be affirmed, They abandoned it four years ago with infinite pain, upon connections of political duty, but with the expec[tation?] that the sepa