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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
tion should be final. The fortune of war, however, having proved inauspicious, they are prepared, I believe, to submit to what seems to be the will of God, and to return {in good faith} unreservedly, to the connection which they had observed, and henceforth "truth & faith to bear of life & limb and terrene honour," to the U States. This is, I confidently believe, the present disposition of the great body of the citizens of Virga, & I doubt not of the other states of the South also, although I am not in a condition to judge of the public sentiment elsewhere; Nor {They are} does any reservation [ ] in this purpose, to bide our time to feed fat an ancient grudge, or to devise schemes, to be executed at formable conjunctures, against the integrity of the restored Union, which is in honesty designed to maintain inviolate as far as depends on us, henceforth forever. By the failure of the war & the capitulation of our armies, our past grief are in the deep bosom of the [ ] buried?
We are in no condition to prepare, much less to exact terms, from the very nature of war, which you cannot ignore, [were we [change?], it is implied, {that} in order that we should become attached anew, or that our old & ardent attachment to the Union & the Constitution shd be revived, that we must experience & share in its blessings. If we are no permitted to participate -(and by that I mean if the bulk of the people are no permitted to participate,- for it is immaterial comparatively what may happen to me or to any other individuals-, if we are not permitted to participate in the {blessings} advantages of Union, and of Constitutional liberty, - it would tend only to [ ] [mis]erable delusion, for us to promise, or for you to expect that we should remain quiet longer than we {were} are constrained by incaistble force. We are Anglo-Saxons, like yourselves, and you have only to consider what you would do under like circumstances, in order to foreshadow the actions of our people. How the liberties of the South would survive, tied then to the dead cause of {a} disfranchisement in one third of the people of the Country, may well lead a {Northern} Statesman to pause, ere he converts [?],000,000 of a free-born & high-spirited race from ailling citizens, into soured surfs, always watching for occasions of convulsions & strife.