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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