Message from Secretary of State Edwin M. Stanton to Lieutenant-General Ulysses S. Grant
Washington, March 3, 1865—12 p.m.
Lieutenant-General Grant:
The President directs me to say to you that he wishes you to have no conference with General Lee unless it be for the capitulation of General Lee's army or on some minor and purely military matter. He instructs me to say that you are not to decide, discuss, or confer upon any political question. Such questions the President holds in his own hands and will submit them to no military conferences or conventions. Meantime you are to press to the utmost your military advantages.
EDWIN M. STANTON,
Secretary of War.
Source: Messages and Papers of the Presidents, 1789-1897, Volume X, James D. Richardson, ed., p 111.
[From McPherson's History of Reconstruction, p. 122.]
Abraham Lincoln, Message from Secretary of State Edwin M. Stanton to Lieutenant-General Ulysses S. Grant Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/379191