Henry Clay studied law under Virginia's great chancellor, George Wythe. From his distinguished Virginian teacher he learned the lesson that slavery--forced upon an unwilling people in the Southern part of this country by kingly and corporate greed, and still further forced upon those regions by the greed of merchants and shipmasters, even after the traffic that fed it had been prohibited by the Constitution and by the law--was an evil and a curse, a wrong to the black man and a demoralizing influence to the white. He saw clearly that it was the task of all good men to exterminate that evil root and branch, by such means as might be found available, without the destruction of society as a necessary incident or consequence. In the young state of Kentucky Henry Clay began his political career as an advocate of rational and gradual emancipation, and to his dying day--involved as he was in all the strenuous controversies to which the slavery issue gave rise in national politics--he never lost his interest in this behalf or abated his efforts to secure its accomplishment. A plea for the extermination of slavery was the first plea he ever presented to the people whom he asked to support him for public office. A plea for the extirpation of slavery was well-nigh the last that he ever urged upon the people of his state after all that was possible of honor had been conferred upon him by their approving will. So enduring was this sentiment at the South that John Letcher, the Democratic war governor of Virginia, the man who set Lee to organize the state's forces for the Confederate war, the man who created the Army of Northern Virginia and made possible all its splendid achievements, was in fact elected governor because of his abolitionist sentiments.