Mr. Letcher was strongly imbued with that conviction which had dominated the best minds of Virginia from colonial days, that slavery was a curse to be got rid of and not at all an institution to be defended upon its merits. He had publicly urged the necessity of getting rid of it. He had explained to his fellow Virginians, in public utterances, its demoralizing influence upon the young white men of that commonwealth. Finally, so eager was he to rid his native state of the incubus that he deliberately proposed the one thing most offensive to the Virginian mind, namely, the division of the "Old Dominion" into two states in order that the western half of it at least might be free from slavery. When he stood as a candidate for governor in the last election before the war, all these facts were used against him to the utmost by the advocates of slavery and they undoubtedly deprived him of many thousands of votes east of the Alleghenies. The first returns indicated the election of his adversary, William L. Goggin, by an overwhelming majority. But when the figures came in from the western part of the state, where slavery scarcely at all survived, John Letcher was elected. Thus the anti-slavery sentiment gave to the foremost state of the Southern Confederacy its singularly earnest and efficient war governor. But side by side with this anti-slavery sentiment in the South, there grew up a pro-slavery sentiment which was buttressed by every impulse of gain that it is possible for the human mind to conceive. Near the end of the eighteenth century, Eli Whitney made slavery enormously profitable by his invention of the cotton-gin. Before that time slavery had been of more than doubtful profit to the people of the states that permitted it. It was not at all an economical labor system. It required the master to give to the laborer, in lieu of wages, such food, habitation, clothing, nursing in illness and care in infancy and old age, as no laboring population in the world has ever before or since received in return for its labor. It involved pension as well as payment. It imposed upon the employer obligations such as no employer in all the world, before or since, has been willing to assume. But Eli Whitney's invention of the cotton-gin made the payment of such wages possible and profitable. It made it possible for a plantation owner to grow rich while feeding, housing, clothing and caring for his negroes as no other employer has fed, housed, clothed and cared for his working people since the foundations of the world were laid.