He was a conservative example of that class of border State Democrats who were blinded to all interests except those of slavery.
The true wealth of Virginia, in addition to her agriculture and in aid of it, lay in her vast deposits of coal and iron, in her extensive forests, in her unsurpassed water power.

Her natural resources were beyond computation, and suggested for her a great career as a commercial and manufacturing State.

Her rivers on the eastern slope connected her interior with the largest and finest harbor on the Atlantic coast of North America, and her jurisdiction extended over an empire beyond the Alleghanies.

Her climate was salubrious, and so temperate as to forbid the plea always used in justification of negro slavery in the Cotton States, that the white man could not perform agricultural labor.

A recognition of Virginia's true destiny would point to Northern alliances and Northern sympathies.