My greatest loyalty is to Virginia,to my home

[Southern Son]

I don't know, if Robert E.Lee really said this sentence.But when i read about the war between the states, i find out that a lot of people give their loyalty to the state where they were born.E.g. Virginia,Pennsylvania,Ohio and so on.
So they fight for their state and they 'didn't care' if it was for the Union or the Confederate.
Why was it so?Was or is the loyality to your 'Home State' higher than to the United States of America?

[gary]

Back in the 19th Century, folks identified with their states and national identity was secondary. Thus Lee's remark was not so unremarkable. Today most Americans couldn't imagine fighting for their state against another. Many folks are transitory and we've a lot of transplanted New Yorkers, East Coast and Midwesterners here. Knowing full well that I, a Californian, could stand to be accused of being a Quisling, I'd still welcome an invasion from Nevada with open arms.

[whitworth]

It's perhaps a vexing problem to understand, especially any American under 40 years of age.
Many people in the 1850's had never travelled beyond their state, perhaps not even outside their county in that state. In most ways their state was their country, as they were so isolated from the rest of the country.
In the age before radio and television, life was different. Hard sometimes for people who don't remember life without television and radio. Radio changed America from what it was. Television changed America from what it was, even more.

As for R.E. Lee, I'll never quite grasp his thinking. He served in the U.S. Army for over thirty years. He went to school in New York state. Lee served in the north, the south and the southwest. He was more exposed to life outside Virginia, but in the end he was no different than the uneducated Confederate private who came off a small farm in Buckingham County, Virginia.

Lee never questioned his loyalty to Virginia. He never questioned publicly the ability of Virginia to wage war.
When he accepted command of Virginia forces, after his resignation, did he know that Virginia could not defend its western counties. As a experienced military officer, did he just accept that Virginia would have a difficult time maintaining its borders? Did Lee not believe that war would come? Was his political philosophy such, that he could not grasp how the federal government could raise funds to support armies all through the south? Certainly most of the founding fathers of the Confederacy did not. And many had been U.S. Senators, U.S. Representatives, one President, and two who were U.S. Secretaries of War.
It is intriguing to me that Virginia would secede, seemingly not realizing the price it would pay for bordering Ohio, Pennsylvania and Washington, D.C.

[unicornforge]

Lee's letters to his family emphasized his feeling of responsiblity to protect Virginia from the invasion of Federal forces. His letters seem to indicate an understanding of the risks and that his only hope was that the war would become too expensive in money and northern lives so that northerners would insist on withdrawing from the war. Lee's strategy was futher expressed by his incursion into Pennsylvania that cumulated in the battle at Gettysburge. That was to try to make the war too pricy for northern citizenry.

Most of the south was perhaps not as realistic as Lee, by seeming to believe that the north lacked the will to fight a perlonged war with the south.