Virginia's Reluctant Secession

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References
VIRGINIA’S RELUCTANT SECESSION
Volume 5, Issue Number 4 (May, 2002) of North & South Magazine (pages 80-89) article w the same title

In trying to protect slavery, the secessionists doomed it.

TO DESERVE THAT HIGH PRAISE, a tale must exude four qualities. The story must be sweepingly important. It must star vivid actors. It must illuminate rich complexities. And it must convey stunning ironies that highlight erring humans' capacity to achieve the reverse of what they intended.​
The order of secession correlates very well with the percentage of slaves.

Of these four requirements-wide importance, vivid stars, rich subtleties, stunning ironies-the importance of Virginia's decision to secede is the most obvious. At 4:00 p.m. on April 17, 1861, the hour of Virginia's decision-an hour haunted by months of paralyzing indecision-the very size of the Southern Confederacy remained uncertain. Eight of fifteen slave states remained in the Union. More than ever at this climactic moment, the differences between southern regions provided the neglected key to the history of the Old South. More than ever in 1860-61 , the Slave South resembled a three-step ladder, with lower percentages of slaves and less enthusiasm for disunion accompanying each step northward. Farthest South lay the Lower or Deep or Cotton South, with 46.5 per- cent of its population enslaved. These seven Lower South states all seceded between Abraham Lincoln's election on November 6-7, 1860, and his inauguration as president on March 4, 1861. Above the Lower South sprawled the four Middle South states (including Virginia), with 31.7 percent of the population enslaved. Still higher lay the four states of the Border South, with only 12.7 percent of the population enslaved.​

Source
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@Pat Young has a graphic here

The Border and Middle Souths together formed the Upper South. No Upper South state had seceded as of April 16, six weeks after Lincoln took the oath of office. The Upper South contained 41 percent of the South's slaves,61 percent of its population,67 percent of its whites, and 81 percent of its factories. |ames McPherson has put it very well: "if all eight states" of the Upper South "had seceded, the South might well have won its independence. If all eight had remained in the Union, the Confederacy surely could not have survived as long as it did."1​
1. James M. McPherson, Battle Cry For Freedom: The Civil War Era (NewYork, 1988)' p.306.

 
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