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Sure the South fought hard to keep it, but that was becuase their entire economy was built on it.
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I don't think you can claim the entire economy was based on it when
75% did not own slaves.
And I've heard that if you read many of the letters written by Rebel soldiers, most felt that they were fighting for their homeland and to repel the "invaders".
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Sure, it wasn't their ENTIRE economy, I was exaggerating. You would agree that the Southern economy was primarily agricultural based at the time slavery was abolished? Also, without slavery southern agriculture wouldn't have been close to what it was then.
If we go by soldier's sentiments to find the reasons wars were fought, then the current war should be judged much differently than it currently is.
The point I was trying to get at is that it's not like Virginia, or any other state, "revolutionized" slavery and made it magnitudes worse of a thing than it had been for the thousands of years it has been in existance. It bothers me that, so often people act like we were the only people in the history of the world that had slaves. As bad as the institution of slavery was in retrospect, at the time our country was founded slavery was not looked at in the same light. To condem our ancestors for utilizing an institution that had not been determined to be wholly wrong at the time they were using it seems completely ridiculous to me. Far worse, to me, is the way we treated black people after slavery was abolished and that is where the focus should be placed not on the fact that we used slavery.