When Lincoln was elected President in 1860 South Carolina seceded almost immediately, followed in rapid sequence by Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Florida and Louisiana. Texas followed during early 1861, with Governor Sam Houston resisting. Then the waves of secession (then called "disunion") stopped. Lincoln was inaugurated March 4, 1861. Virginia didn't secede till April 17, 1861, after the first shots were fired at Fort Sumter, and Lincoln announced a token muster of Virginia troops.
Lincoln called on Virginia, along with all other states, to supply 75,000 troops for the suppression of "combinations too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings". No particular quota was assigned to any individual state. Virginia, as one of larger states, would be expected to provide between 5,000 and 10,000 men, which is lot more than a "token muster".
It was a very open question whether Virginia, then considered a Border State...
Kudos for noticing this. Virginia had a long border with the free states of Pennsylvania and Ohio.
... would secede. Indeed a chunk of the state now known as West Virginia, and the part on the Delmarva Peninsula did not join the rest of the state in disuniting from the Union.
The fate of Accomack County (Virginia's "Eastern Shore") is obscure. I have seen a passing mention of a Union division being earmarked for an expedition to "clean out" this area in 1862 (but diverted to some other task, the actual subject of the passage). This would imply that Accomack adhered to the secession government in Richmond. Of course, since Chesapeake Bay was controlled by the Union Navy, Accomack was completely isolated, and could not participate in the Confederate war effort in any way.
I happen to believe that had Virginia (followed shortly by other border states such as North Carolina and Tennessee and yes I know Arkansas also seceded late but different situation)
...
North Carolina and Tennessee are considered Upper South states, not border states, as they had no border contact with any free state.
not seceded the crisis may well have gone the way of South Carolina's nullification crisis. Virginia was likely pushed to secede by the reality that the remaining Union might have abolished slavery with the Cotton States out of the Senate.
Virginia, and the rest of the Upper South, were divided between unconditional Unionists, conditional Unionists, and secessionists. The conditional Unionists opposed secession,
provided the slavery-related issues were resolved on terms acceptable to the South (including the Deep South). Even after the Deep South states had declared secession, the conditional Unionists still believed such a "compromise" was possible. Surely the Yankees would come to their senses, and yield to the
entirely reasonable Southern position. (And surely their excitable neighbors to the South would accept this and rescind secession.)
Thus in January to March 1861, there was a majority opposed to secession in the Upper South. The leaders of this faction worked quite hard in places to prevent immediate secession. For instance, US Representative Robert Hatton of Tennessee used his Congressional franking privilege to mail thousands of anti-secession pamphlets to Tennesseeans, to help defeat a referendum on holding a secession convention.
But their position was built on delusion. Lincoln was not going to concede anything. He had already stated his position that he had no power and therefore no inclination to interfere with slavery in any state. I believe that he felt this should be enough for the South.
And the Deep South had no intention of rescinding secession, regardless of what the Republicans did (short of resigning en masse, perhaps). The Fire-Eaters had persuaded a dominant plurality of Deep South whites that Republican control of the Federal government was an intolerable threat.
So the crisis was going to come down to force, eventually. And in that case, the conditional Unionists would turn and support secession. For instance, Rep. Hatton became a brigadier general in the Confederate Army. Virginia had already stated what it would do. In January, the Virginia legislature passed a resolution calling for a peaceful resolution of the slavery issues. The resolution also stated that if the issues were not settled peacefully (and therefore on terms acceptable to the South), Virginia would "join her sister Southern states".
The already seceded states, as of the beginning of April 1861 were South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas. All of those states were deeply impoverished.
Hardly. While cotton prices had been depressed in the last year or two, the wealth accumulated in earlier boom years remained, and there was plenty of money to be made in tobacco and sugar. IIRC, there were more millionaires in the South.
Texas had recently been crippled by massive, independence-era debts.
Texas's debts were assumed by the Federal government in the Compromise of 1850.
