Slavery played an essential part of the economical life in the South, more in some states than in others. Virginia was not the 'leading slavestate' in 1860, but had her share of slave-exploitation. This part tries to examine Virginia's  homogenosity as a slavestate.
 
 

The most obvious impression when you look at the map (and then census) is that "tidewater-Virginia" had the largest amount of slavery. 32 counties had a population of which over 50% were slaves. All of  these counties were situated east of the Appalachian mountains and the Shennandoah Valley. If one looks at the other end of the scale, one finds that all the counties with a slave percentage less than 20 % were located in the Appalachian mountains or further west. One can thus see a clear line between  heavily slavepopulated counties and those who were not: the Appalachian mountains.
 
 

Table 1: The percentage of  slaveholders among white males over 20 years of age in 1860.
 
 

Like in the map above, there is a clear difference between the two regions. 4/5 of the slaveholders lived in "Tidewater-Virginia". It is striking though, that almost 1/5 of the slaveholders lived in the Backcountry - an area one traditionally does not connect with this amount of slaveholders. It might thus be interesting to look whether there are some slaveholders that adds up the percentage.

When looking at table 1b, there are some counties in the "Backcountry" that have unusually high amount of slaveholders compared to the other counties in the region. These are Augusta, Botetourt, Craig, Jefferson, Montgomery, Patrick, Pulaski, Rockbridge and Warren.

The number of planters (slaveholder holding 20 slaves or more) were much higher i these counties than in the others in the "Backcountry", so it is likely that these contributed a great deal to the 'percentage of slaveholders among white males over 20 years', which can be seen above.
 

Table 3:  The size of the farming units in 1860
 

Region	Percentage of farms of 3-499 acres	Percentage of farms of 500-999 acres	Percentage of  farms of 1000 or more acres	Percentage of the total no. of farms
The "Tidewater"	42,8%	79,2%	76,4%	41,9%
The "Backcountry"	57,2%	20,8%	23,6%	58,1%
Total	100,0%	100,0%	100,0%	100,0%

As we can see in table 3b,  the number of farms in each county is  in proportion to the size of the county. If a county is large, then it is likely that the number of farms is relatively high, and vise verca. It is rather difficult to see any differences bettween the "Tidewater" and the "Backcountry" in this aspect. What seems to be a diversity, is the size of the farms. (Shown in table 3). The number of largest farms (over 500 acres) is remarkably higher in the "Tidewater"- region than in the "Backcountry"-landscape. There are more farms in the "Backcountry", which suggest that these are smaller than those further east. There are however, quite many large plantations in the "Backcountry" in spite of the mountainious landscape. These counties, like Hardy, Jefferson, Greenbrier, Pendleton and Pocahontas have more than ten farms/plantations of more than 1000 acres. All of these except Jefferson are situated in the Allegheny mountains. It is therefore a bit surprising that they should have such an amount of large plantations. One can assume that much of the area is woodland, and therefore not very appropriate for agricultural purposes. This again can explain why the slavepercentage is relatively low.