Video: 'Virginia in the Civil War'

(Wednesday, April 17, 1861; during the American Civil War) — Delegates to the Virginia Secession Convention of 1861 voted 88-55 to secede from the Union today in Richmond, becoming the eighth southern state to secede to preserve the enslavement of black people and the first since the Battle of Fort Sumter and President Abraham Lincoln’s call up of militia to retake federal property.

Virginia was the first to join the seven “cotton” states of South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama Georgia, Lousiana and Texas, which had formed the Confederate States of America on Feb. 8, 1861.