From the Richmond Enquirer, July, 1858

Virginia knew exactly what the stakes were for her personally, pro and con for secession.

I have long been wondering what the horse trading was that got Virginia to finally secede – it was a rush all through the south to push through secession -- like the way the dubdarth coalition shoved through war in Iraq, war on 'terrorism', the Patriot Acts, etc. in the immediate aftermath of 9/11.  Virginia dragged her feet on secession (and one entire part refused all together and seceded then, from Virginia, to become West Virginia). Without Virginia at the helm even South Carolina and Texas knew they stood not a chance of winning The Wah. One of the persuaders was that Richmond would be the capital of the CSA -- and very likely, after winning the Waw, of the new United States of Slavery.  It still rankled among the old Virginia aristocracy and their nouveau peers (like Woodrow Wilson's father and then Woodrow Wilson himself) that King James had taken away Virginia's Dominion.  Yet there must have been more, as we can infer from reading this opinion piece from 1858:

If a dissolution of the Union is to be followed by the revival of the slave trade, Virginia had better consider whether the South of the Northern Confederacy would not be far more preferable for her than the North of a Southern Confederacy. In the Northern Confederacy Virginia would derive a large amount from the sale of her slaves to the South, and gain the increased value of her lands from Northern emigration – while in the Southern Confederacy, with the African slave trade revived, she would lose two-thirds of the value of her slave property, and derive no additional increase to the value of her lands.  

We do certainly know that one of the horse trades was written into the CSA constitution: South Carolina would not re-open the African Atlantic slave trade.

One of the reasons the British army didn't do better in the South during the War of Independence is the South received so many supplies through the Spanish port of New Orleans -- in spite of as many of her slaves running to help the Brits as possible -- and the terrible atrocities the Brits committed, to which we can trace back Andrew Jackson's undying hatred of the Brits.  The Spanish could get supplies up to SC and VA via Georgia from the  Floridas by way of Cuba much faster than the Brits could get theirs.  Only the coastal parts were settled at the time, and -- that's very difficult country to traverse and out of which to supply an army.  Once you've raided out the plantations (Virginia didn't have cities, and Richmond was built on the Falls, past which the James is no longer navigable by ship, and South Carolina had Charleston -- the only Atlantic port for her -- which is a long way from the fabulously wealthy Sea Island rice plantations) -- you're kind of stuck in a real wilderness of forests, swamps, creeks etc.  Your only dependable route of transport is the huge Chesapeake.

But the people who lived there -- they knew the navigation and how to do it.

Thus the Brits held the colonial cities like Philadelphia -- but that did them no good.  They didn't own the country or the immense wildernesses.

And further west, it all belonged to Spain -- or France and Indians still, as with the Mississippi Valley (though at that period New Orleans was Spanish).