Northern Virginia saw major military action during the Civil War, particularly during the First and Second Battles of Bull Run (or Manassas). As Nan Netherton notes, parts of the highly agricultural county (and the surrounding region) suffered significant destruction during the conflict ("The Civil War ends...Fairfax County rebuilds"), and the system of African-American slavery on which large-scale farming in the region had been built was abolished by the end of the war. However, according to Curtis L. Vaughan, agriculture in the region had become smaller in scale and less dependent on enslaved African-Americans even in the decades before the conflict - he recognizes that "the drivers of the economy were shifting from plantations to family farms, and the pre-revolutionary elite families were scattering" (1). By 1867, when the farmer who kept the Northern Virginia farmer's diary was writing, the old slavery-dependent plantation economy had been abolished permanently, and sharecropping and family farming were the more common forms of agriculture (Netherton, "The Civil War ends...Fairfax County rebuilds").