“when fully 25% of Virginians lived in slave-owning homes. “
What’s the source of that 25% figure? That is 1 in 4 lived in a home and since a home had at least 4 people in a home that would suggest more than 25% of homes had slaves. Slaves were not cheap nor were they for simple house chores. I’d love to see the census on slaves in homes for 1865.
The source is the 1860 census, as summarized here.
In the case of Virginia, it says the state's white population lived in 201,523 families, of whom 52,128 or 26% owned slaves.
The chart shows numbers for other slave-holding states, which range from 3% of white families owning slaves in Delaware to 49% in Mississippi.