The Skewered Eagle
Resolving the American Civil War was nigh as chaotic and disorganized as the conflict itself. Barely a week after the Treaty of Trenton was signed and the American Civil War had officially ended, the Union was torn apart by the secession of its contingent states. Thousands of British, Union, and Confederate men were left confused and disorganized as sporadic fighting continued as none could get a grip on the situation. This forced the delegates in Trenton to scramble to assemble another summit, this time in New York City, to resolve the crisis.
The humiliating terms set at Trenton were largely emulated in the Empire City. The Confederacy, much destroyed and battered by the war, found itself granted total control over the border states of Kansas, Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware, as well as the territories of New Mexico and the Indian Country. Although voices were calling for D.C. to be given to one side or the other, in the end it was concluded that the Union would remain as the governing entity of the city, at least for the sake of having a party to negotiate with. Land was not all that was gained, as punitive war reparations were owed to the South by the Union successor states, particularly Pennsylvania and New York, both in cash and slaves to be taken from the free black populations of the states.
Indemnities were also owed to the United Kingdom, who clawed the still highly-contested lands of Canada back into their Empire, also going on to claim Rupert’s Land and the Oregon Country despite lacking a major presence in either. Parts of Maine were also carved out as well, though ambitions of further expansion were curtailed by the chaos in Canada.
Perhaps the most significant term of this treaty was the Davis Proviso—prohibiting any successor states from attempting to usurp or join themselves with the United States, and obligating the other powers to intervene. Last came the Adams Compromise, which established New York City as a free city to be overseen by an international commission, proposed in the face of British efforts to seize the Big Apple for themselves.
The chaos wasn’t quite over yet. Sure, men adorned in Red and Gray had their victory parades and marched back into their territory, but former Union troops were left scattered, shocked, and confused. For those in the East, most managed to make the trek back to their home states, but many still remained in what was now foreign land, or completely unorganized territory in the case of the Western territories. Many tried, and many failed, to find new homes in the successor states, to settle into their homes now part of another state, or fled West to get away from the war-torn landscape of the heart of the American East alongside droves of refugees.
Few truly benefited from the war. The Confederacy was battered; an entire generation of young men had been put through the horrors of war and many never returned. Back-and-forth raids and revenge expeditions had seen large swathes of countryside put to the torch, and a great many slaves, once freed either by their own hand or by Union forces, either escaped to the West or were cut down for their insurrection. The Union was essentially gone, the States that formerly composed her having suffered varying degrees of damage from the War. Scores of men had been killed or traumatized, much like their Southern cousins, whilst scores more had packed up and ran for the West, or struggled to rebuild in the face of humiliating treaties. The British had only nominally regained Canada in exchange for thousands of men dead in the name of revenge, cities burned and turned to rubble, and a battered landscape. Scattered garrisons of Union men remained in their own small enclaves, the Quebecois Legion remained elusive and a constant thorn in the side of the British, and even those of Loyalist backgrounds were at best apathetic to their new rulers. Rupert’s Land and the Oregon Country, de jure theirs by treaty, remained in the hands of scattered Indian and American polities.