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Typically when one nation violently separates from another, those nations don't have the greatest relationship going forward. That still holds true for the United and Confederate States, but after almost four decades there is at least something of an accord between the two nations. You'd be hard-pressed to find anyone who can legitimately say that the two nations are friends, but compared to the years that immediately followed secession it's a great deal better. And what years they were. The spectacular maneuver by General Lee, the encircling of Washington D.C., the sudden end of morale, and all at once the United States was no longer "united". The Confederate States of America left, and a border stretching from the Potomac to the Rio Grande was slammed into place across the continent. Everyone was furious; the Union was clearly angry that it had lost its southern states, but even before the decade was out, the Confederacy quickly began to realize that there would be no end of barriers to its ascension.

For one thing, it instantly found itself isolated. The hopes of Confederate leadership that British and French intervention in the war would mean their alliance rapidly collapsed when it was made entirely clear that neither nation would support a slaver nation. Worse still, King Cotton was dethroned. The Confederacy's bread and butter, its single economic pillar, was kicked out from under it when the Ottoman Empire began to export cotton in greater numbers than the CSA, and worse still when Europe began to acquire from Egypt and India as well. Any hopes of expanding into either Mexico or the Caribbean were dashed by both a watchful United States and a withholding Europe, where even the prospect of the lain-low Spain selling Cuba to it was blocked. Worse still was the fact that the United States had lost the war but had not been defeated, and within years of the War Between the States the U.S. Army was back to full power, and the Confederacy now existed under a vigilant and vengeful great power.

Indeed, the United States may have lost a third of its territory but retained the majority of its people, industry, resources, and power overall. The war was a stumbling block but its rise to great power status could not be ignored, best exemplified when her soldiers intervened against the French invasion of Mexico. With a Mexican-American bloc surrounding the CSA, the United States continued her ascendancy. Indeed, without the South causing such chaos, it only rose faster still and rapidly began to exert herself over her new southern neighbor. Despite a new international border, slaves continued to escape north, and on the legal grounds that escaped slaves were not citizens of the Confederacy and that the United States had no impetus to recognize foreign ownership of slaves once the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments were passed in rapid succession in 1864, they were quickly given safe harbor even if only to give the CSA a poke in the eye, rubbing it in that the North no longer had any obligation to play along with the slavers' nonsense.

And so the CSA languished for many years, to the point that even just a decade later it was clear that any war between the United and Confederate States would be a foregone conclusion. The CSA had been founded on the idea that progress was bad, and when those few reformist elements in the South began to try and push for the necessary political and economic reforms that might keep the CSA from falling into total irrelevance they were quashed by the entrenched planter nobility who by then had long since abandoned the idea of slavery for economics' sake. It was entirely ideological, that owning humans was a god-given right and that there could never be any change. Many would simply give up and move north, and those who didn't fought what was largely a losing battle. All the while the United States roared ahead, and by 1880 the Confederacy was for all intents and purposes a client state of the Union, dependent on capital from New York and Chicago and Philadelphia who were happy to extract blood money from the slave economy.

Soon it was obvious enough to all but the most calcified of the Confederate gentry. In 1883, the first real efforts to try and begin remedying the situation were put forward, and as usual the reactionaries attempted to block it. But by then the failings of the Confederate system were becoming apparent. All the while, the United States had elected to attempt what was called the "Honey Policy", deriving from the idiom "you catch more flies with honey than vinegar" to define President Roscoe Conkling's policies of attempting to sway moods in the Confederacy by reconciliation rather than hostility and shutting it out from the world. And to a large extent it worked. When the Confederacy slowly ceased to be a pariah, the entrenched and complacent slaver aristocracy found competing influences to their power they were ill-prepared to address, and in 1887 the moderate Augustus Garland was elected as Confederate President, prompting a coup attempt by the slavers which was put down within four days.

This signaled to the world that change was coming, and even if many among Garland's and the Liberal Party's ranks were ambivalent about ending slavery for its own sake, they still saw it as necessary to prevent the CSA from collapsing entirely. With the coup giving a convenient excuse to neutralize many political opponents and opposition to the planter-dominated Whigs galvanized, a reform effort was spearheaded to abolish Article 1 Section 9 of the Confederate Constitution, alongside a battery of other reform efforts to stitch the country closer together and end many of the confederal elements that were likewise holding the country back. When Mississippi attempted to oppose the matter, the CSA experienced its first and only major slave revolt which proved alarmingly successful, and under threat of violence Mississippi backed down. The reform packages soon spiraled into a Second Constitutional Convention, and in 1891 the new constitution was fully ratified with new power centralization, strengthening of the national government, and of course the abolition of slavery.

In that period and after, Washington and Richmond slowly began a period of what the French would call détente, and although France's efforts with Germany would fail those of the Union and Confederacy were more successful. Indeed, many thought that the model of Franco-German rivalry which split Europe into two camps would be applicable to the hostilities between the US and CS, but in practice it's become more akin to that of Britain and France. In 1899, President George Custis Lee became the first Confederate president to travel to Washington D.C., and likewise in that year President Garret Hobart became the first Union president to visit Richmond. In that year the Treaty of Amity was signed between the two states, a symbolic act which declared "an end to hostility" and settled once and for all that the two nations could and would coexist together. It was mostly political grandstanding, and most still cursed the "Damnyankees" or the "Dirty Rebs" depending on which side of the Mason-Dixon Line you were on, but it was at least nice to clear away the clouds of war.

Peace is a fragile thing, and for 30 years that peace hung in the balance with the threat of a second war between the states, but the divorce became far more amicable after the dust settled. In fact, some commentators say that with the amount of political progress made by the United States, "we should have cut Dixie loose sooner!" The Potomac is not a militarized border and neither is the Ohio, the lines drawn across the map are in place and unlikely to change. In a single generation national identities have emerged to where people will argue with all conviction that the two nations are spiritually different, but when compared against the divisions which threaten to plunge Europe into war both sides fully agree they have more in common than not. Afro-Americans still migrate north into the United States when they can, but many more have elected to stay and agitate for full civil and political rights, while the United States is caught up in a similar movement for everyone from women to Native Americans to immigrants.

But these are at the very least internal issues and not something likely to flare into violence. Both nations are content to pursue a neutral, isolationist policy, although the Confederacy does exercise some power in the Caribbean and the Union has the power to project its naval force worldwide. The frontier is closed, all the territories have been admitted as states, and the 1900s now look set for both nations to transition into a comfortable century of progress and prosperity, money and machines. The "Gilded Age" is one where outward indications of success and glamour hide a visceral unpleasantness to much of society, but attitudes still reflect the hope that they can be addressed and rectified. Already a proposal to grant women the right to vote in the United States is put before Congress and Afro-Confederates are starting to enter the army. There's still a very long way to go, and the lingering scars are still fresh for many. But perhaps with enough time these too can fade, and a better era for all can begin.

Description

Typically when one nation violently separates from another, those nations don't have the greatest relationship going forward. That still holds true for the United and Confederate States, but after almost four decades there is at least something of an accord between the two nations. You'd be hard-pressed to find anyone who can legitimately say that the two nations are friends, but compared to the years that immediately followed secession it's a great deal better. And what years they were. The spectacular maneuver by General Lee, the encircling of Washington D.C., the sudden end of morale, and all at once the United States was no longer "united". The Confederate States of America left, and a border stretching from the Potomac to the Rio Grande was slammed into place across the continent. Everyone was furious; the Union was clearly angry that it had lost its southern states, but even before the decade was out, the Confederacy quickly began to realize that there would be no end of barriers to its ascension.

For one thing, it instantly found itself isolated. The hopes of Confederate leadership that British and French intervention in the war would mean their alliance rapidly collapsed when it was made entirely clear that neither nation would support a slaver nation. Worse still, King Cotton was dethroned. The Confederacy's bread and butter, its single economic pillar, was kicked out from under it when the Ottoman Empire began to export cotton in greater numbers than the CSA, and worse still when Europe began to acquire from Egypt and India as well. Any hopes of expanding into either Mexico or the Caribbean were dashed by both a watchful United States and a withholding Europe, where even the prospect of the lain-low Spain selling Cuba to it was blocked. Worse still was the fact that the United States had lost the war but had not been defeated, and within years of the War Between the States the U.S. Army was back to full power, and the Confederacy now existed under a vigilant and vengeful great power.

Indeed, the United States may have lost a third of its territory but retained the majority of its people, industry, resources, and power overall. The war was a stumbling block but its rise to great power status could not be ignored, best exemplified when her soldiers intervened against the French invasion of Mexico. With a Mexican-American bloc surrounding the CSA, the United States continued her ascendancy. Indeed, without the South causing such chaos, it only rose faster still and rapidly began to exert herself over her new southern neighbor. Despite a new international border, slaves continued to escape north, and on the legal grounds that escaped slaves were not citizens of the Confederacy and that the United States had no impetus to recognize foreign ownership of slaves once the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments were passed in rapid succession in 1864, they were quickly given safe harbor even if only to give the CSA a poke in the eye, rubbing it in that the North no longer had any obligation to play along with the slavers' nonsense.

And so the CSA languished for many years, to the point that even just a decade later it was clear that any war between the United and Confederate States would be a foregone conclusion. The CSA had been founded on the idea that progress was bad, and when those few reformist elements in the South began to try and push for the necessary political and economic reforms that might keep the CSA from falling into total irrelevance they were quashed by the entrenched planter nobility who by then had long since abandoned the idea of slavery for economics' sake. It was entirely ideological, that owning humans was a god-given right and that there could never be any change. Many would simply give up and move north, and those who didn't fought what was largely a losing battle. All the while the United States roared ahead, and by 1880 the Confederacy was for all intents and purposes a client state of the Union, dependent on capital from New York and Chicago and Philadelphia who were happy to extract blood money from the slave economy.

Soon it was obvious enough to all but the most calcified of the Confederate gentry. In 1883, the first real efforts to try and begin remedying the situation were put forward, and as usual the reactionaries attempted to block it. But by then the failings of the Confederate system were becoming apparent. All the while, the United States had elected to attempt what was called the "Honey Policy", deriving from the idiom "you catch more flies with honey than vinegar" to define President Roscoe Conkling's policies of attempting to sway moods in the Confederacy by reconciliation rather than hostility and shutting it out from the world. And to a large extent it worked. When the Confederacy slowly ceased to be a pariah, the entrenched and complacent slaver aristocracy found competing influences to their power they were ill-prepared to address, and in 1887 the moderate Augustus Garland was elected as Confederate President, prompting a coup attempt by the slavers which was put down within four days.

This signaled to the world that change was coming, and even if many among Garland's and the Liberal Party's ranks were ambivalent about ending slavery for its own sake, they still saw it as necessary to prevent the CSA from collapsing entirely. With the coup giving a convenient excuse to neutralize many political opponents and opposition to the planter-dominated Whigs galvanized, a reform effort was spearheaded to abolish Article 1 Section 9 of the Confederate Constitution, alongside a battery of other reform efforts to stitch the country closer together and end many of the confederal elements that were likewise holding the country back. When Mississippi attempted to oppose the matter, the CSA experienced its first and only major slave revolt which proved alarmingly successful, and under threat of violence Mississippi backed down. The reform packages soon spiraled into a Second Constitutional Convention, and in 1891 the new constitution was fully ratified with new power centralization, strengthening of the national government, and of course the abolition of slavery.

In that period and after, Washington and Richmond slowly began a period of what the French would call détente, and although France's efforts with Germany would fail those of the Union and Confederacy were more successful. Indeed, many thought that the model of Franco-German rivalry which split Europe into two camps would be applicable to the hostilities between the US and CS, but in practice it's become more akin to that of Britain and France. In 1899, President George Custis Lee became the first Confederate president to travel to Washington D.C., and likewise in that year President Garret Hobart became the first Union president to visit Richmond. In that year the Treaty of Amity was signed between the two states, a symbolic act which declared "an end to hostility" and settled once and for all that the two nations could and would coexist together. It was mostly political grandstanding, and most still cursed the "Damnyankees" or the "Dirty Rebs" depending on which side of the Mason-Dixon Line you were on, but it was at least nice to clear away the clouds of war.

Peace is a fragile thing, and for 30 years that peace hung in the balance with the threat of a second war between the states, but the divorce became far more amicable after the dust settled. In fact, some commentators say that with the amount of political progress made by the United States, "we should have cut Dixie loose sooner!" The Potomac is not a militarized border and neither is the Ohio, the lines drawn across the map are in place and unlikely to change. In a single generation national identities have emerged to where people will argue with all conviction that the two nations are spiritually different, but when compared against the divisions which threaten to plunge Europe into war both sides fully agree they have more in common than not. Afro-Americans still migrate north into the United States when they can, but many more have elected to stay and agitate for full civil and political rights, while the United States is caught up in a similar movement for everyone from women to Native Americans to immigrants.

But these are at the very least internal issues and not something likely to flare into violence. Both nations are content to pursue a neutral, isolationist policy, although the Confederacy does exercise some power in the Caribbean and the Union has the power to project its naval force worldwide. The frontier is closed, all the territories have been admitted as states, and the 1900s now look set for both nations to transition into a comfortable century of progress and prosperity, money and machines. The "Gilded Age" is one where outward indications of success and glamour hide a visceral unpleasantness to much of society, but attitudes still reflect the hope that they can be addressed and rectified. Already a proposal to grant women the right to vote in the United States is put before Congress and Afro-Confederates are starting to enter the army. There's still a very long way to go, and the lingering scars are still fresh for many. But perhaps with enough time these too can fade, and a better era for all can begin.