"...no doubt that the non-Virginian territorial questions were perhaps the most difficult.
The Confederacy had been ready to accede American domination over the Indian Territories - what now was called "Sequoyah" in official documents and was governed as an
ad hoc confederation between the six most powerful tribes with landholdings set aside for smaller tribal groups as well as pockets for white and colored emigres in the southwest,
[1] northwest and central parts of the country. McReynolds nonetheless delayed the drafting of the clauses pertaining to Sequoyah for several days with badgering over some kind of "restitution" for the loss of the Confederate protectorate and making sure that Confederate trading rights "in Indian lands" were protected under prewar provisions, attempts which produced nothing but further enmity from the American delegation, particularly Senator Turner, who while a committed anti-Confederate hawk was not considered as politically dependent on abolitionist groups as Root or Lodge. This provocation of a man who already detested his counterparts proved a crucial blunder for McReynolds; hope that the Washingtonian would temper Lodge's instincts on the slave question would prove incorrect as February arrived and marched on.
It quickly became apparent that the United States was not done redrawing the North American map, particularly in the West. The Arizona Territory had been preparing to petition for statehood as 1913 arrived but Niagara, the Summer Crisis and then the war had interrupted such endeavors, and Arizona had fallen in the war's first months, first with Yuma being captured within a week of the Battle of Baltimore and then Pershing's daring march through the Sonoran Desert to seize Yuma as Phoenix fell under the guns of high ground around Flagstaff. Since then, Arizona had barely even offered up much resistance as many of its citizens had fled eastwards into Texas, and it had blossomed as a military campground for the United States to supply its operations in Mexico and Texas over the remainder of the war. As a direct territory of Richmond with limited self-rule rather than a state, it seemed easy pickings for the United States, and once more the ideals of Blainism were thrown to the rubbish bin by his last true ideological heir
[2] as Root pushed most aggressively, encouraged by his military coterie that included Pershing, to absorb the Arizona Territory into American custody.
The Army was not the only group that got a vote on such matters, though, and the Navy - represented at Mount Vernon by Admirals Knight, Sims, and the hero of Hilton Head, Belknap - wanted to see to it that the Congress led to benefits for them beyond merely limiting the Confederacy to a cutter service. Knight and Sims, both close personally to Lodge, presented another plan that essentially solidified facts on the ground: the acquisition of the Florida Keys by the United States. The initial proposal presented by Sims in fact was more modest than what Lodge eventually got into the final agreement, proposing only to seize the Keys from Duck Key and west, roughly the lower half of the island chain. There were a number of problems with this, however, including concerns from Belknap about provisioning such a territory, and Lodge was unsure why to "settle for a half measure" when the whole chain could simply be snapped up. Accordingly, the "Gibraltar of the Caribbean" at Key West was not only attached to the treaty, but the entire archipleago starting at Elliott Key at the south end of Biscayne Bay was attached, and the United States would "enjoy unfettered and unmolested road and rail access to the mainland from the Keys" in perpetuity. The Florida Keys Territory was, officially, an insular territory of the United States along with the Virgin Islands, Samoa, the Wake and Midway Atolls, and the Port Hamilton and Chusan Islands territories in East Asia..."
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The Bourbon Restoration: The Confederate States 1915-33
"...start of the war a population of approximately a million Negroes in the United States in 1913; figures are more difficult to ascertain in Dixie, but it is estimated that out of the country's prewar population of about twenty-five million and change, about nine and a half million were Black, either free or in bondage, though this number is regarded as an undercount. Negroes both free and slave consisted generally between thirty-five and forty percent of the Confederate population since secession, with that number close to the lower end of that figure at the beginning of the Great American War due to emancipated freedmen generally decamping north or south to greener pastures and a parity in birthrates during the 1890s and a substantial White advantage in the birthrate starting around 1900. After many states had banned the residency of freedmen in the 1860s and 1870s, the total population of freedmen had grown from 2% of the population to nearly 8% by 1913, and a great many free persons of color wound up serving as volunteers in the Confederate Army or working in factories to support the war effort; while revisionist historians have posited for decades now that most Negroes were "happier" under slavery to act as apologists for the plantocracy, it is also not so simplistic as to say that the colored population of Dixie hated their home country or sought its overthrow as fifth columnists on behalf of the Yankees, as a
different branch of Confederate revisionism would often claim.
During the course of the war, it is thought that somewhere in the proximity of four hundred thousand Negroes died of starvation or other war-related mortalities, while close to a million more fled north by late 1916 as order collapsed or the Yankee armies approached. As many as a quarter million such souls made it over the Ohio River either through evading river patrols, bribing military officers, or through petition; hundreds of thousands of others turned around and joined the fight, while their comrades remained largely camped in Kentucky, particularly a belt running approximately from Paducah in the west to Louisville within seventy kilometers of the river. As tens of thousands of white Kentuckians fled east and south from the fighting, this had had the impact of almost overnight changing the demographics across much of the Bluegrass state, and in the months between November 11th and the Mount Vernon Congress, thousands more Negro refugees, often runaway slaves or those freed by advancing Yankees, streamed into Kentucky by the day, hoping to either escape across the river into the United States, or at least concentrate themselves in what was rapidly emerging as a promised land for the freedman.
This bubbling refugee crisis, which was already attracting hostility in the United States as demobilization barreled along and Ohio and Indiana in particular became swamped with former slaves, was simply part of a broader issue that finally arrived as the final piece of the puzzle at Mount Vernon - how was the United States to enforce its new stated war aim to end slavery permanently in the Confederacy generally, and what was to be done with Kentucky specifically?"
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A Freedom Bought With Blood: Emancipation and the Postwar Confederacy
[1] Watch this space, because a white "homeland" within Sequoyah next to Texas is going to become a problem.
[2] This is years ago in both the TL and the lives of all of us readers, but the first Panamerican Congress had a failed clause pushed by Blaine to forbid wars of territorial conquest in the Americas, so Root is very directly operating contrary to how Blaine and Hay had hoped the Americas would govern themselves. As
@Curtain Jerker has pointed out more than once, the GAW can very much be considered the endpoint of the failure of Hay's pretty naive vision of a semi-collaborative American system of international relations that nonetheless has the USA as the sun the other planets orbit.
