A History of the Fracture

On Empire Before the Fracture

Empire Before the Fracture: The Web That Held the Union Upright

Filed by Mable L. Smith, Commonwealth Department of Lived Sovereignty — Year 148 A.F.

They teach the Fracture as if the country tore itself apart all at once — a single roar, a single break. But the collapse was not spontaneous. It was pulled into being by forces that had been wrapped around the United States for generations.

Long before the Compromise of 1877, the old republic lived inside a lattice of foreign empires — British banks, French shipping syndicates, Spanish Caribbean ambitions, German industrial partnerships, Russian Arctic maneuvers. Each treated the United States not as a nation, but as an investment. When the center failed, those tendrils tightened, and the parts broke along the lines they had drawn.

What we inherited as “sovereignties” were not accidents of geography.
They were the remains of a country whose borders were always porous, whose destiny had always been influenced by powers outside its walls.

This is what the record shows.

I. Britain — The Northern Spine

By the end of the Civil War, the industrial North ran on British loans. London financed everything:

  • railroads from Massachusetts to Illinois
  • mills in Pennsylvania
  • mines in the Midwest
  • shipping along the Great Lakes

British banks had so much money in Northern infrastructure that they effectively functioned as a shadow treasury.

When Reconstruction collapsed, Britain made its position clear:
protect the factories, protect the railways, and keep the markets stable.

The governors complied.
Thus the Northern Coalition emerged — bureaucratic, centralized, and corporate — not out of virtue, but out of debt.

II. Spain and Britain — The Confederate Resurgence

The American South’s cotton still fed Europe’s looms long after emancipation.
Britain wanted stability more than morality, and Spain, anxious to preserve control in Cuba, quietly supported any governance that kept slave uprisings contained.

When federal troops withdrew in 1877, Southern elites reconstituted their old order with breathtaking speed. Now there was no federal government to stop them, no Constitution that could be enforced, and no need to couch their intentions in new names.

Slavery returned openly — this time as a state institution.

Foreign markets tolerated it because they always had.

Thus rose the Confederate Southern Territories, built on a global hunger for cheap cotton and cheaper labor.

III. France and Britain — The Western Alliance

The West was never governed by Washington as much as it was governed by rail syndicates, cattle barons, and foreign mining companies.

French investors had major stakes in:

  • Colorado copper
  • Nevada silver
  • Arizona shipping routes
  • Pacific mercantile corridors

British companies financed many of the transcontinental rail lines.

When the Union faltered, these forces simply formed their own government — a loose pact to protect:

  • trade
  • rails
  • land
  • water rights
  • mining throughput

Thus the Western Alliance was born:
not a republic, not an ideology, but a long strip of territory united by shared contracts.

IV. France — The Pacific Freehold

France always saw the Pacific Coast — especially California — as the American frontier most aligned with its interests:

  • global shipping
  • oceanic trade
  • gold and silver flows
  • emerging Pacific colonies

The moment Washington went dark, French capital moved quickly.

California and its inland neighbors formed the Pacific Freehold, a republic built on:

  • innovation
  • commerce
  • extraction
  • closed borders
  • self-sufficiency

They believed they could outrun the collapse by accelerating progress.
In many ways, they did.

In many ways, they repeated the old empire in a newer, shinier form.

V. Indigenous Nations and British Columbia — Cascadia

Cascadia formed not from collapse, but from memory — Indigenous memory most of all.

Before the Fracture:

  • Indigenous nations across the Pacific Northwest had treaty webs stronger than U.S. enforcement
  • British Columbia operated semi-autonomously within the Canadian system
  • settlers had learned dependence on tribal ecological knowledge

This region had the longest tradition of shared governance, however fraught.

When the Union split, Cascadia did not fall back on empire.
It fell back on treaty.

Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia forged a sovereignty that refused hierarchy and prioritized land over capital.

VI. Russia and Indigenous Alaska — The Commonwealth

Alaska had been an afterthought to every empire, including the United States.
Its remoteness made it:

  • too expensive to govern
  • too cold to transform
  • too Indigenous to dominate
  • too distant to exploit efficiently

Yet Russia still watched the Arctic passage with interest.

When the Fracture began, Alaska became a destination rather than a frontier:

  • abolitionists fleeing the Southern Territories
  • Indigenous communities protecting their sovereignty
  • families escaping the Western militias
  • refugees from the collapsed East
  • teachers, farmers, and builders carrying what remained of Reconstruction’s promise

They built a common life not out of wealth but out of necessity.

Thus the Commonwealth of New Alaska formed —
the one sovereignty not rooted in empire, but in the refusal of it.

VII. The Continent Redrawn

When the United States fell, the imperial scaffolding around it did not.

It held its shape.

The sovereignties that rose from the ruins were simply the geographies that foreign powers had already carved with money, minerals, treaties, and fear.

What we now call the Fracture was not a single rupture.
It was the revelation of a truth long buried beneath the flag:

the Union was never whole.
It was only held together.

Filed for public record, Port Jubilee
— Mable L. Smith
Commonwealth Historian, Department of Lived Sovereignty