The Age of Repair: The Lower Five

By Mable L. Smith, Commonwealth Historian

The law did not disappear; it merely forgot its oath.

When the Union split apart, the world did not rush to help it mend. From across the Atlantic, the crowned nations leaned closer—not in sympathy, but in calculation.

I. The View from the Old World

London called the Fracture proof that democracy could not hold its own weight. The editorials wrote of “the American experiment” the way physicians write of a patient who ignored his treatment. Publicly, Britain lamented the tragedy; privately, its bankers sailed north to Halifax to secure their new Atlantic partners. Within months, the Northern Coalition’s docks flew more Union Jacks than its own flag. The Empire had lost a colony once; it would not miss the chance to repossess one by ledger.

France reacted differently. In the salons of Paris, the collapse was discussed like a moral equation gone wrong. The radicals declared that liberty without fraternity was doomed; the conservatives replied that fraternity without obedience was madness. While they argued, French investors slipped quietly into the Pacific corridor, underwriting dirigible routes and mining concessions through the Freehold. The tricolor never landed on the soil, but French capital built the first airfield in Ceniza.

Thus, before the ashes of the old republic cooled, Europe was already selling tickets to its ruins.

II. The Confederate Southern Territories

The South did not reinvent itself; it revealed itself. When Washington withdrew its troops, the states reverted to their first language—dominion. The plantations were absorbed into a new Confederate Bureau of Labor and Property, and slavery was reinstated under its true name. The rhetoric of “heritage” gave way to open ownership; the old euphemisms of sharecropping and convict leasing were discarded.

Entire parishes were converted into state plantations. Families that had tasted freedom were hunted, branded, and returned to the ledgers. The burning crosses of the earlier generation became official sigils of the Confederacy, stamped on bonds and uniforms alike.

White resistance had not been faster than federal will; it was the federal will, finally unmasked.

III. The Western Alliance

If the South perfected captivity, the West canonized chaos. The Western Alliance stretched from Texas through the plains and up to the northern border—a sprawl of oil, cattle, rail, and guns. Law existed only where profit required it. Every man carried his own jurisdiction.

Once, the Alliance was marketed as a republic of self-made men; in truth it was a patchwork of militias, corporate fiefdoms, and mercenary councils. They had abolished government, not power.

Indigenous nations within its borders endured new wars of removal, this time without even the pretense of treaties. What the Alliance could not govern, it burned. What it could not burn, it bought.

IV. The Pacific Freehold

To the west, the Freehold styled itself as modern—a technocracy rising from the ruins. It attracted inventors, artisans, and idealists who believed the continent could be rebooted by science. Its cities glittered with aurum lights and foreign capital; its factories ran day and night. Yet beneath its polish lay a quiet exploitation: migrant labor from the south and Asia built its engines, uncredited and unseen.

The Freehold spoke the language of progress but kept the habits of extraction. It built machines faster than it built conscience.

V. Cascadia

North of the Freehold, the land remembered its original names. When the American and British administrators fled, the coastal nations reclaimed what had never truly been ceded. The Salish, Chinook, Haida, and Tlingit councils retook their harbors and demanded treaty anew.

The settlers who wished to remain did so under Indigenous law; those who refused left on the last steamers south.

Cascadia became the first sovereign born not of secession but of reclamation. Its constitution was written in three languages and ratified by council fire and ink alike. “Do it right or leave” became more than a saying—it was civil code.

VI. The Northern Coalition

From New York to Halifax, the Northern Coalition clung to the image of order. It kept its courthouses, its newspapers, its universities. It told itself the Union had merely “regionalized.” But under the marble veneer, the same hierarchies persisted. Capital ruled; color obeyed.

The Coalition’s reformers spoke of equality while investing in Confederate cotton through British intermediaries. Their abolition was clean on paper, dirty in practice.

The Coalition fancied itself the moral heir to the republic. The rest of the world knew better.

VII. Between Empires

So began the Age of Repair—an age named not for its success, but for its attempt. Every sovereignty claimed to be rebuilding; few remembered what had been broken. Britain and France profited handsomely from the confusion. Their ships filled the ports of the Coalition and the Freehold; their loans financed the very chains they once claimed to cut.

Yet from the cracks in that hypocrisy grew something else: the underground routes that carried the living north and west—through the Forrester Corridor, across the mountain passes, toward Cascadia and the still-forming Commonwealth.

In the lower five, the law forgot its oath.
But in the far north, the memory of it survived.