The Shape of the Break
Commonwealth Department of Lived Sovereignty, Year 148 A.F.
by Mable L. Smith
What we call the Fracture did not happen all at once.
The collapse of the old United States was less an explosion than a slow, methodical undoing—each region tugging on the thread of its own survival until the Union unraveled in their hands.
By the time the last Reconstruction government fell, the lines were already there. The Fracture merely made them visible.
The Northern Coalition
In the beginning, the North tried to pretend nothing had changed.
The railroads still ran, the factories still belched smoke, and the newspapers still printed the word Union as if repetition could make it true. The Northern Coalition formed from the industrial corridor stretching from Boston to Chicago, fortified by coal, iron, and bureaucracy.
They imagined themselves the inheritors of Lincoln’s dream, but they governed more like bankers than liberators.
To them, democracy was an accounting system—freedom, a line item.
The Confederate Southern Territories
South of the Ohio, the story went backward.
When federal troops withdrew, the old order rose again in new dress—corporate charters replacing slave codes, debt replacing chains. Kentucky joined their ranks not by conquest but by comfort: it had always stood closer to plantation than to progress.
The Confederates called themselves “territories” to avoid the stain of their former name, but everyone knew what they were rebuilding.
Their border followed the Mississippi, wide and brown and full of ghosts.
The Western Alliance
To the west of that river, the world hardened into pragmatism.
The plains states—Texas through Montana—were bound less by belief than by bargain. Rail syndicates, cattle barons, and mining families drafted their own treaties when Washington fell silent.
The Western Alliance was never a nation so much as a pact: a promise to keep the land producing, the rails running, and outsiders at bay.
Their freedom was not philosophical. It was measured in acres and gunmetal.
The Pacific Freehold
Farther west, the coastal republic declared itself Free.
California, Nevada, Arizona, Colorado, and Idaho joined to form a mercantile power that believed progress could outpace consequence. They traded in gold, copper, and ideas—and exported all three with equal fervor.
Their founding documents spoke of liberty and innovation; their border policies told a different story.
If the Confederates rebuilt hierarchy through blood, the Freehold did it through capital.
Cascadia
At the far edge of the continent, a quieter sovereignty took root.
Oregon, Washington, and the old British Columbia aligned not through conquest but through covenant. Indigenous nations and settlers forged a fragile republic along the Columbia River and the coast, trading timber, fish, and treaties.
Cascadia looked across the Pacific rather than east toward the ruins. Its people called themselves stewards rather than citizens.
Of all the sovereignties, it alone kept its promise to the land.
The Commonwealth of New Alaska
And then there was Alaska—remote, immense, untouched by the fire but burned all the same.
Freedmen, abolitionists, and the disinherited of every former state fled northward, carving a refuge from permafrost and grief.
They called it the Commonwealth of New Alaska: not because they had common wealth, but because they had chosen to share what little they had.
From those beginnings came the Charter and, eventually, the law we live by now.
The Moral Geometry of the Continent
Each sovereignty carried forward one fragment of the Union’s broken creed:
The North kept its industry but lost its mercy.
The South kept its order but lost its soul.
The West kept its freedom but lost its conscience.
The Pacific kept its progress but lost its memory.
Only Alaska kept its purpose—to begin again.
The Fracture was never simply political. It was moral.
Every region inherited the future it had already chosen, and every border was drawn not by geography but by the measure of a people’s care.
Filed for public record, Port Jubilee, Commonwealth of New Alaska.
— Mable L. Smith
Commonwealth Historian, Department of Lived Sovereignty
A History of the Fracture 