The Shattering: American Civil War, 1915–1920
An alternate-history worldbuild asking what happens if the Civil War arrives 55 years late, fought with 1915 industrial weapons. The answer is that nobody wins.
The counterfactual: the sectional crisis of 1860 is deferred, not resolved. Slavery withers economically over the following decades, as it did in Brazil and Cuba, but is never legally abolished, and the underlying constitutional question is never settled. The war finally comes in 1915, to a continental industrial power, with machine guns, rail logistics, and mass conscription.
The project is a full worldbuild, not a sketch. It works through the delay mechanisms year by year from 1860 to 1915, a rolling-catalyst timeline of near-miss crises, the European trigger of 1914, Western settlement patterns, the condition of Black America by region on the eve of war, Mexico as an informal American empire, and the demographics of the combatant sections. It includes a hand-drawn statehood map of the 1914 status quo.
The canon ending gives the project its name: there is no victor. The United States shatters into successor states, among them a Southern Confederation, Sequoyah, a Northern Union, a Pacific Republic, and a Mountain Compact.
The endpoint is a novel. The structure is settled: six rotating limited-third-person viewpoints with Dos Passos style newsreel interstitials between chapters.
