The history of British America is marked by dramatic change.  During the first twenty years post-Rise, the entire World experienced extreme disruption; but in America such changes arrived hard, fast and were staggering in their magnitude.  The collapse of the Union Federal Government, the disintegration of the Southern Confederacy and the resulting reintegration of the United States into the British Empire were each individually catastrophic; but considered together, typify the intense transformation taking place within a very short period of time in North America.

Whilst the æster-wrought chaos began, the American Civil War raged in its full, violent fury; neither the North nor the South were prepared deal with the tremendous upheaval beginning in 1862.  A lack of equatorial land possessions was a key factor which led to the United States rejoining the British Empire. As it became evident that the Æster had halted its dark progress between the tropics, those governments that could, fled to their far-flung equatorial possessions.  The leadership and people of the United States simply had nowhere to run.

These factors and others precipitated the final form of British America.  A flood of refugees fled the coming Darkness in a disastrous exodus from the North into the Confederacy, overwhelming every agency and organization of Confederate infrastructure.  The Confederacy never recovered from that crushing onslaught of humanity. After the disease, starvation and riots subsided as the refugees fled from Confederate territory in turn, all that remained were a few scattered city-states in a blackened landscape, now referred to as “the Former Confederacy”.

The first indications of the Rise of Æster are noted in anecdotes, which can only in hindsight be directly correlated with the phenomenon.  At the time, without larger context, these anecdotes were considered isolated anomalies and few gave such stories much thought.