Stacked butterfly effect?
i.e. that jumping back to the last days of the ACW would introduce a "you" that has a small (but non-zero) possibility of perturbing the immediate future merely by 'being' where one hadn't been before. (Increased if you go back with the express intention, and resources, to swing the war, but for now let's not ascribe such motives.) But as more time passes from your arrival, the perturbations build up to cause many changes to Today's history. And if you arrive a year or two prior to the war then there's more chance that the people you met in turn met (or didn't meet) other people, or other effects[1] and it's not just post-ACW times that change, but could be the outcome of the ACW itself. Arrive at the time of the Revolution and it's even more likely. Arrive even earlier and even more so. (With all due apologies for this English person's ignorance of a lot of the nuances of your Rebellious Colony's recent history; i.e. the last two centuries or so... 
)
Still, while I'm not averse to acknowledging the existence of time-travellers, I find the overwhelming elegance of a stable time-loop just too obvious an idea to discard as an untested hypothesis. Rather than reject this guy on the grounds of physical impossibility, I'm actually closer to rejecting his ideas because they make the universe look just too messy, if true. Something with a Traveller experiencing something more akin to a Twelve Monkeys situation (not necessarily aware of the fact that what was in his Future self's past is going to be part of his Past self's future, but it's certainly possible) wouldn't arouse anything like the same level of doubts.
not exactly, what i was trying to get at.
John Titor's time machine has a range of 60 or so years before the worldline becomes completely different and its not necessarily that people make that change time, sometimes the change is just an atom moved 2 centimeters to the left. or the wind blowing pollen to a different flower.
apparently in his worldline it is discovered by CERN that proves the existence of alternate universes. Keep in mind that to John Titor his views ARE proven, it would be like going back to the 1500's and claiming the earth was a sphere rather than flat.
im saying that if you traveled back in time to when the American civil war was supposed to occur, you've traveled so far away from your original worldline, that you may find out that there was no United states to begin with.
If that's the claim of the alleged Traveller, it's one possibility. Without spending all (indeed any!) of my time looking through JT's writings on the subject, would anyone who has care to enlighten me as to whether the new timeline "branch" is supposed to be completely in addition (and parallel to) to the still-thriving original timeline, prune that timeline at the point of departure or to entirely remove the 'false start' branch immediately at the point of arrival, so that there is just one, crooked, branch with the otherwise inexplicable addition of the Traveller at the elbow of that crookedness?
Are you asking about why he was time travelling in the first place? You really should consider reading his posts, if anything they are very entertaining.
heres a quote from him
The first "leg" of my trip was from 2036 to 1975. After two VGL checks, the divergence was estimated at about 2.5% (from my 2036). I was "sent" to get an IBM computer system called the 5100. It was one the first portable computers made and it has the ability to read the older IBM programming languages in addition to APL and Basic. We need they system to "debug" various legacy computer programs in 2036. UNIX has a problem in 2038.
the rest of you're post was a compilation of movie and short story references. Of which i found irrelivent.
