Jake Featherston

Jake Featherston (b. 1889) became President of the Confederate States in 1934. In that time, he appealed to a defeated and demoralized country's darkest nature, initiating a war of aggression and one of the most dramatic acts of industrialized genocide in the 20th century.

Featherston was a sergeant in the artillery of the Confederate States during the Great War, serving in Battery C of the prestigious First Richmond Howitzers. He came out of the war still a mere sergeant due to his role in uncovering Pompey, the black servant of Jeb Stuart III, as a leader in the Red Rebellion. Featherston informed Major Clarence Potter, an Intelligence officer investigating a possible Red Rebellion at the time, that Stuart's servant should be looked into. Captain Stuart used his family's influence to shield the servant. Later, after the Negroes rebelled, it became clear that Pompey had been a Red all along, tarnishing Stuart's reputation forever. Captain Stuart, humiliated and enraged, later sought death in battle, an act for which his father, Jeb Stuart Jr. of the Confederate General Staff, blamed Featherston. Stuart Jr. made certain that Featherston never rose above sergeant as revenge for his son's death. Jake neither forgot nor forgave the offense. Already embittered in the closing days of the war, Featherston began writing a book entitled Over Open Sights. In it, he wrote about the problems in the C.S.A. at the end of the Great War, and proposed his own solutions. This led him into politics, rising to power with the Freedom Party. After a series of set-backs for the Party, Featherston was elected President of the C.S.A. in 1933, after the stock market crash. In short order, he established dictatorial control over the Confederacy by: abolishing the Confederate Supreme Court; assassinating Louisiana governor Huey Long (who had dictatorial asperations of his own); imprisoning and  murdering his main rival, Vice-President Willy Knight and; amending the Constitution, making him effectively president-for-life.

Featherston's foreign policy had two goals: revenge against the United States and Confederate supremacy in North America. To that end, Featherston strengthened ties with Charles XI of France. He encourged anti-U.S. violence in Kentucky, Sequoyah, and Houston, the states that the C.S. had lost to the U.S. at the end of the Great War. United States President Al Smith pursued an accord, which led to the Richmond Agreement, granting plebiscites to the three states. Kentucky and Houston voted to return to the C.S.; Sequoyah, with a substantial population of U.S. transplants, remained in the U.S.

However, Featherston had entered into the Agreement in bad faith, making an empty promise that he would not pursue any more territory formerly belonging to the U.S. When he broke his promise by publically demanding the remaining territory, he was met with firm resistance from Smith. In the meantime, war was brewing in Europe, and, in 1941, the CS joined the Entente in declaring war on Germany. It soon became clear to Featherston that Smith was not going to back down and return the territory. It was also clear that the U.S. was not going to immediately stand with Germany as it had in 1914. Thus, he initiated Operation Blackbeard, the invasion of the U.S. wihout a formal declaration of war.

Due the initial military success of Blackbeard, Featherston became more cocky and ego-centric, taking a hands-on approach to the strategic aspects of Second Great War. The death of Al Smith during a C.S. bombing raid further inflated Featherston's hubris. He pushed for Operation Coalscuttle to succeed despite the rising losses it took as The Confederate Army pushed throught Pittsburgh and the warnings by his military commanders to pull out of the city. Dissent began to rise due to losses in Pittsburgh and in the Ohio salient.

Domestically, Featherston had instituted a series of public works programs. He also modernized agriculture, with an eye to displacing the blacks. Featherston had a strong sense of white superiority, common to Confederate citizens before the Great War. It was fanned into a burning rage during the war, when, despite the Red Rebellion, the increasingly-desperate C.S. used black soldiers on the battlefield. The troops were not particularly well-trained, and so did not always fight well. In Featherston's mind, the Red Rebllion had already proven Confederate blacks treacherous; as far as he was concerned, their inconsistent performance on the battlefield had lost the C.S. the war.

Featherston's rapid rise to power in the interwar years fed his ego, eventually giving him a sort of God-complex. After becoming Freedom Party leader and later President, he began to believe he was destined to acheive such power, and began to take all criticism as a grievous offence. By the time the Second Great War broke out, his early victories had him convinced that he was perfect in every way, completely incapable of error. That is why the defeats at Pittsburgh and Ohio came as such a rude awakening to him. His rising anger over his failure, coupled with his constant, manic repetitions of "We will beat them, dammit!", caused high-ranking members of his inner circle, such as Nathan Bedford Forrest III and Clarence Potter, to doubt his fitness to command the CSA.

After the Army of Kentucky was trapped and destroyed in Pittsburgh and the subsuquent destruction of the Confederacy's corridor through Ohio, Featherston began placing more and more hope into the uranium bomb project headed by Professor Henderson V. FitzBelmont of Washington University. He also diverted vital resources and manpower away from the main front in Kentucky, Tennessee and Georgia to protect the main "population reduction" facility in western Texas, Camp Determination. As the summer of 1943 turned into autumn, Featherston began looking for a decisive battle to be fought in front of Atlanta, a battle that will either buy more time for FitzBelmont's project and the population-reductions, or cost the Confederacy the greatest war in history and the loss of its indepedence.

Featherston is very fond of a certain big ol' floppy straw hat in his wardrobe, which he wears frequently.