Jake Featherston

Featherston is driven largely by revenge and hatred. The "fire in his belly," as he calls it, drives him even in the years of political failure and through his presidency (and apparently keeps him thin while other men of similar age have put on weight).

Featherston blames blacks, and the powerful families that control the country, largely via the Whig Party, for causing the Confederate States to lose the Great War. His rise in politics to the position of President of the Confederate States was spurred on by his dream of overthrowing the status quo, and solving race relations in the country once and for all. Featherston is so sure that blacks are a threat to the Confederacy that, even as the United States begins to win the war, he continues committing resources to the genocide against them.

Featherston's racism, unlike that of the German Nazis or the Imperial Japanese militarists, is of a very unmystical kind. He does not seek to carry out a global genocide, but simply to "save" the Confederacy.[1] In contrast to his own designs for the Confederacy, Featherston would later criticise both Russia and the Ottoman Empire for their own genocidal acts against Jews and Armenians respectively, viewing both groups as essentially white.

Ultimately, Featherston is a victim of his own megalomania, as he forces himself to attempt to accomplish increasingly dangerous goals in order to maintain his own belief in his greatness. He expresses several times his opinion that, without him, the Confederate States of America would amount to nothing, and that race relations would rot the core of the Confederate nation.

Born the son of an (ex-)slave overseer in 1889 somewhere near Richmond, Virginia, Featherston grows up in a poor household and joined the CS Army at a young age. It is mentioned that he learned from his father various elements of "overseer lore" – i.e., how to detect when Blacks are lying or pretending ignorance.

By 1914 he becomes a sergeant in the First Richmond Howitzers, under Captain Jeb Stuart III. As part of the Army of Northern Virginia, Featherston fights on the Susquehanna River and then falls back towards Maryland. During this time he reports his suspicions to an intelligence officer about Pompey, Captain Stuart's manservant, being a Marxist rebel. Pompey is protected from investigation by his prominent master, however, and reveals himself as a real Marxist when the Negro uprisings break out. Featherston allows Negro workers to serve an artillery piece to repel a US attack. The Negroes themselves are even enthusiastic about serving with Featherston, commenting they would have helped him defend the position even if it came down to using pistols. Indeed, when first introduced, Featherston is in many ways a sympathetic character and his attitude towards Blacks is rather ambiguous - far from the fanatic, genocidal hatred he would develop towards them in later parts of his career.[2]

As the uprisings peter out in early 1916, Jeb Stuart III, who had destroyed his career by protecting Pompey, intentionally allows himself a "heroic death" in combat. His father is General Jeb Stuart, Jr., a power in the Confederate General Staff at Richmond, who ensures that Featherston never makes officer's rank despite his fitness for the post. Featherston, previously no more racist than other ordinary white Confederates, now hates blacks and aristocratic officers alike. His anger intensifies as the war starts to go badly for the Confederates. By the end of the war, Featherston has begun pouring out his hatred on Gray Eagle scratchpads in what would later become his autobiography, Over Open Sights, analogous to Mein Kampf. When the ceasefire goes into effect, he vows to Clarence Potter that he would have vengeance on the blacks and the aristocrats running the War Department.

In the aftermath of the war, Featherston drifts for a short while, before joining the newly created Freedom Party. Featherston establishes himself as head propagandist, and eventually becomes its leader, aided by Party member Ferdinand Koenig. With his raw energy and humble origins, Featherston has little trouble whipping up support from much of the Confederate populace, and it seems by the early 1920s that he would surely be leading the country. But with the assassination of President Wade Hampton V in June 1922 by a Party stalwart, the Freedom Party suffers a sudden and near-total collapse as a political force.

Featherston spends the next few years repairing the damage to the party, and waiting for his next opportunity. The vital discovery of the power of the wireless radio and his subsequent broadcasts do much to aid the Party's recovery. The Confederate Supreme Court's decision to allow President Burton Mitchel, formerly vice president to President Hampton, to run for election despite serving for a few months short of his predecessor's full six-year term, the damage caused by the Mississippi floods and the Business Collapse of the early 1930s ensures that the Freedom Party will win the 1933 Confederate Presidential Election.

Once he is legally elected President of the Confederacy, Featherston slowly and quietly twists the Confederate Constitution into giving him more power. He maneuvers the Supreme Court into striking itself out of existence (having ruled that Featherston's proposed dam-building project was unconstitutional as per Article 1 Section 8(3)), provokes the black minority toward rebellion with race riots, creates farm machinery to root them out of their livelihoods so he could incarcerate them in concentration camps, and repeals the single term limit via a stage-managed constitutional amendment process so he could run multiple times, effectively making him president for life. His vice president, Willy Knight, orchestrates an abortive coup by elements of the Freedom Party Guards formerly belonging to the Redemption League, believing that he had been cheated out of the Confederate presidency through the repeal of presidential term limits. This results in his impeachment, resignation and interment at Camp Dependable, and the appointment of CS Senator from Tennessee Donald Partridge (a womanising, joke-telling, unambitious incompetent, and Knight's polar opposite) as Vice President. Featherston easily wins the 1939 Confederate Presidential Election, being virtually unopposed due to the suppression of the Whigs as well as the Radical Liberals and Socialists both in terms of their party organisation and electoral base, the most notable example being the overthrow of Huey Long's Radical Liberal administration in Louisiana. In the meantime, the black rebellions give the CSA a plausible excuse to reinstitute conscription and arm itself. He manipulates Socialist US President Al Smith into allowing the states of Kentucky, Houston, and Sequoyah (all formerly part of the Confederacy) to hold plebiscites to determine their futures. Kentucky and Houston vote to rejoin the Confederacy with Houston also rejoining Texas, while Sequoyah, which had been saturated with settlers from other parts of the north, voted to remain part of the US.

By 1941, Featherston is ready for war. With the excuse of redeeming lost territory and with an Action Française-governed France having declared war on Germany to reclaim Alsace-Lorraine, he initiates the Second Great War in North America with a surprise air raid on Philadelphia and Operation Blackbeard (analogous to Operation Barbarossa), which cuts the USA in half through central Ohio. His expectations of quick victory are dashed when President Smith rejects his peace offer, however. His empire begins to unravel, starting with his disastrous attempt to take Pittsburgh in the fall of 1942 and the subsequent loss of an entire army trapped in a pocket there, because Featherston refuses to withdraw even when his generals realize it is the sensible thing to do, much like the Battle of Stalingrad. Meanwhile, Featherston increases the program of systematic genocide of the Confederacy's entire black population.

Though he suffers further losses in 1943, losing occupied Ohio, as well as Kentucky, Tennessee, and Camp Determination, Featherston refuses to admit defeat. When U.S. President Charles W. La Follette (who succeeded to the position in 1942 after Smith was killed when the Powel House was damaged during an air raid over Philadelphia) demands the Confederates surrender unconditionally, Featherston goes on the wireless to refuse, and fires two rockets into Philadelphia from Virginia to prove that he is not ready to end the war.

Featherston continues to lose more ground into 1944, losing northern Georgia, and large parts of South Carolina and Alabama. A coup attempt by Nathan Bedford Forrest III shakes his confidence in his men, and he begins to lose his grip on reality. Even then, he believes that he will be able to get his way through the use of superbombs, a technology he had poured everything he could into upon realizing the war would not be short. Shortly after Germany uses the first superbomb in warfare against Petrograd, the only Confederate superbomb is set off in Philadelphia, by General Potter. However, the bomb detonates on the outskirts of the city west of the Schuylkill River and doesn't affect any US Government buildings.

As Richmond falls to U.S. forces under Daniel MacArthur, Featherston flees to the Hampton Roads area of Virginia to give a speech to what remains of the Confederate States. After leaving the radio station, he calmly watches Newport News explode, as a U.S. superbomb attempting to assassinate him goes off. Featherston is annoyed at the display of US power, but takes it in stride, considering it was he who set off the first North American superbomb, that Newport News wasn't nearly as important a target as Philadelphia, and most importantly, he was still alive.

Well into 1944, with the Confederate cause all but lost and Texas having seceded from the Confederacy to sue for its own peace with the United States, Featherston attempts to flee the more populous northern areas with many core Freedom Party and CSA officials, including General Potter. He wants to lead them into the woods so that they could begin guerrilla action against the U.S., making occupation too hazardous for the United States forces to attempt. Ultimately, his plan was defeated by a guerrilla fighter named Cassius (son of Scipio/Xerxes), who finds the bedraggled party by chance and promptly shoots Featherston dead after recognizing his voice from frequent wireless broadcast. Upon his death, his vice president, Donald Partridge, quickly moves to end the war, and as it turns out, the Confederate States' existence as a nation, by surrendering to U.S. forces.