Jake Featherston
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Jacob "Jake" Featherston (1886-1944) is a fictional character appearing in Harry Turtledove's Timeline-191 series, in which the Confederate States of America defeat the United States thanks to the failure of George B. McClellan to locate General Lee's Special Order 191, leading to British and French intervention in the American Civil War. Featherston appears as a leading antagonist in the series, from The Great War: American Front to Settling Accounts: In at the Death, rising from his rank as an artillery sergeant in the Army of Northern Virginia to the office of President of the Confederate States of America.
[edit] Appearance
Featherston serves in the series as analog to Adolf Hitler. He is physically very thin, raw-boned, and is often described as lanky, awkward and bony. He remained slender into his fifties, retaining his "dangerous" eyes, close-cropped brown hair, and a harsh, raspy voice. He was extremely petty and vindictive, taking the slightest mistake or remark as a personal affront and then vowing to take vengeance on the perpetrator, be it a single man, an entire race, or a whole country. Featherston also had the uncanny ability to vent his anger and frustration in a manner that captured the attention of his audience and holds it spellbound, enticing them to join him in his madness. While he is not an educated man, he is frequently described to have impressive intelligence and shrewdness.
Ultimately, Featherston was a victim of his own megalomania, as he forced himself to attempt to accomplish increasingly dangerous goals in order to keep up the impression that he was "great." He expressed several times his opinion that without him the Confederate States of America would amount to nothing, and that without him race relations would rot the core of the Confederate nation. He seemed to suffer from Narcissistic Personality Disorder, where he perceived himself to be the center of his universe. Since he held the highest position of power ever achieved in North America, and worked hard to get to the top, that only worked to stoke the fire within him.
[edit] Fictional Character Biography
Born the son of an (ex-)slave overseer sometime in the 1880s somewhere near Richmond, Virginia, Featherston grew up in a poor household and joined the CS Army at a young age.
By 1914 he was a sergeant in the First Richmond Howitzers, under Captain Jeb Stuart III. As part of the Army of Northern Virginia, Featherston fought on the Susquehanna River and then fell back towards Maryland. During this time he reported his suspicions to an intelligence officer about Pompey, Captain Stuart's body servant, being a Marxist rebel. The accusation would have more influence on Featherston's life than he could ever have imagined at the time. Not only did Pompey, protected from investigation by his prominent master, turn out to be a real Red when the Negro uprisings broke out, but the intelligence officer in question was one Clarence Potter, whose destiny would be forevermore inextricable with Featherston's.
Interestingly, considering his future career, at this stage Featherston is far from being a rabid racist. He had a rather ambiguous relationship with the blacks who do menial work in his unit, not lacking in grudging respect - especially after one battle when the blacks help him operate the unit's artillery after a U.S. barrage killed the white gunners. On the eve of the uprising, the leader of the blacks, Perseus, actually comes to say goodbye to Featherston and warn him to "be careful for a while". (In Mein Kampf there is a passage where Hitler recalls a time when he was well-disposed towards Jews and considered the prejudice against them unjustified.)
As the uprisings petered out in early 1916, Jeb Stuart III, who had destroyed his career by protecting Pompey, intentionally allowed himself a "heroic death" in combat. His father was General Jeb Stuart, Jr., a power in the Confederate General Staff at Richmond, who ensured that Featherston never made officer's rank despite his fitness for the post. Featherston - as noted, previously no more racist than other ordinary white Confederates - now burned with intense fury at 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 had begun pouring out his hate on Gray Eagle scratchpads (what would later become his autobiographical "Over Open Sights"). When the ceasefire went into effect he vowed to Clarence Potter that he would have vengeance on the blacks and the aristocrats running the War Department.
During the aftermath of the war, Featherston drifted for a short while, before joining the newly created Freedom Party. Swiftly establishing himself as head propagandist, it was not long before Featherston, aided by Party member Ferdinand Koenig, became its leader. With his raw energy and humble origins, Featherston had little trouble whipping up support from much of the Confederate populace, and it seemed by the early 1920s that he would surely be leading the country. But with the assassination of President Wade Hampton V in 1923 by a Party stalwart, the Freedom Party suffered a sudden and near-total collapse as a political force.
The following years were spent by Featherston repairing what damage he could, and waiting for his next opportunity. The vital discovery of the power of the wireless radio and his subsequent broadcasts did much to aid the Party's recovery. The damage caused by the Mississippi floods and the Business Collapse of the early 1930s ensured that the Freedom Party swept the elections in 1933.
Once he was legally elected President of the Confederacy, Featherston slowly and quietly twisted the Confederate Constitution into giving him more power. He maneuvered the Supreme Court into striking itself out of existence, provoked the black minority toward rebellion with race riots, created farm machinery to root them out of their livelihoods so he could incarcerate them in camps, and repealed the single term limit so he could run multiple times. In the meantime, the black rebellions gave the CSA a plausible excuse to reinstitute conscription and arm its airplanes. He manipulated USA Socialist president Al Smith to allow the states of Kentucky, Houston (West Texas), and Sequoyah (all former CSA states) to hold plebiscites to determine their futures. Kentucky and Houston voted to rejoin the Confederacy, while Sequoyah, which had been saturated with settlers from other parts of the north, remained a part of the USA.
By 1941, Featherston was ready for war. With the excuse of redeeming lost territory, he initiated the Second Great War in North America with a surprise air raid on Philadelphia and the immense success of Operation Blackbeard, which cut the USA in half through central Ohio. His megalomaniacal mindset would prove to be his undoing, however, and his expectations of quick victory were quickly dashed when Al Smith rejected his 'generous' peace offer. His downfall began 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 defiantly refused to withdraw even when his generals realized it was the sensible thing to do.
Though he suffered more defeats in 1943, losing occupied Ohio, as well as Kentucky, Tennessee, and Camp Determination, Featherston refused to admit defeat. When U.S. President Charles La Follette demanded the Confederates surrender unconditionally, Featherston went on the wireless to refuse the demand, and quickly responded by firing two rockets into Philadelphia from Virginia to prove that he was not ready to end the war.
Despite his displays of defiance, Featherston continued to lose more ground into 1944, losing Georgia and large parts of South Carolina and Alabama. His confidence only began to break after a coup attempt by Nathan Bedford Forrest III shook his confidence in his men. Even then, he believed that he would 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 used the first superbomb in warfare, the only Confederate superbomb was set off in Philadelphia, by General Potter.
As Richmond was falling to U.S. forces under Daniel MacArthur, Featherston fled to the Hampton Roads area of Virginia to give a speech to what remained of the Confederate States. After leaving the radio station, he calmly watched Newport News explode as a U.S. superbomb attempting to assassinate him went off. Featherston was annoyed at the display of US power, but took 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 (if only to himself and the Confederacy), he was still alive.
Well into 1944, with the Confederate cause all but lost, Featherston attempted to flee the more populous northern areas with many core Freedom Party and CSA officials, including General Potter. He wanted 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 found the bedraggled party and killed Featherston. Upon his death, his vice president, Donald Partridge, quickly moved to end the war, and the Confederate States' existence, by surrendering to U.S. forces.
