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.