A Brief History of Frontier: Expanding the Colony, pt. 2
If the councillors from Duligne and Madera had angered the council, the ratification of Underwood's constitution made them utterly livid. The constitution established several states, each built around one of the cities of FFC1079; it also abolished the colonial council and created a Senate, to which each state's population directly elected representatives, of a number in proportion to the number of residents of that state. It also established, separate from the Senate, a Colonial President, who served as the Federation's satrap on FFC1079. Perhaps more offensive to the councillors was the provision for term limits on both the President and the Senators; a President was elected to four-year terms with a limit of two terms, and the Senators to two-year terms with a limit of three.
The constitution prevented the council from either altering or abolishing it, but some councillors attempted to do both anyway. Most of the councillors angrily denounced the document and called for another vote, accusing Underwood again of either vote fraud or bribery, but their words fell largely on deaf ears, especially when a Federal audit found no evidence to back up the councillors' accusations. J. James Underwood was elected to the Presidency at the end of LY40, and he took the oath of office and loyalty to the Federation along with the Senators and the Supreme Court justices on a snowy New Year's Day.
The snow was to be Underwood's downfall; just after he had been sworn in, an assassin hiding in a nearby snowbank shot the new President through the head. At roughly the same time, the Federal Police came across several men who were preparing to destroy the new Senate with explosives. The assassin and saboteurs, all of them councillors who had not been re-elected, were jailed, brought before the newly-created Colonial Supreme Court, and summarily executed for treason. This served as a deterrent to the remainder of the ex-councillors, who refrained from taking further action against a government which they viewed as usurpers for the rest of their lives.
With the death of President Underwood, his Lieutenant President, Thomas Webster, stepped into the position. President Webster's agenda was similar to Underwood's; now that the population had equal representation, the next step was to continue expanding. In his first term as President, Underwood saw two new cities formed within existing states, as well as an additional state to the far southwest, where the grain fields began to turn to desert.
Webster's policies did not end with expansion, however. Where Underwood had taken a laissez-faire approach to economic growth, Webster was taking great pains to better the economy, including granting tax breaks for small producers and retailers and increasing the government subsidy of certain imported products (notably paper goods). To balance this, however, he convinced the Senate to increase the existing tax rate slightly across the board, which allowed the government to operate without going into the red.
One area in which Webster had a particular interest was the arts. Webster's mother had been an artisan, and he wanted to stimulate the production not only of crafted goods for export but of art and beauty in general. In order to accomplish this he set aside half of his salary as President and used it to establish the Webster Endowment for the Arts in LY44, a private charity which supported artists both financially and administratively, helping them to set up exhibits and to sell their work. He also worked to encourage government support of local artists and artisans, in addition to the generous assistance which the Federal government already provided on a much more diffuse scale.
Webster was re-elected to the Presidency at the end of LY44, but he merely continued on the same course and offered no new policies or changes in his second term. In LY49 he was succeeded by Patricia Hatfield, a former Senator from Madera who continued much as Webster had; when she retired after a single term and Gustav Schluter was elected, he continued the trend. It was not, in fact, until LY61, with Schluter's retirement and the election of Tyrone King, that the politics of FFC1079 changed significantly.