Jonathan Chaffins II
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Jonathan Chaffins II | |
|---|---|
| Personal | |
| Affiliation | House Chaffins |
| Profile | |
| Profession | Businessman |
Jonathan Chaffins II was a Terran Hegemony businessman and founder of the Autocracy of New Virginia.
Contents
History[edit]
Autocracy of New Virginia and the Virginian Union[edit]
Jonathan Chaffins II, The extremely wealthy owner of Chaffins Colonial Development Corporation, a key player in the investment and colonization boom of First and Second Exoduses, the rich and utterly spoiled Chaffins spent the ever increasing wealth his father's investments earned in profligate fashion, of which the Autocracy was the most grandiose. Displeased at having to yield sovereignty to local governments on his colonial holdings, Chaffins created the Autocracy to allow him rule a private empire with him as a king, locating eight worlds near the Aquila Rift far from the oversight of the Terran government and taking great pains to obscure their location and discovery. Despite the distance, backed by a corporate empire specialized in developing colonies, Chaffins had no difficulty in arranging his private empire. Unfortunately while an able corporate CEO, Chaffins was ill-prepared to rule as a king, alienating the population of the Autocracy in short order.[1]
In a move that would effectively doom the region to a future of stagnation, Chaffin's last grasp at power (before his lynching) was to scuttle most of the Autocracy JumpShip fleet — excepting, of course, his private yacht, the M. L. Crassus, which possessed 152 tons of gold and platinum furnishings. Virtually marooned in the unknown region and with Chaffin's heirs more interested in battling over his estate in the Inner Sphere than reclaiming control, the colonists replaced his Autocracy with a standard federal republic (using boilerplate from Chaffins' CDC government handbooks) and making their lives on the eight worlds of the newly inaugurated Virginian Union. Unfortunately all eight systems were established with some degree of industrial overspecialization and the loss of most of the colony JumpShips would prove crippling, technology on the worlds of the Union decaying to sustainable twentieth century levels as their growth slowed to a crawl. With virtually no means of maintaining a connection between the worlds, the concept of the Union as an interstellar power was a nonentity by the twenty-sixth century, each world turning inward with increasing balkanization.[1]