Rising Tide. Part 5

CHAPTER SEVEN.

IN 1841, TWENTY-YEAR-OLD Charles Percy abandoned an Alabama plantation worth a quarter of a million dollars and headed deep into the lush wilderness of the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta. He loaded furniture, equipment, supplies, mules, overseers, and slaves onto barges and flatboats, traveled down the Tennessee River to the Ohio, stopped briefly near Paducah, Kentucky, before continuing down the Ohio to the Mississippi, then proceeded two hundred more miles down it. Finally, he and his entourage unloaded near what would become the city of Greenville, Mississippi, then cut their way fifteen miles through a jungle of vines and cane twenty feet high to Deer Creek and some of the very finest land in all the Delta. They soon built a house with ceilings so high that even in dead summer its center hall was "a very cave for coolness and emptiness," and waited for barrels of whiskey, oranges, brandy, and oysters that had already been ordered from New Orleans to arrive. Charles Percy abandoned an Alabama plantation worth a quarter of a million dollars and headed deep into the lush wilderness of the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta. He loaded furniture, equipment, supplies, mules, overseers, and slaves onto barges and flatboats, traveled down the Tennessee River to the Ohio, stopped briefly near Paducah, Kentucky, before continuing down the Ohio to the Mississippi, then proceeded two hundred more miles down it. Finally, he and his entourage unloaded near what would become the city of Greenville, Mississippi, then cut their way fifteen miles through a jungle of vines and cane twenty feet high to Deer Creek and some of the very finest land in all the Delta. They soon built a house with ceilings so high that even in dead summer its center hall was "a very cave for coolness and emptiness," and waited for barrels of whiskey, oranges, brandy, and oysters that had already been ordered from New Orleans to arrive.

The Percys were home, home in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta-known throughout America as simply "the Delta." It is a region that conjures dark things in the mind. It has been called the South's South, Mississippi's Mississippi, the most southern place on earth. There, over the next century, the Percys became giants, generations of men who led both the South and the nation. These giants in turn sp.a.w.ned generations of writers, including William Alexander Percy, whose work remains in print half a century after his death, and Walker Percy, an award-winning novelist important enough to be the subject of literary biographies. The family story includes men who lived lives like Faulkner's Sartoris, only larger, and who were well known to Faulkner. It also contains men with dark secrets, dark enough and complex enough for a Faulkner novel. Some, haunted by death, died young and by their own hand.

T. S. Eliot wrote that the sea is around us, but the river is in us. The Mississippi River ran through everything that the Percys did. And the Percy story was intertwined not only with the river but with race, and power, and money, and evil. These were wild forces, yet the Percys did not simply represent a time and cla.s.s. They tried to put bridles on these forces and command them. Others ruled much larger personal empires like fiefdoms. Yet the Percys were the most commanding of all the planters and, in their own way, the most ambitious, more ambitious even than Eads or Humphreys.

Eads and Humphreys struggled with each other, and to contain the river. The Percys built upon what Eads and Humphreys had done by transforming the potential that the river had created into an entire society, extending far beyond their own holdings, and by making it conform to their own special vision. This immense task required them to contain both the river and great social forces sweeping through the nation. Yet, for a time at least, they succeeded.

THE DEMESNE the Percys shaped out of the river's potential was the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta. Resembling an elongated diamond, this Delta begins just below Memphis, widens to nearly 70 miles near the head of the Yazoo River (which means "river of death") at Greenwood, Mississippi, and extends south 220 miles to Vicksburg, where the Yazoo empties into the Mississippi. The Mississippi created this land, for thousands of years depositing ineluctably sweet topsoil, dense with nutrients and washed down from the rest of the continent, making a lush saucer of 7,000 square miles, almost twice the size of Connecticut. Then, as if marking its owners.h.i.+p, the river splayed sideways across the Delta; the Sunflower, the Tallahatchie, the Yalobusha, Deer Creek, now all tributaries of the Mississippi, all transverse it and once served as the main channel for either the Mississippi or the Ohio. the Percys shaped out of the river's potential was the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta. Resembling an elongated diamond, this Delta begins just below Memphis, widens to nearly 70 miles near the head of the Yazoo River (which means "river of death") at Greenwood, Mississippi, and extends south 220 miles to Vicksburg, where the Yazoo empties into the Mississippi. The Mississippi created this land, for thousands of years depositing ineluctably sweet topsoil, dense with nutrients and washed down from the rest of the continent, making a lush saucer of 7,000 square miles, almost twice the size of Connecticut. Then, as if marking its owners.h.i.+p, the river splayed sideways across the Delta; the Sunflower, the Tallahatchie, the Yalobusha, Deer Creek, now all tributaries of the Mississippi, all transverse it and once served as the main channel for either the Mississippi or the Ohio.

The Delta was wild and the river kept it so. In 1837 a European visitor observed the Mississippi as it roiled through this region and was chilled: "It is not like most rivers, beautiful to the sight...not one that the eye loves to dwell upon as it sweeps along, nor can you wander along its bank, or trust yourself without danger to its stream. It is a furious, rapid, desolating torrent, loaded with alluvial soil.... Pouring its impetuous waters through wild tracts, it sweeps down whole forests in its course, which disappear in tumultuous confusion, whirled away by the stream now loaded with the ma.s.ses of soil which nourished their roots, often blocking up and changing the channel of the river, which, as if in anger at its being opposed, inundates and devastates the whole country round.... It is a river of desolation, and instead of reminding you, like other rivers, of an angel which has descended for the benefit of man, you imagine it a devil."

The land, wrote another traveler, was "a jungle equal to any in Africa," with dense forests of cane and "giant trees" from which hung "great clinging vines of wild grape and muscadine." The density of growth suffocated, choked off air, held in moisture and a pulsing heat, was so thick a horse and rider could not penetrate; even on foot one needed to cut one's way through. Only the trees, some one hundred feet high, burst above the choking vines and cane into the suns.h.i.+ne. Stinging flies, gnats, and mosquitoes swarmed around any visitors. One pioneer reported killing fourteen bears in eight days. Another warned of wolves and "the fetid alligator, while the panther basks at [the river's] edge in the cane-brakes, almost impervious to man...nearly as large as a young calf. They are the most savage looking animal I ever saw. Their strong sinewy legs with large hooked claws like a cat could tear a man to pieces in a trice if they chose to."

The wild animals, the rattlesnakes and water moccasins, the yellow fever and malaria, made it, worried one settler, "almost worth a man's life to cast his lot in the Swamp."

Yet the river had made it worth the risk. The river left gold in the Delta. It was gold the color of chocolate, gold that was not in the earth but was the earth. Elsewhere one measures the thickness of good topsoil in inches. Here good lush soil measures tens of feet thick. A 1901 report published by the American Economic a.s.sociation said, "Nature knows not how to compound a richer soil." A 1906 scientific a.s.sessment concluded that the nutrients in the soil were unexcelled by those of any other soil in the world.

The Delta, however, overwhelmed individual farmers. To take the land from the river, to clear it, drain it, and protect it, required an enormous outlay of capital and labor. From the first the Delta demanded organization, capital, entrepreneurs.h.i.+p, and gambling instincts. It was a place for empire, and the Percys intended to transform what the river had created into empire.

At first, they and a few others only clung to narrow strips of the highest ground, the natural levees, usually within half a mile of the Mississippi and its tributaries. They carved fields out of jungle, built levees-rarely more than two or three feet high-and planted cotton. The vast and impenetrable interior remained an untouched offering.

By 1858, 310 miles of levees protected the Delta from the Mississippi. They protected adequately, largely because the Arkansas bank had weaker levees, or none at all. In floods the river simply overflowed the Arkansas side. So Delta planters began to thrive. After levee improvements, a.s.sessed values in five Delta counties leaped from $7,792,869 in 1853 to $23,473,115 in 1857.

Yet the region remained almost entirely wild. Even its settled parts resembled the frontier more than the plantation society of older parts of the South. It boasted few if any estates like those of Natchez, built on cotton wealth downriver, nor was it favored by the elegant sprawling oaks that shaded the mansions on the vast sugar plantations of Louisiana. In 1861 an area that later became three large Delta counties had not a single school, not a single church. That same year Humphreys' report referred to the entire Delta simply as "that great Swamp." The Delta was still, warned a man who perhaps saw too deeply into it, "a seething lush h.e.l.l."

AT AGE THIRTY, ten years after coming to the Delta, Charles Percy died. His younger brother W. A. Percy took charge of family affairs. Like his father a Princeton graduate with a law degree from the University of Virginia, this Percy understood power and had few illusions. He had opposed secession but immediately after Mississippi seceded raised a regiment of Confederate volunteers, became its colonel, and during the war earned the nickname "the Gray Eagle." It fitted him. At twenty-eight he came home from the war deep-voiced, white-haired, aloof, and steely-eyed, but also charming. A cold efficiency lay beneath that charm.

He came home to desolation. Federal troops had flattened virtually every town in the Delta. Grant in his efforts to conquer Vicksburg had destroyed numerous levees. Others had disintegrated without maintenance. In the spring of 1865 the Mississippi flooded and miles of additional levees were breached. Much of what had survived Union troops was washed away. In all of Bolivar County not a single town remained; its most populous town, Prentiss on the river, left no trace of having ever existed. Wilderness was rapidly reclaiming cleared land. Blue cane fifteen and sometimes twenty feet high, vines, even willow trees grew where cotton had once risen taller than a man's head. Returning soldiers found "a wilderness and a waste.... Our lands had grown up in bushes.... A desolate scene presented itself."

The first priority was to rebuild the levees. In December 1865, W. A. Percy reorganized the levee system, convincing the governor and the state legislature to create a new levee board, legally unenc.u.mbered by old levee board debts or bonds. (The state simultaneously created a "Liquidating Levee Board" that built no levees, only raised money to pay off old debts at pennies on the dollar.) It was an effort to bring order out of the chaos left by the war. Percy naturally controlled the active levee board; this gave him power. The board spent more money than any other enterprise in the area on everything from attorney fees, bond commissions, and printing contracts, which guaranteed that certain newspapers would support a board while others would oppose it, and it kept its deposits in favored banks-especially the one on whose board Percy sat.

Never forgetting the levees, Percy then began to address other needs as well, helping to organize a railroad that crossed the state from east to west. Almost immediately it became the most profitable of Mississippi's sixteen railroads, largely because Percy also helped get public bond issues to pay for its expansion. Ultimately, J. P. Morgan's Southern Railroad bought it.

The levee boards and the railroads would soon link W. A. Percy and, largely through him, all the Delta's interests and complexities to the financial markets of New York and London, and the political market of Was.h.i.+ngton. Meanwhile, his influence inside Mississippi spread, particularly over the nexus of race, money, and power. In 1879, when Eads was finis.h.i.+ng the jetties, Percy had relatively little to show for his influence. Only a fraction-less than 10 percent-of the Delta was developed. But the flow of events was moving Percy's way.

IT WAS THE G GILDED A AGE, the age of robber barons and great Wall Street manipulators, of vast fortunes and dominating eastern capital. The spirit of the age spread south and infected southern crusaders who now hoped to use commerce to do what the Confederate armies could not-defeat the North-creating a "New South." Led by people like James De Bow in New Orleans, editor of De Bow's Review De Bow's Review, and Henry Grady of the Atlanta Const.i.tution Atlanta Const.i.tution, southerners made economic development a sacred call.

The weapon was cotton still, both growing it and, now, bringing great textile factories to the South. The Memphis Daily Appeal Memphis Daily Appeal called cotton "more a king today...than ever before." Grady declared that cotton had put the South "on the threshold of a prosperity more brilliant than any in the past," and the masthead of his newspaper proclaimed, "The foremost branch of American industry is the culture and manufacture of cotton." called cotton "more a king today...than ever before." Grady declared that cotton had put the South "on the threshold of a prosperity more brilliant than any in the past," and the masthead of his newspaper proclaimed, "The foremost branch of American industry is the culture and manufacture of cotton."

In 1880, Grady estimated that if the twenty counties bordering the Mississippi River between Memphis and Baton Rouge were fully developed-the undeveloped land lay largely in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta-they could produce more cotton than the entire American crop of that year, a record harvest that exceeded the prewar peak by over a million bales.

Eads' success allowed Grady to make that prediction, for the establishment of the Mississippi River Commission promised protection from floods. The commission would set standards, oversee construction, supply funds to nearly bankrupt states and local levee boards. As a result, northern and foreign capital, which was building textile mills in the Carolinas, steel mills in Alabama, and rail junctions in Georgia, suddenly saw profits in Delta cotton fields.

Eads' influence extended further. As he began work on the jetties, he noted, "To facilitate trade, two great agencies are absolutely requisite...Transportation and Finance, and they are so inseparable...that the first may be not inaptly termed the bone and sinew and the last the nerve and brain of Commerce."

Indeed, in the nineteenth century transportation and finance were virtually identical. Railroads were were capital, the physical incarnation and representation of Wall Street. And by making New Orleans into a great port, the Eads jetties compelled this capital to bend toward it, to build a web of track paralleling the rivers that flowed south. Where track was laid, development followed. capital, the physical incarnation and representation of Wall Street. And by making New Orleans into a great port, the Eads jetties compelled this capital to bend toward it, to build a web of track paralleling the rivers that flowed south. Where track was laid, development followed.

The single railway most important to the lands along the Mississippi River was the Illinois Central, headquartered in New York, where its executives were major Wall Street figures. It was a symbiotic relations.h.i.+p. In the mid-1870s, the company fell into desperate financial straits; its directors, gambling everything on the success of the jetties, invested the company's scarce resources in a line to New Orleans. With Eads' triumph, the Illinois Central's traffic jumped 500 percent in three years, and profits gushed forth. The road's president, Stuyvesant Fish, called the extension to New Orleans "the salvation" of the company and committed the railroad to the region. (Years later, Chauncey Depew of the New York Central Railroad demanded to know why Fish was "stealing" business from New York for New Orleans. Fish replied, "I [am] only trying to get for New Orleans what New York and other northern ports had stolen from it during and immediately after the Civil War.") Simultaneously, Percy was helping craft tax and land policies to tie railroads, especially the Illinois Central, directly to the rich land the river had created. During the economic chaos accompanying Reconstruction, 2,365,214 Delta acres-nearly all of it undeveloped, totaling more than half the entire Delta-had been forfeited to the state for back taxes. In 1881, with the river commission generating new confidence, with cotton prices rising, and with Percy pus.h.i.+ng from backstage, the state made two huge land deals.

First, it sold 774,000 acres of the Delta to a railroad that had laid not a single mile of track and owned not a single locomotive. But this road did have a franchise and state tax exemptions worth millions of dollars, and it ultimately became the Yazoo & Mississippi Valley Railroad, the Y&MV, later called "the yellow dog" in blues songs after the color of its trains. The Y&MV was wholly owned by the Illinois Central and shared the same directors.

A few weeks after the first sale, the state sold 706,000 acres of Delta land for $2,500 in cash plus nearly worthless old levee board bonds that had a face value of only $45,954.22. t.i.tle to this land went through several hands before ending up with the Southern Railroad, controlled by J. P. Morgan.

Now large capitalists owned the land, men who had created vast fortunes and who intended to use the Delta to make more. And the Delta began to explode into flower.

Town after town sprang into existence around a tiny depot. The History of Bolivar County History of Bolivar County reads like a litany to the Y&MV railroad: "The coming of the railroad in 1884 marks the beginning of the Boyle community." "Gunnison first saw the light in a cotton field, Nov. 18, 1889, when the foundations of the...depot was [ reads like a litany to the Y&MV railroad: "The coming of the railroad in 1884 marks the beginning of the Boyle community." "Gunnison first saw the light in a cotton field, Nov. 18, 1889, when the foundations of the...depot was [sic] laid at...the plantation owned by Arvin Gunnison." "The life of Benoit began in the year 1889 with the coming of the Y.&M.V. Railroad." If a town could not attract a railroad or grow up around a depot, it might simply relocate: "The entire town [of Concordia] moved south three miles to greet the welcome railroad."

DEVELOPMENT PAID. The veins of chocolate-colored gold the river had deposited meant money, not simply the kind of bare living that poor whites scratched out of the land elsewhere in the South-a living so poor that they were losing their lands and being forced to work in mills-but serious money, money for the railroads, money for the planters, money for the suppliers, money for the cotton factors, money even for blacks. Even through a depression in the 1880s, the Y&MV Railroad poured forth profits. And it grew. In 1890, 235 miles of its track traversed the delta. In 1903, 816 miles crisscrossed it, and the expansion continued. One stretch of road was known as "the Pea-vine" because its circuitous route zigzagged from plantation to plantation, each having its own station; when there were dances, a locomotive pulling one or two cars would run through the night, stopping to pick up belles or their young men at their plantations and waiting if they were not ready, delivering them to the party, delivering them home at dawn. If this seemed inefficient, profits were enormous. The Y&MV soon became more profitable, Fish confided, "than the Illinois Central taken as a whole."

Two-thirds of the world's cotton supply came from the American South. The river had made Delta soil so lush that without fertilizer it produced far more than other land did with fertilizer, even the black loam of Alabama. Often Delta yields doubled and tripled that of other soils. Delta cotton, for reasons of climate and soil, even had some resistance to the boll weevil, which had entered Texas from Mexico in 1892, spread east at 40 to 70 miles a year, and was devastating the rest of the southern crop.

In the early 1900s, world textile manufacturers began to fear a cotton famine. British and northern investors poured ever more cash into the Delta. Development required three things: protection from the river, transportation into the interior, and labor. Increasingly, labor shortages were limiting the Delta's growth. No area of the South was more short of labor than it.

In the South, of course, the issue of labor was inextricably bound up with race. It was also inextricably linked with the society the Percys intended to create. On the issue of labor, the Percy family would play more of a role than on any other.

THE D DELTA had always been too wild for one man or one family to subdue, and from the first, settlers had brought slaves and organization with them. Immediately after the Civil War, Mississippi and other southern states tried to resolve labor and racial questions by pa.s.sing a "Black Code" that effectively reestablished slavery. One Mississippi provision required blacks to sign annual labor contracts or be arrested for vagrancy; the local government would then sell their services to contractors. Congress reacted to such laws with anger and inst.i.tuted "Radical Reconstruction," setting up new state governments that threw out those laws and putting a buffer of federal power between southern whites and blacks. had always been too wild for one man or one family to subdue, and from the first, settlers had brought slaves and organization with them. Immediately after the Civil War, Mississippi and other southern states tried to resolve labor and racial questions by pa.s.sing a "Black Code" that effectively reestablished slavery. One Mississippi provision required blacks to sign annual labor contracts or be arrested for vagrancy; the local government would then sell their services to contractors. Congress reacted to such laws with anger and inst.i.tuted "Radical Reconstruction," setting up new state governments that threw out those laws and putting a buffer of federal power between southern whites and blacks.

Percy recognized both the economic problems and the need to accept a new order, and advocated a solution. Planters had land but no cash. Blacks had labor but no land; they also resisted working in gangs under a foreman, which smacked of slavery and overseers. So Percy, who understood both the capital shortage and the importance of making labor content in order to maximize efficiency, advocated sharecropping. One man even credited Percy with inventing the system, and contemporaneous reports in other southern states did attribute the system's beginnings to Mississippi. Planters supplied land; blacks supplied labor and gained some independence. Profits were theoretically split fifty-fifty (the cropper got more if he had his own mules), making blacks and whites partners and by implication comparable if not equal. However abusive sharecropping later became, because of the system's implied partners.h.i.+p of white and black, initially whites resisted it while blacks welcomed it.

Sharecropping may have helped alleviate the Delta's desperate shortage of labor in another way. Planters and their labor agents were scouring the rest of the state and the South recruiting former slaves, promising-and delivering-better pay and treatment than elsewhere. The new system may have helped attract blacks, for in a steady stream they came. From one Mississippi county outside the Delta, a single Delta plantation recruited 500 workers. From Columbus, Mississippi, near the Alabama line, 100 black workers left for the Delta in a single week. From Uniontown, Alabama, 250 blacks boarded a single train, heading for the Delta. From Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia as well, thousands of blacks came.

The advocacy of sharecropping was not the only reflection of Percy's sensitivity to the inefficiencies of racial animosity. As Reconstruction dragged on, as the federal government became less and less willing to support black rights with Army bayonets, Percy, like most southern white leaders, became increasingly aggressive in his efforts to seize power back from Republicans and Negroes. But he did not want to frighten away either labor or northern investors. Elsewhere across the South, Democrats took power by murdering hundreds of blacks-including dozens in the Delta-intimidating thousands away from the polls, and perpetrating ma.s.sive vote fraud. But Percy prevented the Ku Klux Klan from operating in his own Was.h.i.+ngton County and no murders were reported there; on one occasion, Percy waded into a crowd to stop the lynching of a black man accused of murdering a white. He also offered blacks minor county offices on a "fusion" ticket, and enlisted Ca.s.sius Clay, a Kentucky newspaperman and prewar abolitionist, to urge Negroes to vote for his slate. Then he formed a Taxpayer's League that spread rapidly across the state and demanded a rollback of taxes. Though not above vote fraud, he considered violence counterproductive; it disturbed unnecessarily. More smoothly than elsewhere, Democrats "redeemed" Was.h.i.+ngton County.

Percy, now a power statewide, prepared the trumped-up articles of impeachment which forced Adelbert Ames, the last Reconstruction governor, to leave the state. Yet after serving one term as speaker of the state legislature, Percy never again ran for office and even declined appointment as a U.S. senator (although only after arranging for a close ally to be named). He preferred to exercise power backstage while concentrating on transforming the river's land into a New South empire.

In the Delta in general, and particularly in Percy's Was.h.i.+ngton County, blacks continued to be relatively well treated, at least compared to most of the South. When a former Percy slave killed a white man, he was not lynched; instead, he was tried and acquitted. In 1877, when a white man boasted of murdering a black, a mob of whites lynched him him, while the Times Times of Greenville, the county seat, announced, "Public sentiment excuses the lynching." of Greenville, the county seat, announced, "Public sentiment excuses the lynching."

A more important test of sentiment came in 1879 with the first great migration of blacks out of the South, the "Exodus" to the "promised land" of Kansas. Outside the Delta, Mississippi whites cheered the departure; one paper hoped "that thousands [of Negroes] will follow...till the whites have a numerical superiority in every county in Mississippi." But in the Delta, planters threatened to seize boats and barges to keep labor from crossing the Mississippi River; a former governor called for creating local committees to protect black rights "with unceasing vigilance"; and a convention of planters warned blacks that they would "be subjected [to prejudice] in a greater degree at any other place on the American Continent" than in the Delta.

Kansas turned out not to be the promised land. In the end, more blacks entered the Delta from elsewhere in the South than left in the exodus. The crisis ended and growth continued.

Then in 1888, at the age of fifty-three, Colonel W. A. Percy, the Gray Eagle, died. Through his fingers had run nearly every thread of power or investment in the region. His son LeRoy stepped forward to replace him. He would do more than merely that.

EVEN BEFORE his father's death, LeRoy had emerged as a young man to watch. Like his father, he was not a sentimentalist. Like his father, he... his father's death, LeRoy had emerged as a young man to watch. Like his father, he was not a sentimentalist. Like his father, he...understood things. After graduating from the University of the South at Sewanee, Tennessee, he, like his father and grandfather, attended the University of Virginia Law School-and finished a three-year program in one year, in time to be admitted to the bar on his twenty-first birthday. Fittingly, his first significant client was the state's second levee board (the first was headquartered in Greenville), which was organized in the northern Delta and hired him as its attorney although he was only twenty-four years old and did not live in the area this board controlled. By the early 1900s he was a prominent attorney whose plantations exceeded 20,000 acres, on the verge of eclipsing anything his father had done. things. After graduating from the University of the South at Sewanee, Tennessee, he, like his father and grandfather, attended the University of Virginia Law School-and finished a three-year program in one year, in time to be admitted to the bar on his twenty-first birthday. Fittingly, his first significant client was the state's second levee board (the first was headquartered in Greenville), which was organized in the northern Delta and hired him as its attorney although he was only twenty-four years old and did not live in the area this board controlled. By the early 1900s he was a prominent attorney whose plantations exceeded 20,000 acres, on the verge of eclipsing anything his father had done.

He had a thick chest, a handlebar mustache, and, though only in his early forties, a full head of silvery hair. Handsome in only a general sort of way and of average height, still he had a remarkable presence. His eyes pierced and chilled and, when he was in good humor, sparkled. He had grown up used to people deferring first to his father and then to himself, and his bearing a.s.sumed precedence and deference. When he spoke, he expected that others would give his words weight. If they failed to, this was their failure, not his.

In all his dealings he sought every advantage, including small ones, and gave no quarter. When his sister-in-law left her purse on a train, he demanded the $8 it had contained from the president of the Pullman Company. A monogram on goods purchased in Venice was a "disappointment" and required compensation. A resort in North Carolina must "quote a lower rate," in return for which he promised "much more patronage from this section...if I am pleased." When he brought the first concrete road to Was.h.i.+ngton County, he saw to it that it ran directly past his plantation. He also had expectations. His brother committed suicide, and when his brother's boy entered Stanford, LeRoy wrote him a long paternal letter that concluded, "While, if you should ever need help, if I am in a position to extend it and thought you deserved it, I will probably do so, I have never felt the obligation to take care of any able-bodied grown man."

Yet if he focused on small things, he also saw the world in wide-angle. Occasionally, he fell into a deep moodiness, sometimes exploded in inexplicable rages. He had pa.s.sion; he also had the coldness both to see what some might call "the greater good" and to sacrifice whatever or whoever was necessary to achieve it. He had a sense of irony, and with it came the ability to step back and see himself and his cla.s.s as if from a distance. He opposed requiring lawyers to attend law school because "it has a tendency to build up sn.o.bbishness in the profession and to keep poor men out of it." And he advised another nephew about to leave for Europe: "I think the 3rd cla.s.s travelling is absolutely all right. I have been on many big s.h.i.+ps where the 3rd cla.s.s pa.s.sengers, composed largely of school teachers and young students, were much more interesting people than the other cla.s.ses. There is a feeling of comrades.h.i.+p and also an amount of intelligence which does not prevail upstairs."

LeRoy's father had represented the Illinois Central and helped found a small railroad. The Illinois Central would pay LeRoy more than it paid any outside attorney in the country, except one Wall Street lawyer who worked nearly full-time for it, and he would serve on the board of J. P. Morgan's Southern. His father had been speaker of the Mississippi legislature and declined a U.S. Senate seat. LeRoy would hunt with President Teddy Roosevelt, be a friend of three justices of the United States Supreme Court (two of them chief justices), become a U.S. senator, a director of a Federal Reserve bank, a director of the Rockefeller Foundation, a trustee of the Carnegie Foundation.

In 1885, LeRoy had his first child, a son, and named him William Alexander Percy after his own father. Young Will was never close to his father but idolized him and recalled, "He read Ivanhoe Ivanhoe once a year.... He was kin to Hotspur and blood brother to Richard Coeur de Lion, and he looked the part.... [T]o the day of his death he was beautiful, a cross between Phoebus Apollo and the Archangel Michael. He could do everything well except drive a nail or a car; he was the best pistol-shot and the best bird-shot, he was the fairest thinker and the wisest, he could laugh like the Elizabethans, he could brood and pity till sweat covered his brow and you could feel him bleed inside. He loved life, and never forgot it was unbearably tragic." once a year.... He was kin to Hotspur and blood brother to Richard Coeur de Lion, and he looked the part.... [T]o the day of his death he was beautiful, a cross between Phoebus Apollo and the Archangel Michael. He could do everything well except drive a nail or a car; he was the best pistol-shot and the best bird-shot, he was the fairest thinker and the wisest, he could laugh like the Elizabethans, he could brood and pity till sweat covered his brow and you could feel him bleed inside. He loved life, and never forgot it was unbearably tragic."

His son also recalled, "No one ever made the mistake of thinking he wasn't dangerous."

Young Will had reason to know. His father lay at the center of a great web of power he had woven that stretched from its center in Greenville not only to Jackson and New Orleans but outward, to Was.h.i.+ngton, New York, even London. In the Delta, the web hung heavily from the bluffs of Memphis to the bluffs of Vicksburg, glistening with moisture from the Mississippi River. Young Will would lie in this web as well. He would lie trapped and poisoned in it.

CHAPTER EIGHT.

LEROY P PERCY had a clear conception of the society he intended to build. It would be a great agricultural factory that chested its way into the forefront of the New South, more humane than, but every bit as efficient as, the textile mills in North Carolina or the coal mines in Alabama. It would have rich and poor and little middle, but it would provide opportunity. It would be a place in which a superior civilization might flourish. And, although Percy was not burdened by sentimentality, he expected this society to adhere to a code of honor. If ruled by an elite, that elite would take care of its less fortunate members. had a clear conception of the society he intended to build. It would be a great agricultural factory that chested its way into the forefront of the New South, more humane than, but every bit as efficient as, the textile mills in North Carolina or the coal mines in Alabama. It would have rich and poor and little middle, but it would provide opportunity. It would be a place in which a superior civilization might flourish. And, although Percy was not burdened by sentimentality, he expected this society to adhere to a code of honor. If ruled by an elite, that elite would take care of its less fortunate members.

Building this society seemed possible. Its center would be Greenville, a town that even took advantage of disaster when, in the late 1800s, the river swung sideways and block after block of downtown collapsed into the river. Lawyers and cotton brokers moved their offices back, while the levee board and the Mississippi River Commission built a new levee, then poured concrete over it to protect it from the currents. This created a huge sloping wharf hundreds of yards long that helped make the port the busiest between Memphis and New Orleans. By the turn of the century, demand for cotton was steadily increasing. Between 1900 and 1904 alone the number of world cotton spindles jumped by 12 percent. In 1904 a "bull clique" of New Orleans traders drove cotton to 17.5 cents a pound, its highest price in decades and four times the price of just six years earlier. Meanwhile, young Greenville gentlemen frolicked; mimicking Sir Walter Scott, until World War I they tied ladies' scarves to their lances and galloped at full speed in jousting tournaments.

Yet before Percy's ideal society could be realized, one problem remained. Capital and transportation needs were being met, making labor the key to everything. Too much of the wealth the river had created, the most fertile land in the world, remained jungle. Levees were rising higher and capital was pouring into the Delta, but there was no labor to clear it, nor enough to farm what was cleared. This was true despite the benefits blacks were gleaning from what Percy was trying to do. Probably a higher proportion of Delta farms were owned by blacks than was the case anywhere else in the country; large numbers of these black owners had sharecroppers themselves. But even this opportunity had not lured the workers needed to the Delta. Percy declared: "The South must not be dependent for its prosperity upon the negro. There is not enough of him, and what there is is not good enough."

So he began looking for a source of white labor. In so doing he hoped not only to supply the region's needs but also to somehow escape "the Negro question." One breed of whites he would not recruit: the poor whites from small farms in Alabama or Georgia or the Mississippi hills who were being driven off the land by economics. Percy did not seek them for two reasons: he considered them inferior to blacks, and he believed their presence would exacerbate rather than ease any racial tension.

Instead, he and Charles Scott, possibly the Delta's single largest planter, asked Illinois Central president Stuyvesant Fish for help: "We are without sufficient labor to work that which is already cleared. These conditions grow more and more acute each year.... [We] must turn elsewhere for a new supply of farm laborers."

Fish had every reason to help. By then he and Percy had become friends. They also used each other. Bred to power and wealth, Fish was descended from the original Dutch founders of New York City; his father, Hamilton, had been governor of New York, a U.S. senator, and secretary of state (descendants would represent the same New York district in Congress from 1910 until 1994). Stuyvesant himself controlled banks and insurance companies as well as railroads, and ranked among the shrewdest and most influential players on Wall Street. His uses to Percy could be many. In turn, Percy helped the railroad legally and politically in Mississippi and Louisiana, where most of its profits lay. He also helped Fish personally when Fish and several partners created a giant plantation in the Delta; these partners included Speaker of the House "Uncle Joe" Cannon, the most dictatorial speaker in history, and Senator William Allison, chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee.

Personal relations aside, Fish recognized that, with less than one-third of the Delta developed, clearing more land could greatly enhance Illinois Central profits. The railroad itself still had hundreds of thousands of Delta acres for sale, and it also had a land settlement department that began operating in the 1850s when the railroad received a federal land grant, the first to any railroad, of 2.5 million acres.

Fish promised Scott and Percy the Illinois Central would "leave no stone unturned" in the search for labor. In addition, Fish instructed a deputy to accept any suggestions about stimulating immigration from "the Delta's three leading planters, John M. Parker, Charles Scott, and LeRoy Percy."

PERCY, PARKER, AND S SCOTT all had plantations just outside Greenville, all traveled often to Europe, and all moved in the highest circles politically and socially in New York, Was.h.i.+ngton, and New Orleans. Scott would run for governor of Mississippi. Parker would become governor of Louisiana. Percy would become a U.S. senator. Their friends.h.i.+p, particularly that between Parker and Percy, would become an axis around which much that happened in the Delta would revolve. all had plantations just outside Greenville, all traveled often to Europe, and all moved in the highest circles politically and socially in New York, Was.h.i.+ngton, and New Orleans. Scott would run for governor of Mississippi. Parker would become governor of Louisiana. Percy would become a U.S. senator. Their friends.h.i.+p, particularly that between Parker and Percy, would become an axis around which much that happened in the Delta would revolve.

The three men had ideas, and so did the Illinois Central's land commissioner. They talked. The land commissioner changed the region's name on railroad circulars from "the Yazoo Delta" to "the Yazoo Valley" to avoid connotations of floods. He urged Dutch, English, and German stockholders to tell their countrymen of the opportunity there. He sent an exhibition train loaded with products of Delta soil to the Midwest. He had the railroad give away thousands of free pa.s.ses to midwestern farmers to examine the Delta. He went to Iowa, Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin, and elsewhere to extol Delta soil, and distributed tens of thousands of copies of a pamphlet, The Call of the Alluvial Empire The Call of the Alluvial Empire, that cited head-high cotton and "an experimental demonstration yielding 220 bushels an acre" of corn. In the Midwest a yield of 40 bushels an acre was excellent.

But the wild had not changed. Making farms of it still required economies of scale, while the railroad was committed to selling its own land in lots the size of Midwest farms. And there was something dark about Mississippi, something dark and deep that men did not want to venture into. Despite a decade of effort, only a few hundred white farmers moved to the Delta.

Immigrants were then pouring into America by the millions, filling northern cities and factories, providing cheap, good, white labor. Percy decided to recruit Italians. In the 1870s, Delta planters had made a concerted effort to bring in Chinese from Hong Kong and from the labor gangs of the intercontinental railroads. The Chinese had left the fields, many opening tiny grocery stores, over fifty in Greenville alone. (Unable to speak English, they provided their almost exclusively black clientele with a pointer for picking out merchandise.) But Percy was not deterred by this failure. He decided to recruit large numbers of Italians to the Delta. If they succeeded as sharecroppers, tens of thousands might follow. Then the Delta would hum like the vast factory he envisaged, and the labor problem would disappear. So would the Negro problem. The Italian government agreed to cooperate, and John Parker urged President Teddy Roosevelt to listen to Percy's "eloquence on the subject."

PARKER AND R ROOSEVELT had had similar childhood experiences and had become friends. Parker, an asthmatic and weak child, had learned judo, performed hard manual labor, bred fighting c.o.c.ks, and avoided church. He grew tall, proud, determined, and successful, and became president of the New Orleans Cotton Exchange and the New Orleans Board of Trade and a director of the Illinois Central; he went back and forth between Mississippi and his mansion in the New Orleans Garden District. had had similar childhood experiences and had become friends. Parker, an asthmatic and weak child, had learned judo, performed hard manual labor, bred fighting c.o.c.ks, and avoided church. He grew tall, proud, determined, and successful, and became president of the New Orleans Cotton Exchange and the New Orleans Board of Trade and a director of the Illinois Central; he went back and forth between Mississippi and his mansion in the New Orleans Garden District.

Through Parker, Percy also became a friend of Roosevelt. Roosevelt understood the South; his mother was a Georgia aristocrat and two of his uncles had fought for the Confederacy. Both he and Percy loved to hunt, with Percy traveling as far as Alaska to shoot and Roosevelt traveling even farther. They were both direct, humorous, charming, charismatic. No one could dominate a room like Roosevelt; his energy simply filled it. But Percy's presence in a room was felt too. LeRoy's son Will, while attending Harvard Law School, met Roosevelt and judged him "scarcely a genius...[but] the biggest man I have ever seen outside of private life." In private life, Will considered his father bigger.

Percy met Roosevelt on a bear hunt Parker organized, a gathering of money and power in the Delta wilderness, including the president, two cabinet secretaries, Percy, Fish, and several others. (Governor Andrew Longino had been invited but, having just annoyed Percy over legislation involving the Hartford Insurance Company, was never informed of the time or place of the hunt, and so was left behind.) The guide was Holt Collier, born a slave of the Percy family.

The hunt itself was brutal and intimate. The dogs cornered the first bear in a lagoon surrounded by tall cane; there the bear stood at bay. Collier and Parker found it there and wanted Roosevelt to have the first kill. So Collier roped the bear to prevent its escape. Then Roosevelt arrived. He refused to shoot it. Parker also disdained a distant kill, instead circling behind the bear as dogs leaped at its front, then ramming his hunting knife under the bear's ribs and into its heart. It was November and crisp. Parker stood there, his chest heaving, his hands dripping blood, his boots covered with mud, as the bear died.*

After this hunt, Percy routinely dined with Roosevelt whenever he visited Was.h.i.+ngton. There Percy and Parker could count among their friends an extraordinarily powerful grouping: both the Republican Speaker of the House and the House Democratic leader John Sharp Williams, a Delta planter from Yazoo City, along with the Republican chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee and the president. Parker confided that he never "made any direct request of President Roosevelt for that would embarra.s.s him." Instead, he and Percy would go through back channels to "Speaker Cannon and whatever was desired would be realized."

Percy's experiment with Italian labor would soon force him to call upon his powerful friends.

THE EXPERIMENT took place at the vast, 11,000-acre Sunnyside Plantation in Chicot County, Arkansas, directly across the Mississippi River from Greenville. The plantation already had its own railroad and a telephone line to Greenville in 1898, when the O. B. Crittenden Company, Greenville cotton factors, took it over. The company's partners were Crittenden, Percy, and Morris Rosenstock (whose grandson is Civil War historian Shelby Foote). Percy was not the first to bring Italians there. Sunnyside's previous owner had started doing so in 1895, but after only a few months he had died in an accident in New York. Then malaria and yellow fever had struck the Delta. The tiny Italian colony had disintegrated. took place at the vast, 11,000-acre Sunnyside Plantation in Chicot County, Arkansas, directly across the Mississippi River from Greenville. The plantation already had its own railroad and a telephone line to Greenville in 1898, when the O. B. Crittenden Company, Greenville cotton factors, took it over. The company's partners were Crittenden, Percy, and Morris Rosenstock (whose grandson is Civil War historian Shelby Foote). Percy was not the first to bring Italians there. Sunnyside's previous owner had started doing so in 1895, but after only a few months he had died in an accident in New York. Then malaria and yellow fever had struck the Delta. The tiny Italian colony had disintegrated.

Percy was intent on succeeding. He and Scott personally went to Italy to recruit workers and hire labor agents. In all, they brought several thousand Italians to the Delta, not all for Sunnyside. They performed well enough that in 1904 Percy boasted to the Manufacturer's Record Manufacturer's Record that Italians were "in every way superior to the negro.... If the immigration of these people is encouraged, they will gradually take the place of the negro without their being any such violent change as to paralyze for a generation the prosperity of the country." that Italians were "in every way superior to the negro.... If the immigration of these people is encouraged, they will gradually take the place of the negro without their being any such violent change as to paralyze for a generation the prosperity of the country."

Soon 47 Delta plantations were working as many as 180 Italian families each. Alfred Stone, a Percy friend and neighbor who was both an agricultural and social scientist, had earlier written in Publications of the American Economic a.s.sociation Publications of the American Economic a.s.sociation, "Every step taken in the development of this section has been dependent upon, and marked by, an increased negro population." Now Stone seconded Percy's opinion: "It is always difficult to get a negro to plant and properly cultivate the outer edges of his field-the extreme ends of his rows, his ditch banks, etc. The Italian is so jealous of the use of every foot for which he pays rent that he will cultivate with a hoe places too small to be worked with a plough."

But the Italians did not consider the experiment so successful. The South did not welcome them. The most grievous incident occurred in 1891, when a corrupt New Orleans police chief involved himself in Mafia rivalries and was murdered; a jury was supposedly either bribed or frightened into acquitting the murderers. The next day many of the city's young leaders-including John Parker-issued a "call for action"; in response a crowd stormed the jail and lynched eleven Italians, including those just acquitted. The incident was hardly isolated. A year later three Italians were lynched in Hahnville, Louisiana; in 1899 five were lynched in Tallulah, Louisiana; in 1901 two were murdered outside Percy's own Greenville. In 1907, after another violent incident in Mississippi prompted the Italian government to demand an investigation, the governor informed the State Department that the victim deserved his fate because he was "a very dirty, low-caste Italian, of the 'Dago' type-very mouthy...causing [others] to be discontented with their work."

Though some Italians at Sunnyside were making money-in six years a single family saved $15,000 in cash-most were sinking into debt and growing bitter. Percy squeezed his tenants hard, charging "flat" annual interest of 10 percent on all advances, whether borrowed for one month or twelve, a routine practice in Mississippi but one that violated Arkansas law. Yet Percy ended the practice only after his manager warned, "I think we are taking some risk.... [Tenants are] making very close investigations about this point."

One Italian answered with a pamphlet t.i.tled Don't Go to the Mississippi Don't Go to the Mississippi, warning that there Italians would find only "slavery and fever"; he distributed it in New Orleans and Italy. In December 1906 a barn at Sunnyside exploded into flame. It was arson; the Italians were learning the revenge of the poor white.

In response, men with guns began patrolling the plantation. Some Italians were beaten. Some ran off. Tensions escalated.