For thousands of centuries the river had roamed over its alluvial valley, its vast natural floodplain. The Mississippi River Commission, certain of its theories, constrained the river within levees, believing that the levees alone, without any other means to release the tension of the river, could hold within narrow banks this force immense enough to have spread its waters over tens of thousands of square miles, where millions of people would settle.
The Mississippi River Commission promised protection to this great valley, a valley filled with the richest earth in the world. It was earth rich enough that men would risk everything for it. Given just the promise of protection, large men willed that the valley would hum with money, and culture, and industry. And they waited to discover whether the great unintended experiment of the levees-only policy would prove a success or a failure.
Part Two
SENATOR PERCY
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.
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 spawned 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 class. 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 ownership, 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 masses 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 sunshine. 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 Association said, “Nature knows not how to compound a richer soil.” A 1906 scientific assessment 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, entrepreneurship, 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, assessed 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 boaste
d 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 hell.”
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 unencumbered 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 Washington. Meanwhile, his influence inside Mississippi spread, particularly over the nexus of race, money, and power. In 1879, when Eads was finishing 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 GILDED 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, and Henry Grady of the Atlanta Constitution, 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 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 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 relationship. 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 pushing 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. Title 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 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.
Rising Tide Page 11