Rising Tide

by John M. Barry

  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 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 passing 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 instituted “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 partnership 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 massive vote fraud. But Percy prevented the Ku Klux Klan from operating in his own Washington 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 Cassius 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” Washington 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 Washington 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, while the Times 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…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.

  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 assumed 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 Washington 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 passion; 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 class as if from a distance. He opposed requiring lawyers to attend law school because “it has a tendency to build up snobbishness 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 class travelling is absolutely all right. I have been on many big ships where the 3rd class passengers, composed largely of school teachers and young students, were much more interesting people than the other classes. There is a feeling of comradeship 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 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 Washington, 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 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.

  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 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, Washington, and New Orleans. Scott would run for governor of Mississippi. Parker would become governor of Louisiana. Percy would become a U.S. senator. Their friendship, particularly that between Parker and Percy, would become an axis around which much that happened in the D
elta 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 passes 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, 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.”