Greater Caribbean Police States: Authoritarianism in the American Mediterranean

Before the planters arrived, the Mississippi River Delta was a swampy jungle. In his 1941 memoir Lanterns on the Levee , William Alexander Percy, a prominent member of the regional plantation elite, described what the Delta might have looked like in those early days, with an emphasis on the area’s fluid nature. “A still country it must have been then, ankle-deep in water, mostly in shadow, with mere flickers of sunshine, and they motey and yellow and thick like syrup.” 1 But in the early nineteenth century, news had started to spread about the fertility of the Delta soil. The younger sons of plantation families in the eastern states, looking for new land to plant staple crops, began to move west, turning the Deep South of the United States into the vertex of the cotton frontier. In Mississippi they settled near the river, which provided transportation, information, and recreation, in the form of leisure trips to New Orleans. “The real highway was the river,” Percy wrote in his personal history of the Mississippi Delta. The steamer Pargo regularly arrived on Sunday mornings in the Delta town of Greenville. Most people would be in church then, but when the Pargo ’s whistle blew, the men immediately stood up from the pews and made for the riverfront, to hear the latest news and gossips. 2 Knowledge was an important cargo aboard riverboats like the Pargo . 3