Sermide: from the banks of the Po river to the Mississippi

The passenger list of the ship Città di Napoli, departed from Genoa September 19, 1905 and docked in New York on October 6th. It enumerates the first families of migrants from Sermide and nearby villages. Migrants of the ships Montevideo, Sicilia, Manuel Calvo, Antonio Lopez, Duca degli Abruzzi, Buenos Aires then followed. This time they were heading neither to Brazil nor to Costarica but rather to Mississippi where they were going to cultivate cotton. The places had quite exotic names such as Robinsonville, Leland, Rosedale, Greenville. By the end of 1907 the migrants totaled almost 300. The last of an emigration, which begun in 1895, was interrupted in 1897 and restarted in 1899. Emigration first had involved the region of Veneto and Marche and then extended to the Bolognese and Modenese Apennine mountains as far as Vernio, the province of Pistoia with the final inroads into the southeastern tip of Lombardy.

Adelelmo Luigi Tirelli,  the labor agent, had been very elusive during his 1904 tour to promote migration to Mississippi cotton fields; no better information had been supplied by his sub-agents on location, they were more interested in the commission rather than the well-being of potential migrants.

The surface area of the states of Arkansas and Mississippi is almost 90% that of Italy’s. The most important city in Arkansas (Arkansas’s population totals about 2,752,000 of which 80% is white, 20 % is African American) is Little Rock with about 185.000 inhabitants. Jackson instead is the leading city of Mississippi (Mississippi’s population totals about 2,910,000 of which 61% is white, 39% is African American) with about 180.000 inhabitants.

The Mississippi Delta is an ellipse shaped alluvial and fertile region that extends across both shores of the same river in the mesopotamic area lined by the course of the Arkansas and the Yazoo Rivers and meanders from Memphis to Vicksburg, about 150 miles further south. Instead the delta of the Mississippi River is 300 miles further down in New Orleans. The Mississippi Delta then is the distinct northwest section of the state of Mississippi between Mississippi and the Yazoo Rivers with a spread in Arkansas.
The reclamation of the region, undisputed domain of forests and swamps, dates back to the early 1800s at the same time as the first cotton crops produced by African American slave labor. While the Civil War abolished slavery, the Federal government did not change the state of things. The economic and political power firmly remained in the hands of the planters: African Americans became either tenant or share-cropper farmers, losing even some of their rights on account of ad hoc laws (Black codes) especially designed to control their labor, activities, and civil rights. This perspective reduced the motivating force towards any kind of improvement except their taking their liberty to go wherever they desired thus making the life of the cotton planters miserable. This migration often leads to the unhappy exodus to Kansas City, St. Louis, and Chicago. 
African Americans became unreliable, consequently a problem. Southern politicians and planters tackled the issue with a dose of atavist racism leaning towards the denigration of their capabilities and justification of the intense propaganda campaign aimed at promoting the South to the thousands immigrants arriving into the United States. These efforts were nullified by the low salaries paid by planters; the Italians for instance accepted mostly factory or mine work to hoard money quickly and return to Italy. The attempts to lure independent farmers even from other states failed because the west was cheaper. Nobody wanted to confront the dominant class of the South, archaic and conservative and with a population prevalently African American. The real fear was that replacing African Americans was socially equivalent to being considered non whites and living at the margins of society.
The first Italians engaged in the Delta worked on the levees at Friar Point, Coahoma County for the cotton planter Charles Sessions in 1880 and soon after the story of Sunny Side Plantation began.
On April 9, 1887, Austin Corbin, a New York banker and owner of the Long Island railroad  incorporated the Sunny Side Company from the nephew of the famous American statesman John C. Calhoun. The Company planned to restore the semi-abandoned 10,000 acres of land that lay in the hollow part of Lake Chicot, in southeast Arkansas in front of the Mississippi. An internal railroad was built to haul cotton to the dock for further transportation across the river to Greenville, Mississippi, the most important cotton center of the region at the time. Besides all the facilities related to the cotton industry, the company also prepared appropriate lodgings for future colonists. Everything was ready for the start of the new colony as Corbin had envisioned. To remedy the manpower problem, Corbin made an agreement with the Italian ambassador Saverio Fava and Alexander Oldrini, head of the Labor office at Ellis Island. Also the mayor of Rome, don Emanuele Ruspoli was involved in the scheme: he took charge of sending a hundred families per year for a period of five years. A contract was drawn up and after the political resolution of several differences with American authorities concerning the 1885 law that forbade the arrival of migrants with labor contracts, the first group of migrants reached New Orleans, Louisiana on November 29, 1895 aboard the Chateau Yquem. It consisted of 98 families, 303 adults, 101 adolescents and 127 children; altogether 562 people. They came from the Marche region above all where Ruspoli had large properties of land around Senigallia, Emilia, and Veneto. The first cotton crop was in the late summer of 1896 and on June 4^th of that year Austin Corbin died after being thrown out of his carriage near his property at Newport, New Hampshire. His son in law George S. Edgell took command of the Company. The second group of 72 families left Genoa aboard the Kaiser Wilhelm on December 17, 1896 and arrived in Sunny Side via New York on January 5, 1897. In the meantime, notwithstanding the spiritual guidance of Father Pietro Bandini, the colony started to disband for several reasons linked to health and economic problems. According to the statistics of the Sunny Side Company, in 1896 out of a population of 544 Italians there had been 24 deaths, a mortality rate of 42 per 1,000, while in 1897 out of a population of 944 souls, 932 of them arrived directly from Italy between 1895 and 1897, 72 people died—22 adults and 44 children versus 56 newborn babies. The colonists wanted to flee right away, but did not have the means to do it. However, the desperation continued and during the winter of 1897-97, the colony fell apart. The complaints sent to Italian authorities and corroborated by the various investigations such as the one made by Rossati in 1898, could not change this situation full of hardships.
The other concern regarded the cost of the land contracts: 160 dollars per acre was 50-60% more expensive than the most productive lands of the region. The houses, actually shanties, were overvalued at 150 dollars. The water was not drinkable and the supervisors treated them roughly if not badly. Finally, the volatility of the price of cotton plus the continuous expenses, especially medical, didn’t guarantee a steady income in spite of their grueling work.
At the end of 1897 a group, mostly comprised of Veneti, followed father Bandini to Northwestern Arkansas to establish the colony of Tontitown, another group went to Missouri with A. M. Piazza to form the village of Rosati, which is still in existence, while others went to Shelby in Mississippi, Irondale, Alabama, or simply returned to Italy.
As of 1 February 1898 the Sunny Side Company leased the plantation to LeRoy Percy, a businessman and senator, Orlando B. Crittenden, a cotton factor and Morris Rosenstock, a prominent entrepreneur all from Greenville, Mississippi. After the project to turn Sunny Side into a model colony populated by Italians, proprietors of their own land, the new management changed the sale contract into rental, but this didn’t stop the exodus. In 1899 the number of families had dwindled from 174 to 20 for a total of 97 people, mainly from Marche, but in 1900 they had increased to 42 totaling 142 people. Why? What happened?
In spite of diseases, deaths and all kinds of vexations, some Italians were successful expecially the ones who cultivated fertile lots and could take advantage of high cotton prices. Italians had learned the cotton trade very fast. The cotton planters headed by LeRoy Percy favored the presence of Italian peasants to contrast the ever increasing demand for manpower. To get round the American law against contract immigration as done with the first colonists at Sunny Side, a very ingenious scheme was put in place. Some Italians, already employed by the Sunny Side company store such as Pierini and Catalani, turned themselves into immigration agents. They prepared false affidavits, formal sworn statements, with lists of families of potential migrants signed by fictitious sponsors who would guarantee for them. These call notices were sent to the Italian consulate in New Orleans for authentication and then mailed to their subagents in Italy. At the beginning, mostly were sent to Marche. To those who accepted to leave for the Delta, the agents, through cotton planters, advanced the cost of the voyage by ship, the train journey and the amount to show the American officers at their arrival in America. They were also given a list with the answers to possible questions that they had to learn by heart.
This is how hundreds of Marchigiani, Modenesi, Bolognesi, Pistoiesi, Veneti, and Mantovani left their homeland at different intervals for the plantations of Sunny Side, New Gascony, Red Leaf in Arkansas; Clarksdale, Cleveland, Indianola, Greenwood, Shola, Longwood, Shaw, Arcola, Hampton, Dockery, Greenville, Vicksburg, Natchez in Mississippi and Mounds, Newellton and Lakeport in Louisiana, just to mention a few. And they soon got into debts up to their necks: They had to refund the cost of their trip: ship and train tickets from New York to Norfolk, Virginia and then to either Vicksburg or Memphis, the minimum amount of 50 dollars required at Ellis Island, the advance for foodstuffs, the doctor’s fees, everything at a fixed rate. They were also charged for the hired African American labor to speed up the cotton picking, the cost of the mules, as exorbitant as their support, always based on annual basis although only used seasonally. The cotton crop was always controlled by the Company that deducted expenses for transportation, packing, speculated on the cotton seeds and prevented the colonists from leaving the plantations until they had paid all their debts. Whoever tried to escape was subject to arrest. A federal crime of peonage, was extensively applied to African Americans and also to Italians who were in similar conditions, notwithstanding its manifest illegality towards the 14^th amendment of the Constitution of the United States. The mechanism was simple and used almost everywhere; get the colonists into debt, block them on the plantations and use the law to force them to respect illegal contracts that they had signed without proper awareness.
Some made it, some did not. The situation in the Delta was immutable. Diseases were rampant due to the climate, but most of all due to the chronic poor hygienic sanitary conditions worsened by the malaria fevers or spells and poor nutrition. After the success in the Marche region, the agents who netted a large commission for every family persuaded to leave, pointed northwest towards the provinces of Modena, Bologna, and even Pistoia, where many of the first settlers of Sunny Side came from. It was 1904-1905 when searching for large families to be dispatched to the cotton fields took place.
The overall situation on the plantations along the Mississippi was worsening. The Italians underwent the same treatment reserved to the African Americans. It is worth reminding the lynching of the 11 Italians in New Orleans in 1891 and the more recent one in Tallulah, in northeast Louisiana, close to the plantations of Mounds, Lakeport and Newellton where Modenesi and Ferraresi were employed, where five Italians had been lynched in 1899.
The Illinois Central Railroad officials attempted to appease the Italian ambassador in Washington, Mayor des Planches—quite responsive compared with his predecessor Saverio Fava—and invited him to cross the United States on their services while visiting Italian settlements. However, the trip only served the purpose of reinforcing his idea that Italians had little chances of progressing in regions full of negative aspects. As a matter of fact few immigrants had made it to the Delta. Jews from Central Europe were active in commerce and real estate, followed by Chinese and Lebanese. In agriculture there remained only discouraged African Americans and whites of English origin who had abandoned farming on the hills east of the Delta and the Italians. The embassy continued to register complaints mostly related to peonage, bad living conditions and violations of Federal laws. The police system that terrorized African Americans was practiced against everybody while the whole judiciary system was controlled by a few prominent individuals, all connected among each other. Wealthy whites who dominated the system, poor whites who did not get along with African Americans, African Americans who had to put up with a lot of injustices and Italians searching for their space.
The ambassador formally asked the American government to investigate about the status of the Italian colonies on southern plantations. The investigation was assigned to Mary Grace Quackenbos, Assistant U.S. District Attorney for the Southern District of New York and started in July 1907.
In this opposed and controversial scenario, the activity of the immigration agents had no pauses, favored by the huge profits, the limited power of Italian immigration, consular offices, and American authorities.
One of the most active agents was a Mantovano who had arrived just before the Great migration.
Adelelmo Luigi Tirelli, baptized Dallelmus Aloysius, was born in Carbonara Po, Mantova on October 3, 1844, the son of land owners, Luigi and Paola Pradella. He left for Pennsylvania in 1882. He then transferred to Vicksburg, Mississippi where he became a naturalized American citizen on August 22, 1887. Officially he tended a fruit and vegetable stand. He had married Antonia Fugace in 1875; in Pennsylvania his son Paul was born in 1878 and his daughter Elsie was born in 1883. Clarence was born in New York in November 1884. When his daughter Dilcy was born in 1887, he was already in Mississippi. She died in 1968.
Like many other shop-keepers he got involved in the trade of Italian immigrant labor with the assistance of James Roselli. In 1904 Tirelli traveled to Italy where he had contacts with some of his sub-agents in the province of Modena and most of all in his hometown. In Sermide he procured personal data through Silvio Negri, station master, mayor and also owner of a furniture store. Mary Grace Quackenbos clearly mentions him in the transaction regarding Achille Poletti together with Andrea Rossi and a clerk at the vital statistic office, all from Sermide. His steamship agency was located at 406 Washington Street in Vicksburg. One of his letters addressed to Poletti on June 28, 1906 explains the procedure to follow to call his cousins from Italy (obviously to avoid problems with immigration authorities with regard to the Contract Labor Law of 1885, which prohibited the importation of foreigners under contract for the performance of labor). Poletti would write to his cousins in Italy. They would get in touch with the city clerk of Sermide, Luigi Cavicchini without letting anybody know. He and his accomplice would give them all the necessary explanations and details pertaining to their departure as soon as the documents to migrate were ready. Quackenbos states that two months before her report of 28 October 1907, Tirelli had been put on trial in Italy with other 16 people for three different violations of the Italian immigration laws.
He had been accused of fraudulent misrepresentation of reality, of furnishing false instructions finalized to immigration and false use of legal statements and thus condemned for these crimes respectively to one year and ten months plus a penalty of 1.223 lire, eighteen months plus a penalty of 600 lire and six months and a fine of 300 lire. Quackenbos doesn’t document this information. The research made in Italy to find this sentence, especially at the tribunal of Pavullo, was unsuccessful.
Tirelli got away with it also in the United States, in spite of the several charges against him and the judgment passed on June 1907 in Italy. In November 1907, right after the revealing investigation made by Quackenbos, the Italian ambassador Des Planches complained to the secretary of commerce and labor, Oscar Strauss that Tirelli, Roselli and Umberto Pierini, notorious labor recruiters and illegal immigration agents, being free, continued their activity unpunished. Actually the attention given to the matter by the Federal authorities and the press had changed the situation and Tirelli, to avoid legal proceedings, had moved to Memphis, Tennessee, where according to the 1910 Federal census he was not suspected. His method was based on highlighting the success of a few people such as the ones working at Friars Point for Charles Sessions but not sufficient to demonstrate the efficacy of Italian migration to Mississippi. A. L. Tirelli was the man behind the migration from Sermide and nearby villages that involved about 300 people from 1904 till 1907. The main destinations of the Sermidesi in Mississippi were: Robinsonville, a few miles south of Memphis; Rosedale, Leland, Indianola, and Longwood around Greenville.
The investigation by Mary Grace Quackenbos focused on Sunny Side, but there are extensive reports on the conditions on the plantations scattered between Memphis and Natchez. Today there are no more Italians in Robinsonville, a community of a thousand people.
Mario Bassi is buried in the nearby abandoned cemetery in Bowdre. In 1906 the plantation owned by W. K. Herrin consisted of 550 acres of corn and 1,200 acres of cotton. It was one of the unhealthiest areas of the territory and in spite of the small number of families that never exceeded twelve. Mary Grace Quackenbos was appalled by the overall conditions found  there  and it seems that she didn’t want to add to her negative impressions. However, as emphasized by the  forthcoming quotations in italics extracted from her investigation, she was usually quite elaborate and descriptive. 
There were four deaths in less than a year. The Mantovane families on location were those of : Policarpo Poletti, Vittorio Galvani, Bartolo Bassi (he eventually returned to Sermide), Achille Poletti, Underigio Bertolani, Reversilio Bertolani, Guido Guidorzi, Pietro Mantovani, Amedeo Avanzi, Rizieri Furini. They had been canvassed by  Tirelli’s sub-agents and allured to Robinsonville by the mirage of easy money, in unspecified places, where women could make from 1.50 to 3 dollars a day and children up to 80 cents. When the prepaid tickets arrived, none of them, also due to their ignorance, suspected a potential swindle, although the documents were signed by people who should have been familiar with them but they were actually unknown to them. Tirelli met the families upon their arrival in Memphis, escorting them to the Robinsonville railway station, thirty miles away and penetrating into the countryside for another six. The plantation was full of African Americans so the Mantovani were lodged in some huts near the swampy river, Buck Island Creek, not far from Lost Lake. The water of the river that meandered through the plantation was, yellow green, covered in some places with thick vegetation and rotting logs. The tremendous stench emanating from the marshy wood plus the humid and sweltering climate was the best for cotton growing.
Daily, Italian women fetched that horrible and undrinkable water walking back and forth carrying their terracotta containers. Quackenbos remarks that rusty water pipes lay semi-hidden by the tall grass. They had been bought by the planter months earlier to calm down the complaining tenants but they were never used. The status of the plantation is easily perceived. Wake-up at four every day and right after the superintendent, a certain Albuck would check to make sure all were at work, with his gun slung over his shoulder.
The young physician of the plantation did not do anything but  prescribed “chill tonics” which were only panaceas. He too, like other physicians in the Delta, denied the harmfulness of the water attributing its color to the density of the plants.
To prove Tirelli’s scam, Quackenbos attached a letter sent to one of the Robinsonville’s tenants, Rizieri Furini, supposedly called by Policarpo Poletti. Furini stated that he had never met Poletti. Poletti on his turn sent a letter to the Italian consul in New Orleans clearly declaring that he did not know and had never written to Rizieri Furini. He had never thought of calling that family and most of all to bringing them to that miserable land, where no law protected the poor Italians who were desperate and in dire straits. His only thought was to be brought away from there as quick as possible. To demonstrate the falsification of the names, Quackenbos also attaches the passenger manifest of Ellis Island.
On May 2, 1907, Policarpo Poletti, Vittorio Galvani, Bartolo Bassi and Achille Poletti went to Memphis looking for jobs. They were chased by five men who caught them and at gunpoint ordered them to return to the plantation and keep their mouths shut. They escorted them back to the plantation. The five of them were accused of peonage.
Underigio Bertolani, Roversilio’s brother asked the Italian consul who had visited the plantation to tell Mr. Herrin that he wanted to leave the place. He was not indebted and his brother offered to settle any payment pending that might surface later. Apparently Herrin accepted. At the railway station, Bertolani was held back by a clerk but managed to catch the train for Memphis. The next day, April 2, 1907, he was arrested in downtown Memphis by a policeman accompanied by Herrin. Quackenbos continues her narration explaining that Bertolani asked to see the Italian consul but instead was taken to the police station where he was compelled to sign a document that he was not able to read. He was then taken back to the railway station and put on the train. Herrin was always with him. He even had a handgun in his pocket. Once they got to Tunica, Bertolani was imprisoned again for debt. He was released after two days when Policarpo Poletti and Amedeo Avanzi signed a bond for 100 dollars and Bertolani pledged not to leave the plantation. His alleged debt was 25 dollars but he claimed to be creditor of 40 dollars. Also in this instance the accusation was peonage.
Guido Guidorzi, Luigi Guidorzi, Rizieri Furini, Pietro Mantovani, and Amedeo Avanzi also went to Memphis looking for different work. At the railway station they met the omnipresent Herrin who didn’t say anything. They felt safe and bought a train ticket to Birmingham, Alabama, where plenty of jobs were available either in the mines or foundries. After a couple of hours near Holly Springs, Mississippi a policeman approached the window of the train, pointed a handgun at them ordering them to get off. They were detained for three hours when Herrin arrived and asked whether they planned to return to work in the plantation. They asked to see the Italian consul but Herrin claimed to be the consul. Eventually they were put under lock and key, taken back to the railway station and sent back to Tunica where they were imprisoned for six more days. While there, labor agent James Roselli from Greenville visited them and promised to take them to the consul. Instead he took them back to Herrin’s office in Robinsonville with the aid of Tirelli and another policeman. They were forced to sign a contract to work out their alleged debt making use of the interpreting and testimony of the two Italian swindlers aka labor agents who were later indicted.
Today the sojourn of the Mantovani in Robinsonville is evidenced only by the abandoned tombstones full of brushwood in the cemetery of Bowdre where the decease3d Italians were buried.
Longwood, Mississippi is only three miles from Greenville where in early 1900s; it used to be the most important cotton center of the region. In 1905 Dunbar Marshall, owner of the plantation, imported many Italians through Tirelli. His manager, whose harsh behavior towards his fellow countrymen was repeatedly denounced, was Italian interpreter, Eugenio Gentilini. Isaia Predieri of Sermide was involved in one of the many cases of alleged peonage:

I brought my wife and children on prepaid passage tickets sent by Tirelli. I was taken to Longwood, Miss. where my transportation debt was fixed at $150. At the close of the second-year my debts increased to $400. My two children died of fever. I left Longwood in March 1907 and went to the home of Antonio Biondini who lives near Greenville. He gave me work and I intended to stay there. The next day my wife came. After ten days two policemen from Greenville appeared and arrested me. They took me to the Greenville station where they handcuffed me. I was taken in custody to Longwood and from there to Erwin, two stations below. I was brought before a Justice of the Peace on charge of debt. He gave me a choice between paying $400, going to the convict farm, or going back to the plantation to work out my debt. Biondini had come with me and offered a cash bond of $10; this was refused and the Justice repeated the proposition. Afraid, I decided to return to Longwood where I afterward worked 4 months. Then I was allowed to leave, by paying $20. I had no contract at any time

Instead, the most consistent group of Sermidesi went to Rosedale.
The living conditions at Rosedale were essentially similar to those of other plantations, in spite of the interest shown by its owner, Charles Scott, a famous lawyer and candidate for governor of the state of Mississippi when the question of Italian immigration was widely debated. Scott had been was quite favorable to Italian immigration since its beginning and had tried to gain support also through a voyage to Italy. About 30 families who worked for him were imported by Tirelli. From May 29, 1906 to February 28, 1907, over a population of 12 families 8 deaths occurred: Federico Magri, 29; Ines Magri, 2; Ines Barbieri, 2; Ugo Moi, 12; Sergio Guidorzi, 7; Maria Rampani, 18; Rosina Vincenzi,7.
The peonage cases at Rosedale demonstrate that despite the favorable public statements towards the Italians made by Scott, he entrusted the management of his plantation to unscrupulous overseers and labor agents that he was unable to control. Many complaints of mistreatment were also filed here. As an example this is the declaration made by Pietro Vincenzi:

I came from Sermide, Italy with five other families. I was held at Ellis Island and put in a detention room. Later a man came and calling my name, said ‘Your relative Dardani Luigi has sent you $100.’ I had never heard of Dardani, but was taken into an office in the immigration station where I was given $40. This I found later charged against me at Rosedale. Nick Curcio, the Rosedale interpreter met me there. Being unable to bear the unhappy conditions, in the month of March 1907, I decide to leave with Rampani Giuseppe, his brother Cesare, captain Fortunato and my son Antonio. Starting form Rosedale at 11 p.m. we walked along the railroad until we reached Round Lake, Miss., about 8 a.m. the following day. There we purchased tickets for Memphis, and had boarded the train when two men armed with revolvers ordered us back. We were searched and taken to a grocery store at Gunnison where we were kept overnight, watched by a policeman. We were then returned to Rosedale and put in prison where we suffered with cold and hunger and where we were kept with negroes. We were told that we would not be set free unless we signed a promise to remain on the plantation until July. I signed the promise as there was no other alternative but in about 40 days I made a successful escape.

The following is Argia Moi’s affidavit who fled with her children:

I am the wife of Giuseppe Moi. We came to Rosedale canvassed by agent Tirelli, on an affidavit signed by Umberto Berloucini of whom we had never heard. In 18 months we made no progress. All were sick with fever; my husband was two months in bed; my son Hugo, 10 year old died; also son of my daughter Guidorzi Sergio died.
Seeing our distress was growing from day to day we decided to leave. I went ahead with my children—my husband was to stay and finish the crop. While I was sitting in the railroad car with my children, the plantation manager, interpreter Mascagni and a policeman came and ordered me to get out. I refused and was threatened with arrest, I decided to obey and my son was literally thrown from the car to the ground. I went back but later in the day determined to face imprisonment rather than remain under such conditions at Rosedale and I again boarded the train and got away successfully.

The investigation made by Mary Grace Quackenbos consists of hundreds of pages and emphasizes an impressing series of abuse of power both physical and economical. Her report was harshly criticized by LeRoy Percy who did not fully recognize her authority since she was a woman attorney from the North presumably with insufficient knowledge of southern customs. Percy resorted to all means to discredit her work at the U.S. Department of Justice to warrant the validity of the Mississippi system.
Actually Mary Grace Quackenbos succeeded in bringing O. B.Crittenden, one of LeRoy Percy’s partners with the charge of peonage against Angelo Casavecchia. He had abandoned the Vaucluse plantation (Sunny Side) and fled to Greenville with an alleged debt of $1,200 with his fellow co-worker Domenico Nobili who had a similar debt. Both were arrested illegally while already on the train to Birmingham, Alabama and forced by Crittenden and his friendly policemen to return to Vaucluse. This act violated section 1990 & 5526 of the U.S, statutes. Besides peonage, they were charged for the illegality of work contracts and their wicked application towards the tenants. O. B.Crittenden was given a light sentence thanks to a jury in favor of the cotton planters which disclosed the illegal practices till then perpetrated with impunity in the Delta. However, this fact would precipitate a change.
Now that Austin Corbin’s dream of a model colony for the South had abruptly finished, which regulations existed between the planters and the workers?
The more common contracts in place were rental and share-cropping. Mary Grace Quackenbos noticed that the Italians preferred renting which made them more independent, but the output was closely related to the fertility of the land assigned, and physical health and number of active family members, that obviously changed from tenant to tenant.
The plantation was a company based on profit made by speculation on everything. The list started with the company store supplying their basic necessities at exorbitant prices, followed by the excessive rental land prices that reached $7.50 per acre, and then profits made on the cotton produced by the tenant which were bought at low prices and resold at much higher prices with a consequent profit. Other income came from keeping the seed to pay for the ginning process, although the seed belonged as a rule to the tenant. Another source of income was the resale of the seed in the market. Profit was also made on: ginning, wrapping and tying cotton bales. Transporting cotton also made a profit of one dollar per bale. A rebate was also charged on doctor’s fees: one dollar per mile, 2 to 3 dollars per visit and at least 25 dollars in case of hospitalization. The company kept 20%. All mules were sold at the same price. A flat interest rate of 10% was applied to all transactions made by the tenants such as cash advances, transportation or rent.
The sum advanced by the company which included transportation and the fees paid to the immigration agents was then easily recovered with handsome interests.
In the case of African Americans and automatically of the Italian immigrants, the plantation system was based on constant debt, where the entire family group represented only a number, an entry on the ledger of the company and the immigration agents’ book of accounts.
The master class refused to admit the injustice of its labor system: their refusal to face the facts hindered their ability to attract Italian migrants.
This situation involved both cotton plantations and some textile mills such as the Premier Mills of Barton, Arkansas. They were also investigated by government authorities. The ruckus raised by the legal controversies following the investigation made by Quackenbos generated great attention towards the living conditions of the Italian laborers in Arkansas and Mississippi. Her generalized accusations against the cotton planters, who were highly regarded in high society including President Theodore Roosevelt who was a personal friend of LeRoy Percy, did not change the state of affairs immediately. The sentences albeit symbolic deepened the knowledge of the immigration problem. Italian authorities in the United States and Italy realized the danger they were in and the American South was practically banned. This is how the Italian migration to the Delta was stopped: the dream of colonization by immigrant labor was carried out only to a minimum extent.
The theories stated by the cotton planters and railroad magnates who desired the replacement of African American labor with the more qualified Italian labor  for the future development of the South fell through due to their blindness. They treated the Italians as they did African Americans and therefore deprived them of their status of white men. Italians would assert their identity, only years later through many compromises, as Americans of Italian descent; always distinct.
The way of life in the South was too complicated, especially in a vast growing country with plenty of opportunities.
In 1905 the number of families at Sunny Side had increased to 127. In 1912 their number had dwindled to 60 and in 1920 the last remaining families moved to Lake Village.
The appearance of the boll weevil, the destructive beetle that devastated cotton farms in 1907, precipitated a situation openly unfavorable to Italian immigration. The only alternative left to cotton planters was to renew their fluctuating relationship with African American labor, still linked to the territory and to the system. At least for the time being.
The apex of Italian immigration to Mississippi  was reached in 1910 when it accounted for 2.3% of the white population of the Delta. From that time onwards the groups concentrated in Bolivar and Washington Counties, scattered all over the Delta to define their new identity._ 

Essential Bibliography

Adams Jane and D. Gordon, “Confederate Lane. Class, Race and Ethnicity in the Mississippi Delta” in American

Ethnologist, V. 33, N. 2: pp. 288-309.

Adams Jane and D. Gordon, “Confederate Lane. Class, Race and Ethnicity in the Mississippi Delta” in American Ethnologist, V. 33, N. 2: pp. 288-309.

Archivio Storico dell’Emigrazione Italiana, “ Modelli di Emigrazione Regionale dell’Italia dell’Italia Centro-Settentrionale,Viterbo, Editore Sette Città.

Armiero Marco “Elsewhere. Italians in the Frontier ( United States, 19th – 20th Century”, dattiloscritto non pubblicato, 2003.

Il Resto del Carlino, ”C’è un Pezzo di Forlì in America”, Bologna, 12 novembre 2002.

Il Resto del Carlino, “Il Prete che Fondò una Città”, 11 agosto 2002.

Archivio Segreto Vaticano, Delegazione Apostolica Stati Uniti d’America, IX. Little Rock. 34, Rev. Pietro Bandini di Tontitown e di Roma (1910-1912).

Stibili Edward C.”Pietro Bandini, Jesuit Missionary, 1852-1890”, in Arkansas Historical Quarterly, 29 April 1994.

Barry John M., Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927, Simon & Shuster, 1998.

McBride Paul, The Italians in America, an Interdisciplinary Bibliography, Ithaca, AIHA, 1975.

Bariola Giovanni, Archivio Privato, Lake Village, Arkansas.

Benatti Elio, Brasile Chiama…Mantova. Una Manciata di Semi sul Terreno della Memoria, Verdello,Tipolitografia Gamba, 1998.

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Bellisi Walter, La Valigia di Cartone, Storie di Emigranti di Montese e Dintorni ( Appennino modenese e bolognese), Golinelli Editore, 2004.

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