A focus on railroad agents active in the recruitment of Italian immigrant families at the turn of the twentieth century provides a novel view onto the development of the New South. Self-titled “immigration” and “land and labor agents” recruited on behalf of the era’s major railroads, the Gould Railway System and its subsidiary the Texas and Pacific; the Southern; and the Illinois Central and its subsidiary, the Yazoo and Mississippi Valley. These very active agents have eluded historians’ attention as they left few if any official records yet appear regularly in the Italian ambassador’s correspondence. In particular, the extensive negotiations that unfolded between the Gould Railway's representative in Naples, J.P. Spanier, and Italy’s acting commissioner of emigration, Egisto Rossi, from the fall of 1904 through the spring of 1905 provides an unprecedented look inside the motivations of one of colonization’s most ardent supporters, and in turn, the Italian government’s views on such men and their plans. Letters between Spanier and Rossi show in detail how a southern colonization business enterprise tried to operate.
While Spanier was not the only person sending requests to settle Italians in the South, he was by far the most persistent, most organized, and most connected. Spanier’s plan to make real the promise of a better distribution for Italians outside of crowded American cities would unfold from his headquarters in Naples. He engaged in a deliberate negotiation between the Italian legation in the U.S., the General Commissariat for Emigration, competing railroad agents, and private landowners in the South. These negotiations exposed the efforts to enact a transformation of the region into a patchwork of small productive farms populated by thrifty Italian families as Italian colonization took up a position within the larger project to remake the New South’s economy and society within the boundaries of racial capitalism.