Gothic, according to Richard Gray, is a means by which the secret history of a culture is told, the repressed revealed, the monstrous encountered, and boundaries crossed (37). The Gulf world presents an archive, both fabulous and gothic, of our secret histories and boundary-traversing traumas. Its hyperracialized space produced a critical “double-consciousness” (3) as W. E. B. Du Bois memorably presented it, haunted by recognition that the ruling archive was partial and false since in this postplantation space of thick entanglements “[t]he price of culture is a Lie” (144). Just as the first gothic novel appeared in London in 1764, the Gulf's north shores faced accelerating pressures, spurred on by political revolution (1776), the cotton gin (1794), and the Louisiana Purchase (1803). Steady violence accompanied Jacksonian-era expansion of the plantation system over a twenty-five-year period from 1821 to 1846. Jackson's victories in the Creek War (1813–14) and the Battle of New Orleans (1815) set the stage. Then, in rapid succession, with Spain's sale of Florida (1821), the Indian Removal Act (1830), the Second Seminole War (1835–42), and the Invasion of Mexico (1846), the whole US Gulf South became a site of accelerated investment in slave-produced cotton culture. All while slavery was abolished in Mexico (1829). Indigenous peoples faced genocide and removal, slave markets expanded, and the more ethnically fluid frontier spaces between La Florida and Tejas were recharted. Anglo-Protestant notions of “the impassable gulf between the races” created by God became dogma in the US south and gripped the nation as an intensely racialized plantation belt hit expansion mode. Gothic expression proliferated with plantation space.