| | A Note on Language | p. xi |
| | Introduction: The Bricks We Stand On | p. 1 |
| | The Slow Poison | |
| | The Wedding: Fruits of Freedom | p. 13 |
| | An Industrial Slavery: "Niggers is cheap" | p. 39 |
| | Slavery's Increase: "Day after day we looked Death in the face & was afraid to speak" | p. 58 |
| | Green Cottenham's World: "The negro dies faster" | p. 84 |
| | Harvest of an Unfinished War | |
| | The Slave Farm of John Pace: "I don't owe you anything" | p. 117 |
| | Slavery is Not a Crime: "We shall have to kill a thousand... to get them back to their places" | p. 155 |
| | The Indictments: "I was whipped nearly every day" | p. 181 |
| | A Summer of Trials, 1903: "The master treated the slave unmercifully" | p. 217 |
| | A River of Anger: The South Is "an armed camp" | p. 233 |
| | The Disapprobation of God: "It is a very rare thing that a negro escapes" | p. 246 |
| | Slavery Affirmed: "Cheap cotton depends on cheap niggers" | p. 270 |
| | New South Rising: "This great corporation" | p. 278 |
| | The Final Chapter of American Slavery | |
| | The Arrest of Green Cottenham: A War of Atrocities | p. 299 |
| | Anatomy of a Slave Mine: "Degraded to a plane lower than the brutes" | p. 310 |
| | Everywhere was Death: "Negro Quietly Swung Up by an Armed Mob ... All is quiet" | p. 324 |
| | Atlanta, the South's Finest City: "I will murder you if you don't do that work" | p. 338 |
| | Freedom: "In the United States one cannot sell himself" | p. 371 |
| | Epilogue: The Ephemera of Catastrophe | p. 383 |
| | Acknowledgments | p. 404 |
| | Notes | p. 407 |
| | Selected Bibliography | p. 444 |
| | Index | p. 460 |