| 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 |