Includes bibliographical references (p. 373-397) and index.

Slavery in the making of the Constitution -- The silent issue at the Constitutional Convention -- The engine of American growth, 1787-1861 -- Birth of an obsession -- Land expansion and white migration to the Old Southwest -- The movement of slaves to the cotton states -- The business of cotton -- The roots of war -- The North: for whites only, 1800-1865 -- Being free and black in the North -- The colonial North -- Race moves west -- Tocqueville on slavery, race, and money in America -- King Cotton buys a war -- Cultivating a crop, cultivating a strategy -- Great Britain and the Civil War -- Cotton and Confederate finance -- Procuring arms -- Cotton trading in the United States -- Cotton and the freedman -- The racial divide and cotton labor, 1865-1930 -- New era, old problems -- Ruling the freedmen in the cotton fields -- Reconstruction meets reality -- The black hand on the cotton boll -- From cotton field to urban ghetto : the Chicago experience -- Cotton without slaves, 1865-1930 -- King Cotton expands -- The controlling laws of cotton finance -- The delta plantation : labor and land -- The planter experience in the twentieth century -- The long-awaited mechanical cotton picker -- The abdication of King Cotton.