In the Hands of Strangers is divided into three parts. Part One focuses on the African slave trade that brought as many as 600,000 Africans into the United States. Part Two concentrates on the internal U.S. slave trade. Documents cover a variety of topics, including the forced transport of slaves throughout East Coast and Gulf Coast states, buying and selling of slaves, increasingly contentious debates over the legitimacy of slavery, and effects of the breakup of families. Part Three focuses on a series of conflicts and crises leading to the Civil War. Included in this section are documents on Texas and the expansion of slavery into that region, efforts on the part of southern extremists before the Civil War to renew the African slave trade, the exodus of slaves early in the Civil War when federal troops entered the South, and debates over colonization.