From the acclaimed New York Times-bestselling author of Chesapeake Requiem comes a gripping new work of narrative nonfiction telling the forgotten story of the mass killing of eleven Black farmhands on a Georgia plantation in the spring of 1921 - a crime that exposed the existence of the "peonage system," a form of legal enslavement established across the American South after the Civil War.On a Sunday morning in the spring of 1921, a small boy made a grim discovery as he played on a riverbank in rural Georgia: the bodies of two drowned men, bound together with wire and chain and weighted with a hundred-pound sack of rocks. Within days a third body turned up in another, nearby river, and in the weeks that followed, eight others. And with them, a deeper horror: All eleven had been kept in virtual slavery before their deaths. In fact, as America was shocked to learn, the dead were among thousands of Black men enslaved throughout the South, in conditions nearly as dire as those before the Civil War. By turns police procedural, courtroom drama, and political expose, Hell Put to Shame tells the forgotten story of that mass killing, and of the revelations about peonage, or debt slavery.