Publishers Weekly
★ 09/05/2022
Vanderbilt University historian Cowie (The Great Exception) examines in this gripping and haunting study the centuries-long tradition of localism by which white Americans have sought to exert their dominance over groups they have designated as “others.” He astutely grounds his study in one specific place—Barbour County, Ala.—and its struggles over land, citizenship, and democracy, from the violent theft by white settlers of land belonging by federal guarantee to Creek Indians in the 1830s and the eventual establishment on those lands of intensely profitable cotton plantations worked by enslaved people, through the rise of militant states’ rights groups such as the Eufaula Regency in the 1850s and the century following the Civil War, when local whites did all that they could to prevent African Americans from utilizing the rights granted to them by the federal government. Cowie also tracks the ascension of Barbour County native and avowed segregationist George Wallace to the Alabama governor’s office, detailing how his calls for freedom from federal oversight tapped into a deep vein of racialized politics running from the country’s founding to the January 6 Capitol riot. Cowie’s meticulous accumulation of detail and candid assessments (he calls out Lyndon Johnson for transforming the 1957 Civil Rights Act into the “weakest bill it could possibly be”) make for distressing yet essential reading. This is history at its most vital. Illus. (Nov.)
From the Publisher
A resonant account of an Alabama county in the 19th and 20th centuries shaped by settler colonialism and slavery, a portrait that illustrates the evolution of white supremacy by drawing powerful connections between anti-government and racist ideologies.” —Pulitzer Prize jury
“Important, deeply affecting—and regrettably relevant… essential reading for anyone who hopes to understand the unholy union, more than 200 years strong, between racism and the rabid loathing of government…White men did all this in Barbour County, by design and without relent, and Cowie’s account of their acts is unsparing. His narrative is immersive; his characters are vividly rendered.” —New York Times Book Review
“Outstanding and urgent...a remarkable achievement.” —New Republic
“A gem...Synthesizing brilliant research in fluent prose, and writing with an indignation that’s all the more damning for being understated.” —George Packer, Atlantic
"A convincing case."—Eric Foner, London Review of Books
“A great read informed by mountains of research.”—CHOICE Connect
“[G]ripping and haunting…Cowie’s meticulous accumulation of detail and candid assessments…make for distressing yet essential reading. This is history at its most vital.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“A powerful history showing that White supremacist ideas of freedom are deeply embedded in American politics.” —Kirkus
"Jefferson Cowie has a knack for publishing instant classics: books that change historians' conversations. This is his most extraordinary yet. With eloquence and with brilliance, he delves deep into the annals of a specific place, Barbour County, Alabama, in order to excavate the foundations of America's darkest and most enduring story: how 'freedom' became a national alibi for cruelty, inequity, and reaction. As soon as I finished reading it, I wanted to start over and absorb it all over again." —Rick Perlstein, author of Reaganland
“Jefferson Cowie has given us a deep history of the long war on the federal government—especially when it came to policies advancing class and race equality, of the evolution of White grievance politics, and of a new way of thinking about the psychic structure of American Exceptionalism. With eloquent, precise prose, Cowie clears away the cobwebs to reveal a national malady long in the making.”—Greg Grandin, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The End of the Myth
“A fascinating book, Freedom’s Dominion takes us to the states’-rights stronghold of Barbour County, Alabama. Barbour was the birthplace of Governor George Wallace, whose infamous defense of segregation described integration as tyranny, segregation as freedom, and equal access to the ballot as a threat to individual rights. Wallace’s views illustrate the confounding interdependence of ideas about freedom and oppression in American politics—as does Barbour County’s long history of state-building rooted in antiblack violence, white supremacist rule, and Indian land dispossession. Freedom’s Dominion offers a searing account of that history that leaves one wondering whether American freedom can ever be disentangled from the causes it has supported.”—Mia Bay, author of Traveling Black
“Jefferson Cowie’s Freedom’s Dominion is a magisterial narrative history of white grievance politics. Cowie reveals the origins of these often hypocritical and confounding perspectives, in which those who stole, enslaved, and segregated would themselves claim to be victims of federal overreach, even as they oppressed so many others. Cowie’s terrific book explains the Southern roots of that racialized ideology and reveals how one of the most influential segregationist rhetoricians of the 1960s helped repackage this powerful form of regional white identity politics for the rest of the nation.” —William Sturkey, author of Hattiesburg
“Freedom’s Dominion covers centuries of American history in Eufaula, Alabama, from the violence of settler colonialism through the ascent of arch-segregationist George Wallace, the region’s most famous native son. Jefferson Cowie is interested in how people in power—almost always white men—used claims of freedom to dominate and enslave others, and how they articulated domination as resistance to a tyrannical federal government. This history has urgent implications for how we understand white supremacist and anti-government politics today.” —Kathleen Belew, author of Bring the War Home
Kirkus Reviews
2022-11-10
A broad-ranging history of resistance to the federal government, especially in matters of civil rights reforms.
“Federal power has proven itself, quite consistently, by design and by practice, to be inadequate to the basic claims of citizenship of its people,” writes Cowie, a professor of history at Vanderbilt. The “design” aspect figures in the constant struggle between federal authority and states’ rights. Before the passage of the 14th Amendment, for instance, the Bill of Rights did not apply to state governments, only to what Congress could or could not do. Even the powers of the 14th Amendment, Cowie notes, were trimmed by the Supreme Court—a fact that makes his book timely given current court decisions against past civil rights rulings—which required Congress to establish martial law in the South in order to effect even the small gains of Reconstruction. Provocatively, Cowie argues that resistance to federal authority, as exemplified by Alabama Gov. George Wallace and his “segregation forever” vow, is almost always cloaked in the language of tyranny and freedom—and the freedom demanded by those resisters is won at the loss of freedom of some citizens, almost always members of ethnic minorities. Cowie adds that federal officials have often acquiesced to the demands of the “freedom” crowd, as when Franklin Roosevelt overlooked Jim Crow racism in order to keep White Southern voters: “By successfully wrestling key exemptions for agricultural and domestic workers from federal regulation, much of the Southern racial and agricultural order remained relatively untouched by the long arm of the New Deal.” Toward the end of a lucid narrative that spans three centuries, the author argues that the federal government has been an unreliable ally and sometimes an open enemy of the rights of non-White people. Even so, without federal power, as current events richly suggest, even those tenuous rights would almost certainly be diminished or eliminated.
A powerful history showing that White supremacist ideas of freedom are deeply embedded in American politics.
