Freedom's Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power
by Jefferson Cowie
Summary
Jefferson Cowie tells nearly two centuries of American history through one place, Barbour County, Alabama, tracing how its white residents repeatedly framed their resistance to federal authority as a fight for their own freedom. Cowie follows the county from its origins on land taken from the Creek nation through the decades of slavery that built its plantation economy, and then through Reconstruction, when Barbour County's white residents used violence and political fraud to overturn federal efforts to secure citizenship and voting rights for the formerly enslaved.
Cowie carries the story into the twentieth century, following local resistance to New Deal programs that Barbour County planters saw as federal interference with their control over Black labor, and into the civil rights era, when the county produced George Wallace, the segregationist governor whose 1963 declaration of segregation now and forever distilled a states rights argument with roots stretching back to Reconstruction. Cowie reads Wallace not as an aberration but as the direct political descendant of the county's earlier fights against federal power, arguing that the same idea of freedom, freedom from federal constraint rather than freedom for the people federal power was meant to protect, runs continuously through all three eras.
Cowie writes as a historian testing a national argument against the granular record of a single county, and reading the book means following that argument through court records, land deeds and political speeches spanning generations. It suits a reader who wants the recurring American argument over states rights and federal power explained through one place that kept having the same fight.
Historical Context & Significance
Freedom's Dominion won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for History. The 2023 finalists were Garrett M. Graff for Watergate and Michael John Witgen for Seeing Red.
Basic Books published the book in 2022, and reviewers called it an engaging, thoughtful and provocative contribution to the history of American political culture. Cowie, the James G. Stahlman Professor of History at Vanderbilt University, earned his doctorate at the University of North Carolina in 1997 and had already won the Merle Curti and Francis Parkman Prizes for his earlier book Stayin' Alive. Freedom's Dominion extended his reputation as one of the sharper interpreters of how ordinary American communities, not just Washington, have shaped the country's long running arguments over federal power and states rights.