Freedom's Dominion

A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power

By: Jefferson Cowie

Narrated by: André Chapoy

Length: 16 hrs and 5 mins

Publisher's summary

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE IN HISTORY

An "important, deeply affecting—and regrettably relevant" (New York Times) chronicle of a sinister idea of freedom: white Americans’ freedom to oppress others and their fight against the government that got in their way.

American freedom is typically associated with the fight of the oppressed for a better world. But for centuries, whenever the federal government intervened on behalf of nonwhite people, many white Americans fought back in the name of freedom—their freedom to dominate others.

In Freedom’s Dominion, historian Jefferson Cowie traces this complex saga by focusing on a quintessentially American place: Barbour County, Alabama, the ancestral home of political firebrand George Wallace. In a land shaped by settler colonialism and chattel slavery, white people weaponized freedom to seize Native lands, champion secession, overthrow Reconstruction, question the New Deal, and fight against the civil rights movement. A riveting history of the long-running clash between white people and federal authority, this book radically shifts our understanding of what freedom means in America.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2022 Jefferson Cowie (P)2022 Basic Books

Critic reviews

“[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)

"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

Enhanced my understanding of how difficult and time consuming it is to accept all citizens in the U.S.

The book is very well researched and written. It gave me more of an appreciation for the perspectives of those of us that grew up in states that enslave people.I understand their desire to have the freedom to maintain old ways despite national policies to treat all people equally.
The reader did a great job as well.

An extremely thoughtful history

Although I am now retired, I taught US history at the secondary level for decades, and and so I’ve been very familiar with much of the ground covered in this elegantly written book. But by focusing on one county in Alabama, and sketching out the continuing theme running through the Indian removals of the 1830s, the introduction of slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, Redemption, and the modern Civil Rights movement, Freedom’s Dominion, has given me a very different way of understanding this difficult history.

Most importantly, it provides a way of seeing those who saw (and see) freedom as the right to exclude and to dominate (often to the point of killing) nonwhite peoples free from interference by the federal government. But Cowle does this in a way that humanizes those oppressors and makes their terrible actions seem understandable as one of the dark tendencies that we can carry within us. Yet he also shows pathways that these tendencies can and must be opposed by those of us who believe in the equality and freedom of all people in our nation.

Unique and Worthwhile Perspective

This book includes some remarkable characteristics. Meticulous historical detail weaves a compelling narrative that carefully marks a straight line from dispossession of native people a generation before the Civil War, immediately followed by slavery as an integral part of the cotton economy, to the century of Reconstruction, Jim Crow and determined resistance to civil rights and racial equity that persists to the present. In a remarkably dispassionate unpacking of unapologetic white supremacy, there is virtually no hyperbole of grievance and outrage for its own sake. That is left to the reader. At times, the experience becomes boundless and nearly inexpressible. To perpetrators, the callous exercise of power and privilege is no more than the exercise of sacred, personal liberty with no regard for the consequences to those of lesser empowerment. One might hope that this illumination could inspire change in those who most need to change. At the same time, however, the history imparts that such hopes have frequently arisen before, only to face nearly total disappointment. Brave agents of change have achieved considerable success. The road ahead remains very long.

Sobering

A great and disturbing history lesson. And, we are still living it. Explains the rise of Trump.

Jefferson Cowie and the Gems of the New Fatalism

An astoundingly well researched piece that sheds a great deal of light on our current cultural situation. Excellent reader as well.

Narrator is distracting

The subject matter of this book is very interesting. However, at times, the narrator nearly renders it ridiculous with accents that are what? Perhaps the problem lay all with me but I couldn’t really understand what the objective was. The “accent” for Alexis de Tocqueville was particularly hilarious and distracting. I stuck with the book, and with time the effort became less annoying, but it never stopped being annoying.

Everything old is new again.

A brilliant look at the historical throughlines of Right Wing political rhetoric: That the freedom to oppress is more important than freedom from oppression, a cornerstone of American White Supremacy.

Highly recommended.

Stunningly Relevant

This book is not just about the history of Alabama. It informs, and gives a deeper understanding of, our current politics.

The title lays bare the real issue

The title lays bare the real issue: Parse the expression, and then consider the paradox of whether Freedom and Dominion can truly co-exist. In this book Jefferson Cowie illustrates—across centuries of historical fact—that use of the word freedom as meaning the right to dominate others was (and is) applied without irony by those who would influence society for their sole profit. Although centered on the local history of Eufaula, AL, Cowie demonstrates the relevance of this community to the US nation as a whole. In many ways this book exposes the sordid soul of white supremacy throughout America.

Cowie traces the history through the initially illegal white settlements in Native American territory, through the introduction of slaves once the Indians were removed, through the suppression of the non-slave holder class (both black and white) before and after the Civil War. The inconsistent federal efforts to expel the white settlers, through faltering Union control during Reconstruction, through hamstrung federal attempts in the New Deal era, were all inadequate to dampen the ultimate control of the elite class whose status and wealth (before and after the war) were based on white dominance and the associated attitudes necessary to maintain their position. Those attitudes incorporated a religious justification of white supremacy conveniently crafted two centuries before Europeans settled in the region around what became Eufaula—since then, African Americans have turned that erroneous impetus on its head, and expressed a Christianity more aligned with the Gospels. A key thread throughout this entire historical narrative is the notion that concerns of white persons—in this case, people of European extraction—supersede any concerns of anyone not of that racial stock. It was (and remains) a effective method to artificially maintain wealth and status.

Another key thread is the manipulative ethos of white supremacy culture—the efforts of whites who are not on board with white supremacy are by themselves insufficient to alter the course of that culture. This is rarely the fault of the individual white people who attempt to be on the right side of history. A major factor is those with wealth often have acquired their wealth through white supremacy—they prefer the status quo and they take extreme measures to keep their ill-gotten profits. These measures include provoking poor and less educated whites to hate their neighbors (and would-be allies) of color. A close cousin to white supremacy culture is the laissez-faire mantra that gained mainstream traction in the late 20th Century. There are significant similarities between neoliberal economics and the white supremacist culture that lives on today—this book illustrates the natural relationship between the two. It's been a proven strategy spanning centuries, and shows no signs of slacking off as it continues to work so well.

As Cowie demonstrates throughout this book, the only effective solution to white supremacy and its associated false freedom to dominate others is conclusive federal intervention. The removal of freedom to dominate is not the removal of essential Constitutional freedoms—it's the only way to ensure these essential freedoms are truly there, as long as the impulse (by anyone) to dominate remains active. Fortunately there are signs that the public is becoming more aware of the need for federal intervention in several areas—and these increasingly aware people are voting accordingly.

Highly recommend

Anyone truly interested in American history should read or listen to Freedom’s Dominion. It’s a difficult truth to face, but we cannot have a secure democratic future without understanding our divisive and challenging past.