Freedom’s Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power, by Jefferson Cowie, a historian at Vanderbilt University, is a gem of the new fatalism. Synthesizing brilliant research in fluent prose, and writing with an indignation that’s all the more damning for being understated, Cowie explores the history of Barbour County, in Alabama’s Black Belt, at the southeastern corner of the state. Here, white settlers drove out Creek Indians in the early 19th century; white planters made cotton fortunes on the seized land with Black slave labor; defeated white Confederates restored their wealth and power using Black convict labor and a Jim Crow constitution; white mobs enforced their racist social order with lynchings. When the civil-rights movement eventually reached Barbour County, in the mid-1960s, white politicians kept Black voters out of power with intimidation and chicanery. By then, a native son of Barbour County named George Wallace was ruling Alabama as its arch-segregationist governor and taking the cause of white resistance national.
Cowie’s theme is how the sacred American creed of freedom serves to justify racial domination. At every turn in the harsh tale of Barbour County, white residents resisted challenges to their supremacy by invoking their birthright as free people. At nearly every turn, the federal government made inadequate efforts on behalf of equal Black citizenship, before yielding to the demands of white “freedom” backed by violence. “Those defending racism, land appropriation, and enslavement portrayed themselves, and even understood their own actions, as part of a long history of freedom,” Cowie writes. In his infamous 1963 inaugural address vowing “segregation forever,” Governor Wallace used the word freedom 24 times. To Wallace and his constituents, the real tyrant was the federal government, issuing its court orders and sending down its marshals and troops to impose its laws against the will of white Alabamians. Cowie quotes a blunt question from the 18th-century British essayist Samuel Johnson that could have been the book’s epigraph: “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”
In the uses of freedom, Cowie argues, domination is as central to the American creed as individual liberty and self-government. Freedom as white power “is not an aberration but a virulent part of an American idiom.” The history of Barbour County “was not much different than what happened in the rest of the Black Belt, the South, or the nation.” For proof, Cowie recounts the nationwide appeal of Wallace’s presidential campaigns in 1968 and 1972 (“We’re going to show there sure are a lot of rednecks in this country,” Wallace said before the ’68 election). The stories Cowie has excavated in Barbour County “are not simply regional tales lost in the dark, overgrown thickets of the past. They are quintessentially American histories—inescapably local, yet national in theme, scope, and scale.” The historian concludes: “To confront this saga of freedom is to confront the fundamentals of the American narrative.”