This “white freedom” is the subject of Jefferson Cowie’s Pulitzer Prize–winning history, Freedom’s Dominion. Cowie is in good company in exploring freedom not as domination’s opposite but its companion. His fellow-travelers include not only Du Bois but scholars such as Edmund S. Morgan, Barbara J. Fields, Orlando Patterson, Aziz Rana, Lisa Lowe, Elisabeth Anker, and Tyler Stovall. Cowie’s approach, however, is distinct: unlike Patterson’s hemispheric conceptual history or Stovall’s comparison of French and American iterations, Cowie’s is a fine-grained local history. His book provides a detailed account of the development of white freedom in one location—Barbour County, in the southeast corner of Tuberville’s state of Alabama—over the course of 200 years. By situating the story in a single county, Cowie demonstrates how freedom operates not merely as a racial entitlement to conquer and oppress but as “racialized anti-statism,” the freedom to dominate without federal interference. This is a history, in other words, of the racial logic of appeals to state’s rights against federal power.
Cowie’s story unfolds over four eras: the Jacksonian era, the Civil War and Reconstruction, Jim Crow and the New Deal, and the modern civil rights movement. It begins in the town of Eufaula in the 1830s, amid a dispute over the meaning of the Indian Removal Act and a clash between federal troops and white intruders—a “crazy quilt of competing interests among affluent speculators, on-the-make-settlers, and poor roughs” who had seized unceded Muscogee Creek territory. Each group “saw land as central to their liberty, and federal authority and Indian rights as antagonistic to their goals.” Ironically, it fell to President Andrew Jackson—the architect of removal, and a man who owed his political career to his reputation both as an “Indian killer” and a man of the (white) people—to defend the Creek. Less out of concern for Indigenous rights than in defense of a federal prerogative to oversee a legal settler-colonial conquest, Jackson’s attorney general, Roger Taney, asserted national authority over all land within the Creek Nation, while the military made preparations to invade, including a blockade of the ports integral to the cotton trade.