Cowie, Jefferson. Freedom’s Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power. New York: Basic Books, 2022.
Calls for reducing the size of the federal government have at this point become rather routine in American politics, at least on the conservative side of the aisle, and are not even close to being one of the more radical planks of the Republican platform in the twenty-first century. Yet as far back as the Nixon and Reagan administrations, these calls for limited government have seemed to coincide with efforts to roll back America’s efforts at establishing racial, gender, and class equity. In his provocative new study of resistance to federal power in Barbour County, Alabama, Jefferson Cowie explores this relationship across nearly two centuries, demonstrating that far from being at odds with systems of oppression, the concept of freedom from central authority has always been a core principle of those seeking to dominate others.
Anyone who has read studies of antebellum and Civil War America, even in passing, has probably noted how stridently slaveholders decried the loss of their own freedom to deal with their property as they saw fit—that property, of course, being actual human beings enslaved in perpetuity. Through a microhistory of Alabama’s Barbour County, birthplace of infamous segregationist George Wallace and site of some of the worst excesses of the Indian Removal Act in the 1830s and white terrorism during Reconstruction, Cowie brilliantly demonstrates how such rhetoric has not been confined to any one time period. Indeed, Freedom’s Dominion is almost as much an argument for proactive federal intervention on behalf of minorities as it is a study of white resistance to that intervention. Cowie conclusively demonstrates that every advance in civil rights in the past two centuries has come at the point of federal bayonets and that every reversal has come when those bayonets have gone home and “left it to the states.” As a result, political rhetoric attacking the size of the federal government has become an easy way to pursue policies of oppression without explicitly saying so. Cowie even implicitly calls the wisdom of the entire structure of American federalism into question—there’s nothing quite like state sheriffs arresting a federal marshal on trumped-up charges just for executing his duty as directed by the president to make you question how our country is supposed to operate.
Yet for all its narrative strengths, Freedom’s Dominion never quite makes it to the heights I think it could reach. Cowie’s three categories of freedom—freedom from personal interference, freedom to participate in civil life, and freedom to dominate others—really should only be the first two, with freedom to dominate others simply the most radical, Hobbesian-state-of-nature extension of the first. His analysis could also have used much more modern framing, such as reference to studies that show that dominant groups tend to view any adjustment of the status quo as an affront, even when the adjustment leaves them in charge, albeit by a slightly smaller margin. In a missed opportunity rare for a popular history author, Cowie also neglects to draw more explicit parallels between the politics seen in his historical episodes and the populist politics of the present. Seeing the similarities between the actions and rhetoric of 1830s land speculators, 1870s Bourbon Democrats, and 1960s segregationists only further emphasizes that the rise of Donald Trump was not a break with American conservatism, but a manifestation of some of its longest-held traditions.
While I do wish Cowie could have been more explicit in his many critiques of American populism, Freedom’s Dominion remains one of the best, most approachable books I’ve come across for those interested in seriously grappling with America’s history of not living up to our founding creed. You’ll never look at modern politics quite the same way again.