Fighting the Feds in the American South

JEFFERSON COWIE IS a prodigious researcher who often shows sensitivity to historical complexities, and his narrative skills shine. The Vanderbilt historian’s latest book, Freedom’s Dominion, is readable and often provocative. But it superimposes a dubious thesis about Southern his tory over the facts, arguing that “land dispossession, slavery, power, and oppression do not stand in contrast to freedom— they are expressions of it.”

- DAVID T. BEITO

By Cowie’s account, whites have repeatedly used the doctrine of states’ rights to justify their “freedom to dominate” others. The Southern worldview, he argues, was a doctrine of “racialized radical anti-statism,” which later spread to the North and eventually became normalized in the modern Republican Party.

Central to the book’s narrative is Barbour County, Alabama, and especially its largest community, Eufaula—a place Cowie regards as a microcosm of the white South, and to some extent white America. Whites in both Eufaula and the surrounding county first asserted their “freedom to dominate” by negating treaty guarantees and occupying Creek tribal lands for themselves. In justifying their theft, the culprits, in collusion with Alabama’s leading politicos, cited the sanctity of local control; Cowie calls this a “frenzy of racialized anti-statism.”