“Freedom’s Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power,” by Jefferson Cowie was awarded the History Pulitzer yesterday. The book tells the story of Barbour County, Ala. during the Civil War and Reconstruction, through Jim Crow and George Wallace. Here is what the New York Times review of the book said about it:
“Freedom’s Dominion” is local history, but in the way that Gettysburg was a local battle or the Montgomery bus boycott was a local protest. The book recounts four peak periods in the conflict between white Alabamians and the federal government: the wild rush, in the early 19th century, to seize and settle lands that belonged to the Creek Nation; Reconstruction; the reassertion of white supremacy under Jim Crow; and the attempts of Wallace and others to nullify the civil rights reforms of the 1950s and 1960s. Throughout, as Cowie reveals, white Southerners portrayed the oppression of Black people and Native Americans not as a repudiation of freedom, but its precondition, its very foundation. Thus were white men, in the words of the scholar Orlando Patterson, whom Cowie quotes, “free to brutalize.” Thus were they free “to plunder and lay waste and call it peace, to rape and humiliate, to invade, conquer, uproot and degrade.”
…The pattern of federal engagement and withdrawal took hold in the early 1830s, when President Jackson resolved to bring order to the settlement of Alabama. The surge of whites westward into the new state had become, Cowie writes, “one of the fiercest tides of human migration in human history,” but even this puts it mildly. “Alabama Fever” was a wholesale invasion. Creek homes and crops were burned; Creek families were swindled, beaten, driven out, killed. Jackson, whose own inhumanity toward Native Americans is well established, was an unlikely defender of their rights. And land, as Jacksonians understood it, was the bedrock of opportunity — another white entitlement, like freedom itself.
Yet the chaos in Alabama offended Jackson’s sense of discipline and made a mockery of his treaties with the Creeks. Beginning in 1832, and in fits and starts over the following year, federal troops looked to turn back or at least contain the white wave. Instead, their presence touched off a series of violent reprisals, created a cast of martyrs and folk heroes, and gave rise to the mythology of white victimization. Self-rule and local authority — rhetorical wrapping for this will to power — had become articles of faith, fervid as any religious belief. Alabama, a historian of the state wrote in 1839, had been “wrought and consecrated through a bitter sacrament of blood.”
“Freedom’s Dominion” returns to the region more than three decades later, during the “radical” phase of Reconstruction. Following the election of Ulysses S. Grant in 1868 and the ratification of the 14th and 15th Amendments, the federal presence in the South was finally robust. So was the spirit of local defiance. In post-bellum Barbour County, Cowie writes, “peace only prevailed for freed people when federal troops were in town” — and then only barely. When Grant stepped up the enforcement of voting rights, whites in Eufaula, Barbour County’s largest town, massacred Black citizens and engaged in furious efforts to manipulate or overturn elections. As in the 1830s, the federal government showed little stamina for the struggle. Republican losses in 1874 augured another retreat, this time for the better part of a century. In the vacuum, Cowie explains, emerged “the neoslavery of convict leasing, the vigilante justice of lynching, the degradation and debt of sharecropping and the official disenfranchisement of Blacks” under Jim Crow…
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