Freedom’s Dominion Quotes

“Reconstruction memories bordered on a “syndrome,” in the words of one historian, based on “an almost manic concern for states’ rights, local autonomy, hyperindividualism, an unfettered—almost fetishistic—view of freedom, political conservatism, sectional pride, traditional values, religion, and gender roles (in fact, reverence for all things traditional), pride in the white race’s leadership and achievements, disdain for hyphenated Americanism in favor of ethnic, racial, and cultural homogeneity.”
― Jefferson R. Cowie, Freedom’s Dominion (Winner of the Pulitzer Prize): A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power

“This book stands as an argument for a vigorous, federally enforced model of American citizenship that is not afraid to fight the many incarnations of the freedom to dominate.”
― Jefferson Cowie, Freedom’s Dominion (Winner of the Pulitzer Prize): A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power

“To speak of emancipation today without historicizing and understanding efforts by whites to recapture their freedom to dominate, without seeing how emancipation of African Americans was made into the oppression of whites, is to fail to understand a central problem of American history.”
― Jefferson R. Cowie, Freedom’s Dominion (Winner of the Pulitzer Prize): A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power

“The third, and most ominous, note in Patterson’s chord is an idea of freedom that means not simply the absence of slavery but the power to enslave.”
― Jefferson R. Cowie, Freedom’s Dominion (Winner of the Pulitzer Prize): A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power

“The second note is “civic freedom”—the ability to participate in the governance of one’s community. We call this democracy.”
― Jefferson R. Cowie, Freedom’s Dominion (Winner of the Pulitzer Prize): A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power

“Patterson sees the structure of Western freedom as having three notes that compose a single cultural chord. The first note is the most obvious: freedom as the absence of constraint on one’s latitude to act.”
― Jefferson R. Cowie, Freedom’s Dominion (Winner of the Pulitzer Prize): A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power

“Even after the immediate political crises of Reconstruction passed, an inescapable suspicion endured that federal intervention served the interest of an untamable and unruly Black society, while simultaneously threatening to crush the freedom of white people.”
― Jefferson R. Cowie, Freedom’s Dominion (Winner of the Pulitzer Prize): A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power

“The entire racialized anti-statist mood of the era, while claiming to serve the unwashed Jacksonian masses, actually boosted the fate of the unregulated elite.”
― Jefferson R. Cowie, Freedom’s Dominion (Winner of the Pulitzer Prize): A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power

“simple: the vigorous enforcement of federal law was what changed voting rights, not the slow drip of racial enlightenment.27”
― Jefferson R. Cowie, Freedom’s Dominion (Winner of the Pulitzer Prize): A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power

“Southerner. The lynching of Iver Peterson”
― Jefferson R. Cowie, Freedom’s Dominion (Winner of the Pulitzer Prize): A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power

“Or put another way, justice can be embedded in a kind of folk law rather than legal formalism. The extreme version of the Jeffersonian-Jacksonian idea is that the real constitution is not the one on paper, but the one embedded in local whites’ freedom and capacity to decide what was right and wrong in their communities. This is what one historian calls “popular constitutionalism.” The people, the argument goes, are the law or are even superior to the law. And “the people” are white and they are local”
― Jefferson R. Cowie, Freedom’s Dominion (Winner of the Pulitzer Prize): A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power

“In an echo of the restoration of the royal house of Bourbon after Napoleon’s defeat, the Southern oligarchy had reversed much of the revolution of the 1860s and 1870s and managed a full”
― Jefferson R. Cowie, Freedom’s Dominion (Winner of the Pulitzer Prize): A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power

“experiment. The only hope within the United States might”
― Jefferson R. Cowie, Freedom’s Dominion (Winner of the Pulitzer Prize): A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power

“interests. As he summarized the political metaphysics at stake: “A whole people cannot rise, as it were, above itself.”7 Tocqueville tapped into an age-old question, one that Native Americans, African Americans, and European Americans all fought over in Barbour County and much of the rest of the nation. Which people are sovereign? Why not all people? Where is sovereignty located? Whose liberties should be protected from whom? By what mechanisms and whose authority? Even ignoring questions of race, these problems remained the”
― Jefferson R. Cowie, Freedom’s Dominion (Winner of the Pulitzer Prize): A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power

“His body "was the corporeal archive of his pugnacious soul. The bullet [from a duel] caused him 'violent pain' on a regular basis, with bouts of blood gurgling into his mouth as well as probable poisoning from the ball leaking lead into his system. He could barely eat. Plagued by malaria and recurring bouts of typhoid, typhus and dysentery, his merciless battle wounds scarred his internal organs as much as his outward appearance. His teeth were painfully rotten...”
― Jefferson R. Cowie, Freedom’s Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power