The idea that freedom has been closely tied to racial domination in American history is hardly new. But Cowie, one of the nation’s leading labor historians, has found a novel way to tell that story. Rather than an intellectual history that charts an abstract idea across space and time, Cowie gives us a visceral, flesh-and-blood narrative rooted in a very specific place: Barbour County, Alabama. Few have probably heard of it, but this rural southeastern county that borders Georgia—population 25,000, largely split between Black and white residents—was not only the birthplace of George Wallace but home to at least six other Alabama governors. Perhaps more importantly, Cowie convincingly argues, Barbour County’s history—from the ethnic cleansing of its Indigenous inhabitants to the enslavement, segregation, lynching, and disenfranchisement of its Black population, to the suppression of its labor unions, all in the name of freedom from federal intervention—encapsulates much of America’s history too.
Cowie divides his narrative into four major episodes, beginning with the forced removal of the Muscogee Nation from Barbour County in the 1830s. The usual villain in this story is Andrew Jackson, who as president oversaw the Indian Removal Act of 1830. The law gave the president the authority to negotiate treaties with Indigenous nations in the southeast and to offer them federal land west of the Mississippi in exchange for the land on which they lived. But Cowie reminds us that, to many white settlers in the region, Jackson quickly became viewed as the enemy: an ally of Indigenous nations who refused to let poor whites settle where and when they pleased.
When Jackson signed the Treaty of Cusseta with the Muscogee Nation in 1832, he not only promised Muscogee leaders federal land in the West—what today is Oklahoma—but also, for those who refused to leave, five years of federal protection from white squatters who illegally moved into their homes. Jackson kept his word. In 1833, he sent federal troops to Barbour County to forcibly remove a white squatter, Hardeman Owens, from a Muscogee home whose owners told federal troops Owens had stolen from them, “killing their hogs and horses, beating the Indians in a most cruel manner.” When federal forces knocked on the door, however, they were ambushed: Owens stocked the cabin with dynamite, blowing it up in their faces.