Jefferson Cowie - Freedom"s Dominion - Notes

This is the best American history book of the year.  The previous review best summarizes the book.  Here are some additional notes.

As Reconstruction played out, freedom proved to be zero sum: any increase in Black freedom meant a decrease in white freedom.  Anything that challenged white prerogatives was understood as the path to Black domination.  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 in American history.  P. 119-120

The unprecedented use of federal force during Reconstruction nurtured a belief among whites that they were the victims of federal military and political overreach.  By the terms of their world, they were right.  To understand Reconstruction is that see that whites saw themselves in a struggle to regain how the white elite saw themselves in a struggle to regain their freedom from their federal oppressors.  Freedom had to be made national not state or local,  the only way for the newly freed people to thrive.  The paradox of American history is that slavery was proclaimed in the name of freedom.  P. 120

There was a hunger for education amongst the newly freed people though many of the schools built through the Freedman's Bureau were burned.  P. 121

Lincoln was forced to move forward from his original position that the war was for the purpose of saving the Union rather than freeing the slaves.  The great irony of the Civil War is that were it not for the slaveholders rebellion to save slavery there would not have been the federal opportunity to abolish slavery.  The Emancipation Proclamation was not a democratic action but government by fiat.  P. 122

The passage of the 13th Amendment at the end of the war was an unprecedented display of federal power against the entire his history of states rights  P. 123

At the end of the war there was talk of the confiscation of planter land, but it never happened with President Johnson in charge and the demise of the Freedman's Bureau.  P. 123

Some African Americans embraced colonization believing that they would never be accepted by whites.  P. 125

Federal prosecution of KKK members was serious and effective and very much so in Alabama.    P. 140

From 1872 on, the struggle to regain freedom from federal incursion and Black political power would be a much more raw, makes appeal to self-rule and white supremacy.  Compromise and formal politics were over.  In the future, they would take up arms against democracy in the name of their own freedom.  P. 151

Reconstruction marked the most effective political  mobilization of any section of the working class in the nineteenth century.  P. 154

The complexities of southern Reconstruction is amazing.  P. 155

Convict leasing, which developed in the South replacing slavery, is one of the greatest disgraceful facts of Southern history.