Jefferson Cowie uses Barbour County, Alabama, as a lens to examine how white Americans have repeatedly wielded the concept of freedom as a weapon against others throughout American history. This sweeping narrative traces how the language of liberty has been deployed to justify Native American dispossession, slavery, secession, the violent overthrow of Reconstruction, and resistance to civil rights. Cowie, a labor historian, demonstrates that freedom in America has rarely been an abstract ideal but rather a contested political claim tied to land, labor, and racial hierarchy. Through meticulous archival research, he reconstructs the lives of Barbour County residents across generations, from Creek Indians fighting removal to enslaved people seeking emancipation to Black citizens demanding voting rights. The book reveals how local struggles connected to national movements, with figures like George Wallace emerging from this very soil. Cowie argues that understanding this history requires recognizing how federal power has alternatively expanded and contracted freedom depending on who was asking. The result is a challenging reinterpretation of American liberty that reveals the dark underside of freedom's dominion. By grounding his analysis in one county's history, Cowie makes abstract constitutional debates viscerally concrete, showing how ordinary people lived, fought, and died over competing visions of what it means to be free in America.