I can't answer the question definitely for the US version. On the EU version there are two ways of achieving this.

The first is that one of the journey types is "avoid freeways". The other way is to select "fastest" and then go into the route detail and tell it to avoid certain roads (or rather road segments).

That review isn't exactly the most through I have seen, there are any features that it doesn't cover.

One area where TomTom isn't so good is manuals (much like Apple), it tends to be a voyage of discovery to find all the smaller features...