Voting in the Blount County Courthouse
October 15th, 2008
By ELROD
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Here in Tennessee we had our first chance to vote for President today. I live in the historically Republican eastern part of the state, though we Democrats are growing in number. I went into the Blount County Courthouse in downtown Maryville this morning and cast my vote for Barack Obama.
When I walked out of the building I had an almost surreal feeling run through me. Though the Blount County courthouse has been rebuilt a few times over the years, it was the very place where slaves were once bought and sold.
Though slavery was less integral to the social and economic life in Appalachian East Tennessee than elsewhere in the South, it was still a widely-defended institution. Even some of the staunchest East Tennessee Unionists like William “Parson” Brownlow and Andrew Johnson were firm defenders of slavery.
I thought particularly of one man named George Erskine. In the 1810s George Erskine was a slave who was purchased by an abolitionist Presbyterian minister named Isaac Anderson. The minister established a new seminary in Maryville to serve the mostly Presbyterian Scots-Irish population trickling down the Great Valley to settle here. Anderson immediately freed Erskine and trained him for the ministry in his home. Anderson then established the Southern and Western Theological Seminary where he could train a new generation of ministers. Erskine would later move to Liberia and his daughter would make a quilt for Queen Victoria.
Southern and Western Theological Seminary is now Maryville College, a small liberal arts college still affiliated with the Presbyterian Church (USA). I am a professor of US history at Maryville College and I teach courses in 19th century US history, African American history and Southern history in Anderson Hall - named after Isaac Anderson. I tell the story of George Erskine to my mostly Southern (and white) students every semester so they know of the quietly progressive and even radical tradition of this college.
But today I thought about what George Erskine would have thought about this election had he been alive. In the very same place where he was sold as a slave, I and thousands of others had the chance to vote for an African American for President of the United States. This didn’t just feel like any old election. It felt like a world-historical event.
For some of us - white or black, Northern or Southern - this election is more special than most. No, as Barack Obama has warned himself, we cannot purchase reconciliation on the cheap by simply voting for him. No, we are not assuaging the sins of the past, or atoning for racism or slavery or Jim Crow simply by voting for Barack Obama. No, we do not vote for him out of some cheap sense of historical guilt.
What’s remarkable about this election is that I and millions of others voted for Barack Obama - an African American - for reasons having little to do with these matters of historical legacy. I voted for him because of his judgment, his temperament, his ideas, his character, his leadership.
But the very act of doing so cannot obscure the historical nature of this moment. It’s amazing.
This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 15th, 2008 at 7:30 pm and is filed under Black/African-American, Civil Liberties, Voting, Newsweek Blogitics, Tennessee, At TMV, Christianity, Society, 2008 Elections, Minorities, Barack Obama, Racism, Politics. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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