Sen. Todd GardenhireAndy Sher at the Times-Free Press reported last week that the Hamilton County Black Caucus is upset at state Sen. Todd Gardenhire for using racially charged, coded language when going after his opponent, Khristy Wilkinson. Gardenhire accused Wilkinson of having Detroit values, but having been to Detroit numerous times and coming from a line of Phillipses who’ve been in or near Detroit since 1828, I can assure you Detroit values delicious food, good music and sneaking into Canada to go to the strip clubs. It’s not that terrible to have Detroit values.
But the Hamilton County Black Caucus, reasoning that Gardenhire was going after Wilkinson’s heritage, decided his heritage was also fair game. And it probably goes without saying that a rich white guy whose family has been in Tennessee since way back does not have the kind of heritage members of any black caucus are going to be cheering about.
The Hamilton County Black Caucus’s press release reads in part:
The full picture of Todd Gardenhire’s family history is deeply troubling for conscientious voters of any color.
An ancestor of Sen. Gardenhire, W.C. Gardenhire, was a slave trader before the Civil War and continued the practice of capturing and selling human beings after the war. Cannibal Fictions gives an account of the late Gardenhire traveling to Pacific Islands, returning to San Francisco and selling indigenous people to P.T. Barnum’s circus. His family built wealth on the sale of human beings, fought to preserve slavery, and continued the practice decades after the 13th Amendment abolished slavery.
WorldConnect Project – Ancestry.com states, “George is descended from William Gardenhire and Ester Nail…I have learned that George Gardenhire was one of the largest slave holders in Chattanooga, TN.” Another article “Names Plantations and Homes in Hamilton County – Chattanoogan.com states,” “Citico – This was the farm and estate of Chattanooga pioneer William Gardenhire, immediately east….plantation had 44 slaves living on it at the outbreak of the Civil War.”
This is a terrible and ugly past. Sen. Gardenhire has put his family heritage on display to suggest that it is superior to his opponent’s. He has also made direct appeals to minorities and suggested that he is the choice to look out for their interests.
OK, well, once cannibals and P.T. Barnum are involved, you know I have to look into this. What I found is even stranger than the press release suggests.
First, let’s untangle the Gardenhires here. George Washington Gardenhire was born in 1796 and died in1894 on a farm outside Chattanooga. He was a slave trader, but many white landowners of his station did a little slave trading when they were young to boost their family fortunes. This isn’t to excuse him, of course, but to point out that he was in the company of men like Andrew Jackson. George had three sons, only two of whom concern us (Sorry, Alfred Blevins Gardenhire, you should have been born earlier.) The Gardenhires did own a large plantation just north of Chattanooga — Citico — one of the few big plantations in the area. As far as I have been able to tell, George’s second son, Francis “Franz” Gardenhire is the one who inherited Citico. Franz is interesting to the extent that he served in the Confederate Army, was a POW for a year at the end of the war, and came back to Chattanooga and was still pretty damn rich for the rest of his life. Plus, he gave Chattanooga a cemetery.
George’s oldest son, William, though! Now this is an interesting life. He was born in 1838. After his family moved to Chattanooga and he grew up, he opened a mercantile business. He joined the Confederate Army and after the war went to California. He traveled the world and was one of the charter members of the American Mining and Stock Exchange. He, along with Alfred Blevins, founded Dayton after drinking from the water of Dayton Springs cured his kidney ailment. Oh, and as Goodspeed’s history of Roane County tells us, “he made a voyage to the South Sea Islands, visiting the Fijians and the Sandwichers, Australians and a number of others. He returned to California in 1871, bringing with him four native Fijians, and after exhibiting them in Woodward Garden, San Francisco, for some time at $150 a day, he sold them to P.T. Barnum for $20,000.”
Goodspeed’s leaves it out, perhaps to spare readers’ delicate sensibilities, but these Fijians were billed as cannibals — man eaters. But did William, even after the abolition of slavery, buy some people and then come parade them around the country before selling them to P.T. Barnum? I see why the Hamilton County Black Caucus grabbed onto it. If the Gardenhires have a history of ignoring civil rights gains — like the abolition of slavery — what’s that suggest about the current Gardenhire?
But the past is weirder and more complicated than that. First, Fiji did have a history of cannibalism, but by the time Gardenhire got there, historians now think that Fijians had mostly given up the practice. The people Gardenhire acquired certainly weren’t in a position to eat anyone. They’d just lost a war with the King of Fiji. But here’s the important thing — Gardenhire was in Fiji because he wanted to get rich(er) off of developing the island. He brought the Fijians to the United States to stir up curiosity about Fiji and to convince rich Americans that it would be fun to go to Fiji and possibly invest.
Jeff Berglund’s Cannibal Fictions: American Explorations of Colonialism, Race, Gender, and Sexuality has a really in-depth look at how Gardenhire acquired these people and what it meant and how Gardenhire and Barnum tried to pass it off as some great humanitarian effort to keep the Fijians from being eaten by their enemies:
Gardenhire, allegedly Barnum’s agent in this document’s account, proposed to the Consul that for the use of the Fijians, he would pay Thokambau [the king of Fiji] a large sum and provided $15,000 in bonds for their return in three years. The missionaries, Crum [a reporter] writes, “had many reasons for encouraging this humane project, and through their influence, and that of the American Consul, the proposition was accepted, the necessary bonds given, and certified to by the American Consul, and the four Fijian specimens are already numbered among the living human curiosities of P.T.Barnum’s show.”
See what’s going on? Gardenhire isn’t buying these people. He’s basically taking them and leaving a security deposit. When he returns the Fijians, he’ll get his money back. The money Barnum gave him was to cover the deposit he would lose when he handed the Fijians over to Barnum. It’s not great, but it’s not exactly slavery.
Note that this Crum dude says there are four Fijians in Barnum’s show. But Gardenhire himself only acquired three Fijians — three men. Barnum had a “Fijian” woman, but it turned out she was just a black lady from Virginia.
People, dwell on this. Barnum thought Americans would want to see a Fijian woman, but he didn’t have one, so, knowing how racist we were, he just hired an African American woman to pretend to be Fijian. A lot of people bought this, though it appears that few people also were like, “Um, we remember ‘Princess Otevah’ from back when she was just a housekeeper. We know her mom.”
Clearly, this woman was being exploited. On the other hand, being a black domestic in Virginia after Reconstruction probably sucked major ass and ‘Otevah’ got a new set of clothes and got to travel and see the country. If you compare cleaning up after racist white folks to Barnum’s circus where there were sea lions, a goat named Alexis who rode a horse, an elephant, sixteen camels, a bearded child and, “the strange and brainless being, Zip,” surely Barnum’s circus comes out ahead.
And it’s also true that, while the actual Fijians probably wouldn’t have been eaten, it wasn’t going to be fun for them to stay in Fiji after rebelling against the king. A world tour might be just the thing to give you a little needed space from your pissed-off monarch.
So, it’s hard to say. Is being put on display for people to gawk at a shitty thing? Obviously yes. Is it the most shitty thing that could have happened to these folks? I don’t think so. It seems better than the likely alternatives.
Should voters hold it against Todd Gardenhire? No. If the descendants of slave owners aren’t fit to serve in the state legislature, that’s going to rule out a lot of people, including a lot of black people. But I think it’s hilarious and appropriate that the Hamilton County Black Caucus brought it up in response to him bringing up his opponent’s heritage.
I score this as worth laughing about, but not worth worrying about.
