William Crutchfield (16 November 1824-24 January 1890) was a member of the US House of Representatives (R-TN 3) from 4 March 1873 to 3 March 1875, succeeding Abraham Ellison Garrett and preceding George Gibbs Dibrell.
Biography[]
William Crutchfield was born in Greeneville, Tennessee on 16 November 1824, and he settled in Jacksonville, Alabama in 1844 and supported local Whig candidates. In 1850, he moved to Chattanooga, where he founded a hotel and the city's fire and police departments. Crutchfield became a prominent political figure and businessman in Chattanooga, and, in January 1861, he engaged in a heated debate with Jefferson Davis at his hotel, establishing himself as a known Southern Unionist. He spied on the Confederate States Army for the Union during the American Civil War, and, after the war, he served in the US House of Representatives from 1873 to 1875 as a Republican. He secured appropriations for improvements to the Tennessee River, and he once proposed a bill which would outlaw a white woman rejecting a marriage proposal from an African-American man based on race, color, and previous condition of servitude. He died in 1890.