Nashville now and then: You watch your mouth

The First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States has not always had a whole lot of meaning in these parts.
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Email | Print By E. Thomas Wood

Amos Dresser

This week in the Nashville of 1918, and also of 1835, saying things that most people disagreed with could get you into big trouble.

On August 8, 1918, Vincent H. Huck was convicted in Davidson County Criminal Court of "seditious utterances." He was sentenced to a fine of $500, as well as six months in the workhouse. Huck had been arrested in May by federal agents for violating the Sedition Act of 1918, signed earlier that month by President Woodrow Wilson.

As assistant district manager of a local threshing machine company — and the Wisconsin-born son of German immigrants — Huck was reported to have insulted a woman who came to the office soliciting funds for the American Red Cross. Employees told investigators that they considered Huck pro-German and that he had not allowed Liberty Loan and War Savings Stamp brochures to be posted in the workplace.

Huck was reportedly overheard saying that the U.S. was in the war just to save the British government and telling a businessman that his company's letterhead was "yellow just like your friend Wilson."

The president had urged the passage of the Sedition Act, prohibiting the utterance of "disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language" about the U.S. government, flag, or armed forces during the war. Wilson argued that open dissent constituted an internal threat against the country. He pushed for the legislation after popular discontent over the war played a major role in the fall of the czarist empire in Russia and that country's withdrawal, in 1918, from the military alliance against Germany.

Was that threat so pressing that the obnoxious Mr. Huck needed to be removed from society? The U.S. Supreme Court ruled on the Sedition Act in 1919. The words of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in that decision yielded a new phrase in American parlance: "clear and present danger." Holmes wrote:

"The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that the United States Congress has a right to prevent. It is a question of proximity and degree. When a nation is at war, many things that might be said in time of peace are such a hindrance to its effort that their utterance will not be endured so long as men fight, and that no Court could regard them as protected by any constitutional right."

The last trace of Vincent Huck found in the public record is his registration for the military draft, submitted a month after he was sentenced. It gives a mailing address care of an attorney's office.

Congress repealed the Sedition Act in 1921.

Enforcing the code

Just as a conspicuous shortage of patriotism was dangerous during the First World War in Nashville, vocal opposition to slavery was a source of peril here in the decades preceding the War Between the States. Here's an item from the Essex Register (Salem, Mass.), published August 27, 1835:

SOUTHERN EXCITEMENT.

We have been favored with the following extract of a letter, received by a gentleman in this town, from his brother, a resident in Nashville. — The writer is a native of Salem — and we publish it as another proof of the high degree of excitement in the South and West, on the subject of Slavery: —

"NASHVILLE, Sunday, Aug. 9, 1833.

"By this you will become acquainted with the state of feeling in the West and South. You have already been apprized of the disturbances in Missis­sippi, the hanging of negroes, gamblers, &c. Since then, large committees have been appointed in eve­ry town, to protect and guard the country. There has also been a company formed, who go by the name of "Capt. Slick," or "Lynch" — these take the law in their own hands, go in disguise, and whip and hang all they think deserving, such as gam­blers, Emancipators, Abolitionists, free blacks, and all such men as you Yankees send to meddle with our concerns. You may rest assured, unless a dif­ferent course is pursued, there will be a civil war, or a division of the Union — and I shall go for the South, and fight against friends, if I knew I should meet you in the battle-field."

The focus of the correspondent's angry-white-male rage was one Amos Dresser. A Massachusetts native, Dresser attended Cincinnati's Lane Theological Seminary but left with a group of other students when the college banned their anti-slavery society. He was planning to join his fellow students in enrolling at the interracial Oberlin College, but he decided first to make a tour of the South selling abolitionist literature.

Dresser left behind an account of his Nashville visit in The Liberator, an abolitionist journal (September 26, 1835). In it, he professed to have had no worries at all about what he was doing. His troubles began when he took his carriage to a local shop for repairs. A workman rummaging inside the vehicle found a cache of anti-slavery books, and the "excitement" began. According to Dresser, a rumor soon swept the town that he was not only selling subversive material but had also been "posting up handbills about the city, inviting an insurrection of the slaves."

Constable John Braughton took Dresser into custody on the evening of August 8th, and a "Committee of Vigilance" convened at the courthouse to try him for the non-existent legal offense of possessing anti-slavery materials.

Noting that the committee included "a great portion of the respectability of Nashville," Dresser said he felt confident at first that it would act within the law. Among its 50 members were future Watkins Institute benefactor Samuel Watkins, Mayor John P. Erwin (who was the son-in-law of Whig party founder Henry Clay), former Mayor John M. Bass, future New Orleans shipping magnate Harry R. W. Hill, former Congressman Thomas Claiborne, prominent merchant Samuel Seay, banker John Sommerville, and businessmen Foster G. Crutcher and Robert Farquharson (the latter both serving as local directors of the Bank of the United States).

Before a large and rowdy crowd, these worthies presented evidence and interrogated Dresser until late in the evening. Then they retired to reach a verdict. The letter-writer from Salem narrated the outcome:

"One of your Emancipators caught it last night; and all you send may expect the same, and worse if Capt. Slick should have a hand with the cook at the time of serving out the dessert. This Emanci­pator (or Abolitionist as you may call him) was ta­ken last evening before a committee of about fifty. He had been vending, or intended to vend, a large quantity of Bibles, Abolition tracts, and the Eman­cipator — they were found in his possession. He was tried by the committee, found guilty, taken into the public square, and received 20 lashes, and was allowed 24 hours to leave the town. He ought to be thankful that he can escape with that punishment, for had Capt. Slick, whose company was in readi­ness at the Court House, have laid hands upon him, they would have hung him — yes, hung him without judge or jury — and served him right."

According to Dresser, a group of committee members stripped him naked, and as he knelt, Constable Braughton administered the whipping. "When the infliction ceased, an involuntary feeling of thanksgiving to God for the fortitude with which I had been able to endure it, arose in my soul, to which I began aloud to give utterance," Dresser recalled. "The death-like silence that prevailed for a moment, was suddenly broken with loud exclamations, 'G-d d--n him, stop his praying.'"

The episode gained attention in newspapers across the country. The Cincinnati Journal editorialized: "Seldom has the infatuation of lawless violence been more strikingly manifested." The paper opposed abolitionism as unconstitutional, but it warned that the attack on Dresser was "just what abolitionism wants to make it grow and prosper."

Dresser went on to have a long career as a pastor, missionary and anti-slavery activist.

Other happenings this week in our past:

Early August 1817: "In consequence of the prevalence of the Small Pox in several towns of Kentucky, the court of the county in Tennessee, in which Nashville is situated, have adopted the precaution of ordering that all boats approaching its limits, be subjected to a quarantine of twenty days." (The National Register, August 16, 1817)

August 4, 1949: The New York Times reports that Brownlee O. Currey, president of Nashville's Equitable Securities Corp., has been named a director of the American Express Co. Inc., following Equitable's purchase of a majority stake in AmEx. By the time American Express announces plans to buy out Equitable's stake in 1967, the shares will be worth $110 million.

Birthdays of note this week:

• Attorney Tom White of Tune, Entrekin and White — August 6
  
• Singer/songwriter Rodney Crowell — August 7