A Southern Unionist, he garnered regional fame and notoriety in January 1861 when he engaged in a heated debate with future Confederate States president Jefferson Davis at his family's Chattanooga hotel.

On January 22, 1861, Jefferson Davis, the future president of the Confederacy who had just resigned his seat in the United States Senate, stayed at the Crutchfield House while en route to his home in Mississippi.

In the hotel's dining room that night, Davis delivered a short speech praising secession and encouraging Tennessee to join the rest of the South.

He described Davis as a "renegade and a traitor," and stated that Tennessee would not be "hood winked, bamboozled and dragged into your Southern, codfish, aristocratic, tory blooded, South Carolina mobocracy.

[9] He provided the leaders of the Army of the Cumberland with invaluable information regarding Confederate troop positions, and would subsequently serve as an honorary captain and local guide to Union generals throughout the Chickamauga Campaign.

After the Union Army solidified its control of Chattanooga, Crutchfield provided assistance to General James B. Steedman and other post commanders until the close of the war.

[10] In April 1864, Crutchfield joined fellow Chattanooga-area Unionists Alfred Cate and Daniel C. Trewhitt as part of the Hamilton County delegation at the revived East Tennessee Convention in Knoxville.

In 1873, a correspondent for the Washington Star noted that since the tenure of Davy Crockett in the 1830s, each of Tennessee's congressional delegations had included at least one "mountaineer character," and that Crutchfield filled this role in the Forty-third Congress.

The correspondent described Crutchfield as "a sunburnt, wiry little man, with foxy hair and whiskers, and though, by report, of considerable means, wears the cheapest of homespun suits, a good deal frayed at the edges, and with a pair of heavy, well-greased cowhide brogans that were the perpetual despair of the Pullman boot-blacks.

"[15] Though he intended this as a joke, it caused considerable irritation for his fellow Republican congressmen who had been fighting for the bill, and generated outrage among white and black residents alike in the 3rd district.

[2] After his term in Congress, Crutchfield spent much of his time on his 500-acre (200 ha) orchard south of Chattanooga, where he produced fruit and engaged in other agricultural pursuits.