The crowd began gathering at the Church Street train station before sunset. Some had waited an hour by the time the New Orleans Lightning Express pulled into Nashville, just as night fell. It was a stifling summer evening—Monday, Sept. 4, 1876. When Thomas and Henrietta Huxley stepped down from the passenger car, they were flattered by the number of people who had braved the heat and humidity to greet them.
In the light of the station lanterns, the bespectacled and side-whiskered Englishman didn’t look particularly impressive. But most in the crowd knew Thomas Henry Huxley as one of the foremost scientists and educators of the day.
The Huxleys had been in the U.S. for a month. Although he had crossed the ocean in order to give the inaugural address at the opening of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, at first Huxley called the trip a second honeymoon. For the first time in two decades, he and his wife had time away from their sizable family. But by popular demand the romantic holiday turned into a royal tour. Huxley met with scientists, and he and Henrietta were wined and dined from Yale to Niagara Falls.
Huxley had included Nashville on his first trip to the U.S. so that he could visit his sister, Eliza, whom he had not seen in almost 30 years. Naturally, she was at the station to meet them. As Henrietta scanned the surrounding crowd, she noticed the piercing black eyes of a woman who was approaching—eyes that resembled Thomas’ own eyes and his description of his mother’s. Henrietta called out, “There she is!”
Eliza and her husband, physician John Godwin Scott, had emigrated to the U.S. in the late 1840s. After living through the Civil War, with Dr. Scott serving as a Confederate surgeon, they had moved to Montgomery, Ala. One son and two daughters lived in Nashville, and Eliza had traveled north to visit her children and to shorten her brother’s own journey. She had also hoped to save Thomas from the Alabama summer, but the swelter in Nashville turned out to be just as oppressive.
Henrietta surveyed the crowd. She had always predicted that Thomas would be successful, but even she had not imagined such widespread fame. Earlier that year, an American who had named his son Thomas Huxley sent a message to the scientist: “The whole nation is electrified by the announcement that Professor Huxley is to visit us next fall. We will make infinitely more of him than we did of the Prince of Wales and his retinue of lords and dukes.”
Thomas Huxley was not an entertainer or a politician. Undaunted by opposition, always enjoying a good fight, he was the public whipping boy for the scandalous concept of evolution. An opponent had once called him the “devil’s disciple.”Amid the fray, Huxley calmly coined the word “agnostic” and pronounced himself pleased to be named after Doubting Thomas, the apostle he most admired. He was the Carl Sagan of his era.
Huxley seemed an unlikely celebrity, especially in Nashville in the 19th century. Later, opposition to the idea of evolution would twice make Tennessee a national laughingstock. In 1925 the whole country followed the Scopes Trial, held in Dayton. And in 1996 even Russian news media covered the efforts of Tennessee state Sen. Tommy Burks and state Rep. Zane Whitson to make it a punishable offense to teach evolution as fact in Tennessee schools.
But Nashvillians in 1876 were willing to overlook Huxley’s radical notions. Support for public education was rising steadily. Students in Nashville schools studied extensive Latin, Greek, French, and German. New scientific requirements included chemistry, botany, and geology.
Almost a quarter of the citizens of Davidson County were foreign-born or had parents who were immigrants. There was even a German-language newspaper.
Immigrants knew that only with education could they battle the institutionalized resistance to true democracy. In 1876 many white men were celebrating a century of freedom by supporting Black Codes that undermined the 15th Amendment; women still could not vote; and the Army was busily exterminating those Native Americans who resisted destiny.
Science and technology were sowing the seeds that would flourish in our own era. Recent developments included the periodic table of elements, the invention of celluloid, and the first description of platelets in blood. Alexander Graham Bell patented a telephone in 1876. Scientists were learning how to cultivate bacteria and were building a four-stroke piston engine.
And, thanks to an ever-increasing flood of evidence, evolution already was becoming the unifying theory of the natural world.
The Huxleys stayed at 98 South Vine St. (now Seventh Avenue), the home of Thomas’s niece. Eliza’s daughter Edith had married Albert C. Roberts, who edited Nashville’s principal newspaper, The Daily American. Thanks to the unexpected public attention that surrounded his visit, Huxley was allowed no rest on the day after his arrival. On Tuesday morning, he ventured into the heat to bestow his blessing upon the fledgling sciences in Nashville.
He began by accepting Gov. James Porter’s invitation to visit the State Capitol. As difficult as it is to imagine nowadays, the governor of Tennessee at the time was interested in education, especially the sciences. A few years later, Porter sponsored the establishment of a State Board of Health that put a stop to such then-common practices as emptying chamber pots into the street. Only three years before Huxley’s arrival, thousands of Nashvillians had fled yet another cholera epidemic that had been brought on by poor hygiene.
With the governor as guide, Huxley inspected the state Department of Mines and Agriculture’s mineral and wood collection, which was displayed in the old federal courtrooms. He then visited the State Library, which at the time was located across from the Senate Chamber on the third floor of the Capitol. His signature is still in the guest book.
Next, Huxley made a brief visit to the still new Fisk University. Although the school already housed extensive collections of both natural history specimens and scientific instruments, there seems to be no record that Huxley viewed them. Soon he was whisked away to see other sights.
Even after a busy day as visiting sage, Huxley wasn’t allowed to rest. At 9 p.m. Tuesday, a delegation called on him at his niece’s house. While he had been making the rounds, a committee had formed to persuade him to appear in public.
The committee explained that, if the good professor wasn’t up to making a lecture, perhaps he would allow them “to extend the courtesies of the city in the form of a banquet, or in any other manner that would meet the convenience and pleasure of the distinguished visitor.”
Huxley may have been choosing the lesser of two evils when he replied, “It affords me pleasure to recognize the compliment which you have so delicately bestowed; and if you will put up with an extemporaneous address I shall be pleased to meet the wishes of your committee at any time that you may appoint.”
They agreed upon Thursday evening.
The next day the Daily American reported, “A Lecture By the Great Scientist Promised for To-morrow Night,” and then proceeded to get the great scientist’s name wrong. The paper reported the committee’s determination to pay tribute to “the scholarship, life-long concentration of purpose, and literary ability of Prof. G. H. Huxley.” Everyone wanted to learn the truth about nature, one committee member had declared, and he himself firmly believed that science in no way contradicted “divine truth.”
Huxley would have disagreed with that last statement. “Vanquished theologians,” he once wrote, “lie about the cradle of every infant science.” However, he conceded that, in order to believe that nature was nudged along by God, it was merely necessary “to suppose that the original plan was sketched out—that the purpose was foreshadowed in the molecular arrangements out of which the animals have come.”
While the public read about him in the papers, Huxley continued to make the rounds. By 9 o’clock he was at the city’s public high school, the Fogg School, which was located on the corner of Broad and Spruce (now Eighth Avenue). The principal, A.D. Wharton, asked him to address the students. Huxley informed them that England was behind the U.S. in commitment to public education, but he hoped that in time the British might catch up.
By 10 a.m. Huxley was on his way to the Vanderbilt University campus. Opened only a year before with a gift of $1 million from robber baron Cornelius Vanderbilt, the school was still Methodist-run. Faculty members took turns leading devotionals.
At Vanderbilt, Huxley encountered a fellow countryman. Thomas O. Summers Sr. had converted to Methodism and had moved to the U.S. to preach. He had become professor of systematic theology at Vanderbilt and was dean of the Biblical Department. Summers was a fierce defender of orthodoxy, and therefore an opponent of evolution. As he led a tour, he traded quips with his guest.
Huxley noticed that the School of Theology and the School of Science were across a hall from each other. “You have religion on one side and science on the other. Do you keep a patrol in between?”
“Come in, sir,” Summers replied. “Come in and see where we beat out theology. And where we should be glad to have the opportunity of beating a little into you.”
“Ah, sir, if I were here I should give you novel theology—if not sound.”
Summers laughed. “I have no doubt of its being sound.”
Huxley observed that the desks were oddly constructed. “You seem to have a twist in the desk appendages to the seat, I see, Doctor.”
“Yes, but it is not so bad as the twist which you put into the occupants, and which we are trying to work out.”
“I hope we keep you employed,” Huxley replied.
In the Vanderbilt library, Huxley found several bronze busts of famous naturalists, including Cuvier, Linnaeus—and Thomas Huxley.
It’s a shame that Alexander Winchell was out of town during Huxley’s visit. Winchell was a part-time professor of geology, and Vanderbilt’s only faculty member of national prominence. He was determined to reconcile the findings of evolution with the Bible. Two years after Huxley’s visit, in response to Winchell’s radical theories about humans existing on earth before Adam, Vanderbilt fired him.
On the evening after Huxley’s visit to Vanderbilt, and all through the next day, a parade of admirers visited Vine Street. Finally Huxley sought seclusion and left Henrietta to keep his admirers at bay. He was exhausted, but also his commitment to giving an “extemporaneous address” required several hours of preparation.
Huxley spoke at the Masonic Hall, which was located on Summer Street (now Fifth Avenue), not far from its intersection with Church Street. At the time, the Masonic in Nashville was considered one of the great theaters in the South. It could seat 700, with standing room for another 400 or more. It provided an exotic setting, richly wallpapered, trimmed in gold and scarlet, with a Nile night scene painted on the curtain.
There was no charge for Huxley’s talk, but a ticket was required. The last one was handed out by late morning. Well before 8 o’clock that evening, the theater was crowded with public officials, businessmen, and well-dressed society women. A band played.
While Huxley looked out over the expectant audience, Dr. T.O. Summers Jr.—the son of Huxley’s Vanderbilt nemesis and himself a professor—stood up to introduce the guest of honor. He described Huxley as “the great apostle of modern science” and referred to “the electric fire of his ready pen.”
The exhausted scientist rose. Recent demands on his voice had left it a whisper, and many in the auditorium could not decipher Huxley’s words. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he began, “when I left England...it certainly did not enter into my plans to have the honor of making an appearance before the citizens of Nashville. The signal kindness and courtesy, however, with which I have been received here would have prevailed upon me.” (Possibly Huxley thought again of a joke he had made at the expense of his admirers in Buffalo, N.Y.: “You have among you the virtue which is most notable among savages, that of hospitality.”)
Speaking as loudly as he could, he launched into a comparison of Tennessee’s geography with that of England. He pointed out that only through education in “the physical sciences” could Tennessee train its future generations to understand the seemingly limitless wealth of the state’s natural resources.
He insisted that there were two ways to know the past—through written history and through archaeology. “And although the archaeological evidence is scantier than the historical, it is the surer evidence of the two,” Huxley said. Piece by piece, he went on to demonstrate the ancient age of the earth and the eons of slow change required to shape the planet as we know it.
“During that vast time,” he said, “the population of the earth has undergone a slow, constant and gradual change, one species giving way to another.É I need not say that this view of the past history of the globe is a very different one from that which is commonly taken. It is so widely different that it is impossible to effect any kind of community, any kind of parallel, far less any sort of reconciliation between these two.”
Then, providing what might well have been a terse sound bite for the press, he flung down the gauntlet: “One of these must be true. The other is not.”
Huxley spoke for half an hour or more. At the end of the speech, the crowd—even those who couldn’t hear him—responded with thunderous applause. Among the audience members who congratulated Huxley was T.O. Summers Sr. He said with a smile, “You did not hurt us very much.”
Huxley smiled too. “I did not want to hurt you at all.”
The next day, Friday the 8th, while Nashvillians read in their papers about the evening’s festivities, the much-applauded “Devil’s Disciple” left on the train for Baltimore.
