In the 1630s, disease swept once again through the New England indigenous communities already decimated by the 1616–1619 epidemic. William Bradford wrote of the Algonquians near Plymouth Colony:
They fell down so generally of this disease as they were in the end not able to help one another, nor not to make a fire nor to fetch a little water to drink, nor any to bury the dead. But would strive as long as they could, and when they could procure no other means to make fire, they would burn the wooden trays and dishes they ate their meat in, and their very bows and arrows. And some would crawl out on all fours to get a little water, and sometimes die by the way and not to be able to get in again.6
Thomas Morgan wrote of the same community in 1637 that they “died on heapes as they lay in their houses . . . in a place where many inhabited, there hath been but one left a live to tell what became of the rest . . . the bones and skulls upon the severall places of their habitations made such a spectacle.”7 Neither Bradford nor Morgan recorded their own responses to such a horrible plight.
The arrival of an epidemic weakened a community’s physical and cultural environment, making it even more vulnerable to further epidemics. When disease disrupted community labor cycles because few people were left to do the planting, or because those remaining alive moved in hopes of avoiding further epidemics, villages, according to the historian William Cronon, “often missed key phases in their annual subsistence cycles—the corn planting, say, or the fall hunt—and so were weakened when the next infection arrived.”8
The environmental changes brought on by European incursion and disease also disrupted subsistence. As historian David Jones has written, colonists deforested traditional living areas, which “led to wider temperature swings and more flooding.” Colonists’ livestock grazed and overran the crops of indigenous communities, which exacerbated tensions and often resulted in the attempted seizure of Native lands. Jones also notes that Europeans “introduced pests, including blights, insects, and rats. All of these changes fueled rapid soil erosion and undermined the subsistence of surviving Indian populations.”9 Weakened by an initial round of disease, and subject to environmental changes wrought by colonists, and, in some cases, depletion in their numbers as a result of massacres and the slave trade, many indigenous communities faced subsequent waves of disease with few resources.
When viral epidemics such as smallpox, measles, chickenpox, and mumps arrived in a village, those between the ages of fifteen and forty experienced the brunt of the outbreaks and had the highest death rates. Their fully developed immune systems responded most aggressively, meaning that they experienced the most virulent reactions—pustules, swelling, fever, weakness, and fatigue. With those most responsible for physical labor incapacitated, “the everyday work of raising crops, gathering wild plants, fetching water and firewood, hunting meat, and harvesting fish virtually ceased.” The young, the old, and those physically unable to engage in such labor likely received little food or care. Many who might otherwise not have died of disease did so simply because they had no one to provide them with food and water. In such physically and culturally depleted communities, caring for one another, engaging in community reciprocity, and sustaining vital cultural traditions became nearly impossible. As one European colonist wrote of the indigenous peoples near Charleston in 1710, “They have forgot most of their traditions since the Establishment of this Colony, they keep their Festivals and can tell but little of the reasons: their Old Men are dead.”10 Understandably, such devastation wrought spiritual and cultural crises.
For those with physical or mental disabilities, and for those whose bodies or minds made physical escape, gathering food or firewood, and finding water difficult, disease epidemics frequently and simply meant death. Though they may have possessed excellent storytelling or basket-making skills, wisdom, the ability to nurture children, these things meant little in the face of overwhelming communal stress. Those with disabilities likely were disproportionately affected by the arrival of Europeans in North America.
Epidemics often left disability in their wake. Survivors of smallpox experienced high rates of blindness and physical disfigurement. Scarlet fever could leave those afflicted blind, deaf, or deafblind. The consequences of European colonization and conquest not only altered the ways in which indigenous peoples experienced what is now called disability, but it disproportionately killed people with disabilities and also produced disability.
The period of European conquest in North America reveals much about the relationship between disability and disease. While the two are not synonymous, disease can lead to disability. Sometimes the resulting disability has little social or economic consequence, sometimes the consequences are significant. The large-scale onset of disease, however, when coupled with war, racism, environmental decline, and displacement, was extremely debilitating and brought significant levels of disability to people of indigenous nations. It also made the material realities of disability profoundly harsher.
Disease brought disability to European settlers as well, but the material realities were less significant and less widespread than for the indigenous peoples of North America. Physical disability was relatively routine and unremarked upon among colonists unless it resulted in an inability to labor in gender-, class-, and racially appropriate ways. European settlers paid far greater attention to those with mental or cognitive disabilities, and provided community care as they saw fit.
EUROPEAN NOTIONS OF “ABLE-BODIED,” AND COMMUNAL RESPONSE TO DISABILITY
The Spanish, French, British, and other Europeans who traveled to North America did so with many different goals. Some dreamed of establishing orderly and permanent colonies of like-minded individuals and families, others sought slaves, gold, and long-term trading relationships from which wealth and power would result. A few sought fame. Nearly all who organized such expeditions sought able-bodied and able-minded peoples to carry out and support these formidable tasks. They generally excluded people considered to have disabilities from the groups that boarded the wooden ships in European ports.
But what did it mean to Europeans to be able-bodied and able-minded in the 1600s? In 1616 Jesuit missionary Pierre Biard recorded that many of the men with him had “some defect, such as the one-eyed, squint-eyed, and flat-nosed.”11 Neither France, nor England, nor Spain offered physically easy lives in the early 1600s; nor did traveling by ship to North America. Bodily variations due to disease, accident, or birth were common and included in definitions of able-bodied. Thus, while those Europeans arriving in North American might have met seventeenth-century standards of able-bodiedness, their bodies varied substantially. Within the early capitalist systems beginning to dominate Europe during the seventeenth century, the primary definition of disability was an inability to perform labor.
European colonists paid relatively little attention to physical disability, but substantial attention to cognitive or mental disabilities. This reinforces the argument that bodily norms were relatively fluid and that bodies themselves varied immensely. One-armed men and women, or those with slight palsies or limps, or those who could not hear, and on and on, could plant fields, mind children, sail, build a barrel or a hunting trap, fish, shoot a gun, or spin and weave. Unlike the physically disabled, however, those that today we would categorize as having psychological or cognitive disabilities attracted substantial policy and legislative attention by Europeans attempting to establish social order, capitalist trade networks, and government in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century North America.
Just as there was considerable variability in the experience of Native communities, English settlements also varied. The English Puritans who settled in New England did so as families and households who sought to establish permanent settlements built on religious ideals. Their leaders thus considered female bodies appropriately able-bodied for their colonial hopes. The English who settled in the Chesapeake Bay region did so largely as individuals who sought economic advancement on a commercial outpost, either as
landholders or as indentured servants, or because they were coerced into doing so. The desired body for working tobacco fields was young, male, and able to perform significant physical labor.
Because the English, far more than the French or Spanish, sought permanent settlements of men, women, and children (rather than military, trading, or religious outposts), they focused more attention than did the Spanish or French on community and social policy. The Puritans of New England thus more quickly established their own legal structures. Those of the Chesapeake Bay region, in comparison, tended to rely on English courts.
The Puritan social ethic pervaded all aspects of life in early New England. Believing that God had created the world to be orderly and hierarchical, the Puritans sought to replicate that design in their social structure and community covenants. Intending originally to settle in Virginia but landing much farther northward, English Puritans led by William Bradford settled in 1620 in what is now Plymouth, Massachusetts. They chose a site already cleared and farmed by Patuxet Indians, who had abandoned it after a disease epidemic swept through in 1617. The members of Plymouth Colony came to be known as Pilgrims, in remembrance of whom US children now often create hats at Thanksgiving time. The colonial settlers established a male-disabled-veterans’ benefit in 1636, promising that “if any that shall goe returne maimed [and] hurt he shalbe mayntayned competently by the Colony during his life.” In 1641 the Massachusetts “Body of Liberties” guaranteed that no one would be made to perform public service if they were unable to due to “want of years, greatness of age, defect in mind, failing of senses, or impotency of Limbs.” It also established legal protections for those considered mentally incapable of making sound financial decisions—“any woman that is married, any child under age, Idiot or distracted person.” A subsequent edition of the Body of Liberties omitted the previous statement, but provided that “Children, Idiots, Distracted persons, and all that are strangers, or new commers to our plantation, shall have such allowances and dispensations in any Cause whether Criminall or other as religion and reason require.”12
Massachusetts law, and generally that of other colonies, distinguished between “idiots” and “distracted persons” throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Idiots were those, according to the poor law of 1693, who were “naturally wanting of understanding, so as to be uncapable to provide for him or herself.” Idiots were generally born idiots, and their condition was lifelong and permanent. A distracted person (sometimes referred to as a “lunatick”), in comparison, “by the Providence of God, shall fall into distraction, and become Non compos mentis”—for whom perceived mental instability occurred later in life and could be temporary.13 The relatively large amount of colonial law dedicated to what we now call cognitive and psychological disabilities remained consistent until the American Revolution.
Early colonial legal frameworks protected from punishment those who could not understand the law. Massachusetts, as stated earlier, guaranteed in 1639 that “Children, Idiots, Distracted persons, and all that are strangers, or new commers” would not be punished for failing to adhere to the law—adopting an already firmly established English practice. Rhode Island adopted a similar provision in 1647. It stated that in cases of manslaughter, punishment would not be given to “a natural foole that hath not knowledge of good or evil; nor a felonious intent . . . neither doth it concerne a madd man, who is a man, as it were, without a mind; for the saying is: an act makes not a man herein guiltie, unless the mind be guiltie.”14
The final concern of New England law regarding mental or cognitive disabilities was financial. Families always bore primary responsibility for those who could not labor and thus care for themselves—whether due to youth, old age, or mental, cognitive, or physical disabilities. Communities considered both idiots and the distracted undesirable inhabitants, particularly those without families, because of their general inability to provide for their own financial support. Beginning in 1693, poor laws allowed local officials to use the estates of either idiots or the distracted to defer the cost of community support.15 Laws also sought to protect and manage property owned or inherited by those considered idiots or the distracted, ensuring that the larger community would not end up financially responsible for their daily needs.
The implementation of laws regarding idiocy required standards, and those standards generally involved work, self-care, perceived intellectual capacity, and the maintenance of property. Massachusetts resident Mighill Smith voted three times in the same election, but the 1647 colonial court decided not to fine him: “His putting in of three beanes at once for one mans election, it being done in simplicity, & he being pore & of harmless disposition.” Mary Phipps was determined “void of common reason and understanding that is in other children of her age [and] . . . next to a mere naturall in her intellectuals.”16 Both adults were thus idiots not culpable for their actions, considered innocent and harmless and in need of protection.
Just as people with cognitive disabilities today are vulnerable to physical and sexual assault or economic exploitation, so were colonial idiots. The cases of Benomi Buck and his sister Mara Buck are one example. Their father, the Reverend Richard Buck, was hired by London’s Virginia Company to provide spiritual guidance to the several thousand indentured servants and masters of the company. Buck and his second wife, whose name in the historical record is given as “Mrs. Buck,” left England in 1609 only to be marooned for nine months in Bermuda before finally arriving in Virginia in 1611. Mara, whose name means “bitter,” was born in 1611, and Benomi, “son of my sorrow,” in 1616. (Between those births, in 1614, Buck officiated at the marriage ceremony of John Rolfe and Pocahontas.) The reverend and his wife died in 1624. At his death, Buck owned substantial property, at least several indentured servant contracts, personal property such as livestock and tobacco, and other goods valued at 320 pounds of tobacco.17
What we know of Benomi and Mara Buck largely comes from the legal battles regarding their portions of their father’s estate. Death and the attempted crimes of others put them in the historical record. Benomi, considered an idiot and “in no way able to governe himself, or to manage that small estate left him by his said father,” lived until 1639, having both in childhood and adulthood always been under legal guardianship. When Governor John Harvey investigated Benomi’s case, he found that several of Benomi’s guardians “had much inriched [themselves] from the stocks” intended to support the young man. Mara received the Crown Court’s attention after rumors surfaced that a man sought to marry her, at age thirteen, in order to gain access to her portion of her father’s estate. The court determined her to be disabled and in need of guardianship. She was, her guardian in 1624 testified, “very Dull to take her lerninge.”18
Mary Phipps also only entered the historical record after a crime. In 1689 the unmarried nineteen-year-old granddaughter of Thomas Danforth (the judge of the Salem witch trials) of Charlestown, Massachusetts, gave birth to a child. Phipps twice named John Walker, a forty-nine-year-old bricklayer, the father. He had, she told the midwife, “took several opportunities to abuse her body in his wicked lustfull manner” while preventing her from crying out by covering her mouth. Servant Hannah Gilson described Walker as “so nasty & his language so base that she would not have been alone in a house with him for all the world hee was so wicked.” Mary’s father reported that she had been “enslaved . . . with fear that if she did tell anybody he [Walker] would kill her.”19
Though clearly Phipps had been raped, she and her child came to the courts only because the child was a bastard. The courts sought to determine fiscal responsibility and found John Walker responsible. Perhaps the legal situation was made worse by Phipps’s idiocy and palsy. She was, court depositions stated, “void of common reason and understanding that is in other children of her age, not capable of discerning between good and evil or any morality . . . but she knows persons and remembers persons. She is next to a mere naturall in her intellectuals . . . She is incapable
of resisting a rape hav[ing] one side quite palsied . . . [we] have to help her as a meer child.”20 Walker’s punishment was to provide for the child financially. When the baby died, Walker had no more involvement. Phipps’s famous grandfather later died in 1699 and left her a portion of his estate, but what happened to Phipps is unclear.
Just as communities expected families to provide care and finances for idiots, so did communities expect families to care for the distracted and the lunatic. Those from well-to-do families lived with family members and, as long as they had financial support, generally didn’t enter the public record. Ann Yale Hopkins, the wife of the governor of Connecticut in the mid-seventeenth century, had “fallen into a sad infirmity, the loss of her understanding and reason.” Colonial leader and family friend John Winthrop recorded her condition, blaming it on her husband’s indulgence of her intellectual pursuits. Despite the medicinal water that Winthrop prescribed for her, she remained considered insane for over fifty years.21
Poor people deemed insane, and those violent or uncontrollable, became a community responsibility. A 1694 Massachusetts statute guaranteed that each community had the responsibility “to take effectual care and make necessary provision for the relief, support and safety of such impotent or distracted person.” If the insane person was destitute, they became the town’s fiscal responsibility. Connecticut, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Virginia followed with similar statutes. When Jan Vorelissen of Pennsylvania could no longer support his son Erik, “bereft of his naturall Senses and [who] is turned quyt madd,” the city provided support. The colony of New Haven provided funds for the town marshal to care for distracted Goodwife Lampson, “so far as her husband is not able to do it.”22
When those considered insane threatened public safety, communities attempted to restrain them. A Virginia court ordered that the sheriff restrain John Stock, who in 1689 “keeps running about the neighborhood day and night in a sad Distracted Condition to the great Disturbance of the people.” The sheriff was to restrain Stock in “some close Roome, where hee shall not bee suffered to go abroad until hee bee in a better condition to Governe himselfe.”23
A Disability History of the United States Page 4
