A Disability History of the United States

by Kim E. Nielsen

  Fettered and blind, one after one,

  Plunged down from the vessel’s side.

  The sabre smote above,

  Beneath, the lean shark lay,

  Waiting with wide and bloody jaw

  His quick and human prey.24

  As with nearly all slave-trading ships, the sharks followed in the wake. While clearly not all such voyages ended as horrifically as Le Rodeur’s, the devaluing of human beings—and particularly of human beings with disability, considered useless—was omnipresent in the slave trade.

  When slave ships landed in North America, slaves with discernible physical, psychiatric, or cognitive disabilities were damaged goods. They became, in the parlance of the time, “refuse slaves.” Slave company agents noted disease or disability on a sales invoice in order to justify receiving low prices. When first put up for sale, enslaved Africans with visible disabilities often sold slowly, if at all. In 1680 a Barbados slave agent complained that his cargo had not been sold after three weeks because it included “very ordinary Slaves both Old some Poore & Blind and many burst ones . . . made them ly long on our hands & goe off at low prices.” Similarly, South Carolina slave trader Henry Laurens complained about “refuse slaves” in 1755: “We have this day sold forty-two to the amount of £7,455 12 shillings [in] currency, in which are included that sold at vendue [auction] for only £35 12 shillings. They seemed past all hopes of recovery. God knows what we shall do with those that remain, they are a most scabby flock . . . Several have extreme[ly] sore eyes, three very puny children and, add to this, the worst infirmity of all others with which six or eight are attended, viz. old age.” Entry ports were often riddled with such slaves, who had been abandoned and left to die.25

  Many owners and slave traders sold refuse slaves northward. One trader, with a “negro man” characterized as “craizie [and who] does little or noe work,” was advised to “dispose of him to ye northward.” Northern colonies, however, did not want these undesirables. In 1708 Rhode Island passed one of the first laws attempting to discourage the importation of refuse slaves, describing them as “som[e] Sent for murder Som[e] for thifing Som[e] Runaways & most Impudent Lame & distempred.”26

  The brutality of slavery rendered those who maintained it and benefited from it increasingly horrific and inhumane. The poisonous combination of racism, ableism, and economic drive left slaves with disabilities extremely vulnerable.

  The experiences of people with disabilities in colonial America varied tremendously according to one’s familial resources (economic as well as physical), race, legal status, gender, and class. For those brought to North America by force and trapped in the slave trade, disability often meant being consigned the status of “refuse,” which frequently resulted in abandonment and death. For people of indigenous nations, disability often came as the result of the disease and violence that accompanied European arrival. Native Americans had fewer resources to share with the vulnerable in their communities, and physical abilities became more valued. For disabled people of European descent, the economic resources of one’s family often mattered tremendously. Unless one was considered threatening, mental disability could be of relatively benign consequence. For those deemed threatening, even family money and care did not make confinement pleasant.

  In the century prior to the creation of the American nation, the legal and economic condition of one’s family and community shaped the definitions, experiences, and consequences of disability. Conversely, it shaped the standards and consequences of ableism. Given the lack of even a weak nation-state, the well-being of one’s community mattered tremendously.

  FOUR

  THE DEVIANT AND THE DEPENDENT

  Creating Citizens, 1776–1865

  By the 1770s, the British government and colonists loyal to it had made their intentions clear to those Europeans living in disparate regions throughout North America. King George and the British Parliament intended to maintain and expand British political and economic control. The French and Spanish governments still had influence, but the British wanted them out. What Great Britain saw as masterful leadership, however, a growing number of colonists considered the illegitimate abuse of power. When unfairly exploited, the Declaration of Independence proclaimed, the people had the responsibility to resist.

  King George, the colonial revolutionaries proclaimed, desired their continual subservience. In his paternalism, he sought to make decisions for them. He sought their dependency. Revolutionaries such as Thomas Paine, John Adams, James Otis, and, later, Otis’s sister, Mercy Otis Warren, argued that they were not children—indeed, as human beings they had basic rights, they desired and were entitled to a say in their government, and they could govern themselves.

  In the decades following the American Revolution, the new nation sought to define and distinguish between good and bad citizens. Democracy was a grand and potentially dangerous experiment that presumed its citizens could and would make reasoned political decisions. How could the new republic survive unless the bodies and minds of its citizens were capable, particularly its voting citizens? Political theorists contrasted idiots, lunatics, women of all races, people of indigenous nations, and African Americans with those considered worthy of full citizenship. States increasingly developed disability-based voting exclusions, alongside and often as a part of those of race and gender. Inherent to the creation of the United States was the legal and ideological delineation of those who embodied ableness and thus full citizenship, as apart from those whose bodies and minds were considered deficient and defective.

  The process of differentiating between fit and unfit citizens raised many legal, ideological, and practical questions. How could unfitness be determined? When was it threatening? Could the unfit be salvaged? If so, how?

  DEMARCATING CATEGORIES

  Legal frameworks provided some solutions to those shaping the nation’s legal, economic, and civic structures. Racist ideologies defined male and female African Americans as fundamentally inferior specimens with deformed bodies and minds who were best confined to slavery. Indigenous peoples were killed or removed, and generally made ineligible for citizenship. And like these other categories, but often privileged by whiteness, most white women remained as feme coverts—legal nonentities determined unfit for civic life. Disability, as a concept, was used to justify legally established inequalities.

  The post-Revolutionary years as well as the first part of the nineteenth century brought a rapid expansion of private and public institutions that increasingly categorized and organized those people considered unfit. Historian David Rothman argued in 1971 that the vast multiplication of institutions for “the deviant and the dependent” represents the post-Revolutionary unease with disorder. Driven by a democratic republic’s need for a competent voting citizenry, the nation sought to regulate and impose order via institutions. The social changes wrought by the twin forces of early industrialization and urbanization—such as children who no longer had to rely on parents as their only source of economic development, wage laborers who sought greater control over their work, and those who journeyed westward to escape growing regulation—only heightened concern about unruly chaos. The nation sought to transform the questionable citizen into a good one and confine those either refusing or incapable of transformation. While institutions each had varying histories, they shared the underlying assumption that human behavior could be managed and altered through professional intervention.1

  Whether Rothman is accurate or not, the creation of institutions and the increasing regulation that accompanied them further defined the normal and the abnormal, ableness and disability. White citizens considered insane, idiotic, or unable to support themselves economically due to physical difference were increasingly institutionalized, and voting restrictions based on justifications of mental inadequacy expanded. States and the federal government began to strengthen immigration laws that restricted entrance to those considered disabled. Individuals considered unfit but redeemable or deserving
received educational opportunities. Founded in 1817, the Connecticut Asylum for the Education and Instruction of Deaf and Dumb Persons is just one example of institutional creation often experienced as empowering and liberating. Its students and advocates established similar schools in a widening expanse all over the country—and perhaps the leadership of those in its target population, deaf people, further made the difference. Those whose bodies or minds were believed to be beyond redemption were variably warehoused or removed. Their leadership in institutional development was definitely not encouraged. Perceived intellect, bodily capacity, race, class, gender, ethnicity, and circumstance all intersected to determine one’s civic competency.

  When individuals and groups denied full citizenship sought to claim it, they consequently often used language of disability and able-bodiedness. For example, in 1791 an unnamed contributor to the Universal Asylum and Columbian Magazine warned of the deleterious effect of limiting women’s education. No one should be surprised, the author wrote, at the “pale-faced, decrepid, weak, deformed women, daily presented to view, who have been tortured into a debility which renders their existence wretched.”2 The nation required women’s education, the author insisted, in order to ensure able-bodied women that it might succeed in its grand experiment of democracy. How could women—if deformed and decrepit—help the new nation at such a critical moment? Embedded in these arguments was the unstated premise that good citizens were citizens able and competent in all ways.

  When advocates for women met at the Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Convention of 1848, they made their claims for equal citizenship by emphasizing their own civic fitness—again, often silently contrasting it with those seen as lacking. Attendees resolved that “the equality of human rights results necessarily from the fact of the identity of the race in its capabilities and responsibilities.” Abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass agreed, similarly asserting that “the true basis of rights was the capacity of individuals.”3

  The new, expanding, and solidifying republic required the maintenance and policing of competent citizens. Ideologies of racism, sexism, as well as ableism supported and contributed to the demarcation of full citizenship but certainly did not exclude all identified as disabled. Within only a few decades of the Revolutionary War, disabled veterans pleasantly found that as a whole their familial, employment, and economic conditions varied little from those of their able-bodied male neighbors.

  REMARKABLE UNREMARKABLENESS: DISABLED WAR VETERANS

  When Ebenezer Brown of Newton, Massachusetts, left home to fight in the American Revolution, he was a young man. Like most young people, he had dreams and plans but no idea how his life would play out. By 1820 he was sixty-three years old, had recently married for the second time, and had two children: a daughter, Elizabeth, and a son, Frederick, “who is a cripple.” While fighting in the 1777 Battle of Saratoga, Brown had received “a severe wound in the shoulder.” Because of his “utter inability to labor,” he sought a pension. “Few men,” his 1820 pension petition detailed, “served longer in the Revolutionary army suffered more in that service or remain in more destitute circumstances.” Like 87 percent of the veterans seeking a pension, Brown’s disability resulted from an injury incurred in combat.4

  Brown survived the Revolutionary War: its diseases (90 percent of those who died in the war died from disease), its medical treatment (a wound in a limb often resulted in amputation; a midthigh leg amputation had a 65 percent mortality rate), and its accidentally exploding guns. Going in, he likely had no idea that he had a better chance of dying than of being wounded and surviving.5

  It is likely that Brown had never been hospitalized before the war. Most European colonists, whatever their class status, received medical treatment in the home: their own, a neighbor’s, or a doctor’s. The Continental Army quickly tried to establish both field and general hospitals, converting taverns, town halls, and the confiscated property of those loyal to the Crown. Not only were soldiers unaccustomed to seeking medical care in a hospital, but the hospitals sometimes provided nothing but a roof. They often lacked food, bedding, and even beds, and what medical care they offered was limited. General Anthony Wayne called the Ticonderoga hospital a “house of carnage.” William Hutchinson remembered the hospital he entered as “a most horrid sight. The floor was covered with blood; amputated arms and legs lay in different places in appalling array.” Often those needing surgery (mostly amputation) waited in the same room where doctors were operating on those before them in line.6 Thus Brown was likely unaccustomed to the thought of hospitalization, but in addition, he may have actively sought to avoid it.

  After receiving his shoulder wound, Brown may have instead returned home for medical care, as did many soldiers and as would have been the norm in nearly all cases of injury. For example, after being shot in the leg during the Battle of Bunker Hill, Benjamin Farnum’s friend John Barker dragged him from the battlefield. His family, close by in Andover, received news that he’d been injured. Before the day was over, a horse-drawn carriage, quickly adapted for Farnum’s damaged leg, had carried him home. His family provided his medical care. Or perhaps, like fellow soldier Richard Vining, Brown hired someone to convey him to his home after being wounded.7

  What we do know about Brown is that when he sought a pension, he met the criteria. He proved his military service, a legitimate military cause of disability, and the inability to labor for wages. The Revolutionary War Pension Act of 1818 established disability as a legal and social welfare category. The act assumed that impairments such as blindness, an amputated leg, or a hand mangled in a horse-and-carriage accident did not render one disabled according to early-nineteenth-century definitions. Under the Pension Act, disability was the inability to perform economically productive labor.

  Large numbers of disabled veterans, however, found employment: 49 percent as farmers, 27 percent as skilled laborers such as coopers or blacksmiths. A small number with class background sufficient to seek an education became teachers or preachers, skilled labor that required little physical exertion. Disabled veterans worked at the same types of jobs, in roughly the same proportions, as nondisabled veterans. Even more remarkably, as historian Daniel Blackie has found, the work and poverty rates of disabled and nondisabled veterans were markedly similar in 1820.8

  Ebenezer Brown and his first wife, Catherine, had been married for over twenty-five years when she died. The fact that Brown, our disabled veteran with the shoulder injury, had married and raised two children was unremarkable—which in itself is remarkable. Today people with disabilities have lower marital and family rates than those without disabilities. Disabled Revolutionary War veterans labored, married, had children, and had households typical in size and structures, at rates nearly identical to their nondisabled counterparts.

  When Bristol Rhodes left Cranston, Rhode Island, to fight in the Revolution, he too had hopes and expectations, perhaps even greater than Brown’s. In 1778 Rhode Island’s General Assembly had proclaimed that “every able-bodied negro, mulatto, or Indian man slave” who passed the military’s muster would “be absolutely FREE.” Born a slave in 1755, the twenty-three-year-old Rhodes would have desired freedom greatly. He joined the army and served for three years before being shot by a cannon and losing a leg and a hand. After being injured, Rhodes returned to Cranston, where he had been a slave, but in 1789 he moved to Providence. He lived on the pension he received from the new Congress, which only issued pensions intermittently; by April 1790, for example, Congress owed Rhodes approximately $26. Rhodes’s home became a center of community life for other free African Americans. His military service, and undoubtedly the life he led afterward, generated respect from many in Providence, both black and white. When he died in 1810 the local newspaper eulogized him as “a black man of the Revolution.”9 He never again worked for a living but became an integral part of the community.

  The new nation’s economic structures, the growing market economy, and the ways in which household
s worked together to complete tasks meant that people with impairments could and did participate in productive labor. One simply made accommodations or adjustments, and relied on the support of others where necessary. The later concentration of industrialization and capitalism would make that more difficult.

  RACE AND (IN)COMPETENT CITIZENSHIP

  The post–Revolutionary War period makes clear the legal and intellectual ties between labor and civic expectations. As free men, Revolutionary War veterans (black and white) were expected to engage in economically productive labor. For white women, the expectation was not that universal. If indentured servants, if housemaids, if members of a shoemaking family, their household (and often the law) expected them to labor. What kind of physical, care, and supervisory labor they did and were expected to do varied according to class, age, and marital status. The perceived deficiencies of their bodies and minds, however, made them ineligible for certain kinds of work. The bodies and minds of enslaved African Americans also (but often in different ways) were considered too deformed for some jobs but well suited to manual, reproductive, and household labor.

  White women and enslaved African Americans generally could not own their own labor in the ways that white men could. They had few if any legal rights to make decisions about and manage the economic fruits of their labor. Given that disability was defined as the inability to labor, white women, free African American women, and slaves came to be associated with the disabled. Political theory linked the denial of property rights with the embodiment of supposed deficiencies.

  Slavery and racism rested on the ideology that Africans and their descendants in North America lacked intelligence, competence, and even the humanity to participate in civic and community life on an equal basis with white Americans. Slave owners, medical experts, theologians, the drafters of the US Constitution, and nearly all parts of the dominant Euro-American society argued that both slave and free African Americans were disabled mentally and physically. The concept of disability justified slavery and racism—and even allowed many whites to delude themselves, or pretend to delude themselves, that via slavery they beneficently cared for Africans incapable of caring for themselves.10