A Disability History of the United States

by Kim E. Nielsen

  14. Boster, “Unfit for Bondage,” 70, 75–76.

  15. Ibid., 86, 90, 101.

  16. Ibid., 56–57; Olive Gilbert and Sojourner Truth, Narrative of Sojourner Truth: A Northern Slave, Emancipated from Bodily Servitude by the State of New York in 1828 (Boston: privately printed, 1850), 39; Norfolk (VA) Herald, October 25, 1798, accessed via “The Geography of Slavery in Virginia,” Virginia Center for Digital History, University of Virginia, www.virginia.edu.

  17. Virginia Gazette, August 11, 1774, accessed via “The Geography of Slavery,” Virginia Center for Digital History, University of Virginia, www.virginia.edu.

  18. Boster, “Unfit for Bondage,” 56–57.

  19. For a strong analysis of soundness, see Sharla M. Fett, Working Cures: Healing, Health, and Power on Southern Slave Plantations (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), chapter 1; Fett, Working Cures, 23; Boster, “Unfit for Bondage,” 92–93.

  20. Dea H. Boster, “An ‘Epeleptick’ Bondswoman: Fits, Slavery, and Power in the Antebellum South,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 83, no. 2 (Summer 2009): 271–301; Ellen Samuels, “‘A Complication of Complaints’: Untangling Disability, Race, and Gender in William and Ellen Craft’s Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom,” MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the United States 31, no. 3 (Fall 2006): 15–47. Samuel’s marvelous essay chronicles not an instance of malingering, but a case in which William and Ellen Craft used disability as a ploy in order to escape from slavery.

  21. Boster, “Unfit for Bondage,” 111, 122.

  22. Marie Jenkins Schwartz, Birthing a Slave: Motherhood and Medicine in the Antebellum South (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 212–14; Ellen Samuels, “Examining Millie and Christine McKoy: Where Enslavement and Enfreakment Meet,” Signs 37, no. 1 (Autumn 2011): 53–81.

  23. Washington, Medical Apartheid, 61–67.

  24. Kirby Ann Randolph, “Central Lunatic Asylum for the Colored Insane: A History of African Americans with Mental Disabilities, 1844–1885” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2003); Frederick Douglass, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, Written by Himself (1892), electronic edition available at “Documenting the American South,” University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, http://docsouth.unc.edu, 137–38; Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 56.

  25. Gerald Grob, “Edward Jarvis and the Federal Census,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 50, no. 1 (1976): 4–27; Albert Deutsch, “The First US Census of the Insane (1840) and Its Uses as Pro-Slavery Propaganda,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 15 (1944): 469–82; Patricia Cline Cohen, A Calculating People: The Spread of Numeracy in Early America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), chapter 6. I’m using Cohen’s statistics.

  26. “Reflections on the Census of 1840,” Southern Literary Messenger (Richmond, VA) 9 (1843): 345, 350.

  27. Grob, “Edward Jarvis”; Deutsch, “The First US Census of the Insane”; Cohen, A Calculating People.

  28. Alfred W. Crosby, “Virgin Soil Epidemics as a Factor in the Aboriginal Depopulation in America,” William and Mary Quarterly 33 (1976): 290–91.

  29. Edward D. Castillo, “Blood Came from their Mouths: Tongva and Chumash Responses to the Pandemic of 1801,” in Medicine Ways: Disease, Health, and Survival among Native Americans, ed. Clifford E. Trafzer and Diane Weiner (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira, 2001): 16–31.

  30. Helpful in my formulation of this argument was Philip M. Ferguson, Abandoned to Their Fate: Social Policy and Practice toward Severely Retarded People in America, 1820–1920 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994).

  31. Lois Bragg, ed., Deaf World: A Historical Reader and Primary Sourcebook (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 6; Harlan Lane, A Deaf Artist in Early America: The Worlds of John Brewster Jr. (Boston: Beacon Press, 2004); Harlan Lane, When the Mind Hears: A History of the Deaf (New York: Vintage Books, 1984).

  32. Samuel Gridley Howe, On the Causes of Idiocy (1848; New York: Arno Press, 1972), 1–2. For more on this trend, see: James W. Trent Jr., Inventing the Feeble Mind: A History of Mental Retardation in the United States (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995); Ferguson, Abandoned to Their Fate; Peter L. Tyor and Leland V. Bell, Caring for the Retarded in America: A History (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1984); Lawrence B. Goodheart, “Rethinking Mental Retardation: Education and Eugenics in Connecticut, 1818–1917,” Journal of the History of Medicine & Allied Sciences 59, no. 1 (2004): 90–111.

  33. Ernest Freeberg, The Education of Laura Bridgman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); Elisabeth Gitter, The Imprisoned Guest: Samuel Howe and Laura Bridgman, the Original Deaf-Blind Girl (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001); Kim E. Nielsen, “The Southern Ties of Helen Keller,” Journal of Southern History 73, no. 4 (November 2007): 783–806; Kim E. Nielsen, The Radical Lives of Helen Keller (New York: New York University Press, 2004); Kim E. Nielsen, Beyond the Miracle Worker: The Remarkable Life of Anne Sullivan Macy and Her Extraordinary Friendship with Helen Keller (Boston: Beacon Press, 2009); Harlan Lane, A Deaf Artist in Early America: The Worlds of John Brewster Jr. (Boston: Beacon Press, 2004); Phyllis Klein Valentine, “A Nineteenth-Century Experiment in Education of the Handicapped: The American Asylum for the Deaf and Dumb,” New England Quarterly 64, no. 3 (1991): 355–75; Hannah Joyner, “This Unnatural and Fratricidal Strife: A Family’s Negotiation of the Civil War, Deafness, and Independence,” in The New Disability History, ed. Paul K. Longmore and Lauri Umansky (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 83–106; Hannah Joyner, From Pity to Pride: Growing Up Deaf in the Old South (Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 2004).

  34. Mary Ann Jimenez, Changing Faces of Madness: Early American Attitudes and Treatment of the Insane (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1987), 81.

  35. Shawn Smallman, “Spirit Beings, Mental Illness, and Murder: Fur Traders and the Windigo in Canada’s Boreal Forest, 1774–1935,” Ethnohistory 57, no. 4 (Fall 2010): 580.

  36. Jimenez, Changing Faces of Madness, 103, and see examples 101–2.

  37. Ibid., 106–7; Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, “Derangement in the Family: The Story of Mary Sewall, 1824–1825,” Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife Annual Proceedings 15 (1990): 168–84.

  38. Dorothea L. Dix, “Memorial to the Legislature of Massachusetts, 1843,” in The History of Mental Retardation: Collected Papers, vol. 1, ed. Marvin Rosen, Gerald Clark, and Marvin Kivitz (Baltimore, MD: University Park Press, 1976), 17; Benjamin Reiss, “Letters from Asylumia: The Opal and the Cultural Work of the Lunatic Asylum, 1851–1860,” American Literary History 16, no. 1 (2004): 1–28; Lawrence B. Goodheart, “The Concept of Insanity: Women Patients at the Hartford Retreat for the Insane, 1824–1865,” Connecticut History 36, no. 1 (1995): 31–47; Gerald Grob, “Class, Ethnicity, and Race in American Mental Hospitals, 1830–1875,” Journal of the History of Medicine & Allied Sciences 28, no. 3 (July 1973): 207–29; Peter MacCandless, “Curative Asylum, Custodial Hospital: The South Carolina Lunatic Asylum and the State Hospital, 1828–1920,” in The Confinement of the Insane: International Perspectives, 1800–1965, ed. Roy Porter and David Wright (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 173–92; Lawrence B. Goodheart, “From Cure to Custodianship of the Insane Poor in Nineteenth-Century Connecticut,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 65 (2010): 106–30; Lawrence B. Goodheart, Mad Yankees: The Hartford Retreat for the Insane and Nineteenth-Century Psychiatry (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003); Shomer S. Zwelling, Quest For a Cure: The Public Hospital In Williamsburg, Virginia, 1773–1885 (Williamsburg, VA: Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 1985); Ellen Dwyer, Homes for the Mad: Life inside Two Nineteenth-Century Asylums (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987); Nancy Tomes, The Art of Asylum-Keeping: Thomas Story Kirkbride and the Origins of American Psychiatry (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994); Benjamin Reiss, Theaters of Madness: Insane Asylums and Nineteenth-
Century American Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); Katherine K. Ziff, David O. Thomas, and Patricia M. Beamish, “Asylum and Community: The Athens Lunatic Asylum in Nineteenth-Century Ohio,” History of Psychiatry 19 (2008): 409–32.

  39. Penny Richards, “‘Besides Her Sat Her Idiot Child’: Families and Development Disability in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America,” in Mental Retardation in America: A Historical Reader, ed. Steven Noll and James W. Trent Jr. (New York: New York University Press, 2004), 65–68.

  40. Samuel Gridley Howe, “Report Made to the Legislature of Massachusetts,” 1848.

  41. Richards, “‘Besides Her Sat Her Idiot Child,’” 65.

  42. Carl T. Steen, “The Home for the Insane, Deaf, Dumb, and Blind of the Cherokee Nation,” Chronicles of Oklahoma 21 (1943): 402–19; Rev. W. A. Duncan, Works Progress Administration, Indian Pioneer History Project for Oklahoma, University of Oklahoma, Western History Collections, http://libraries.ou.edu, accessed August 5, 2011.

  43. Steen, “The Home for the Insane,” 418.

  44. Mary L. Day, Incidents in the Life of a Blind Girl (Baltimore, MD: James Young, 1859), 163, 175. Day also wrote a second and later volume of autobiography: The World as I Have Found It (Baltimore, MD: James Watts, 1878). For an analysis, see: Mary Klages, Woeful Afflictions: Disability and Sentimentality in Victorian America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 146–63.

  45. Christopher L. Tomlins, “A Mysterious Power: Industrial Accidents and the Legal Construction of Employment Relations in Massachusetts, 1800–1850,” Law and History Review 6, no. 2 (Fall 1988): 375–438.

  46. Robert J. Steinfeld, “Subjectship, Citizenship, and the Long History of Immigration Regulation,” Law and History Review 19, no. 3 (2001); William J. Bromwell, History of Immigration to the United States: Exhibiting the Number, Sex, Age, Occupation, and Country of Birth of Passengers Arriving from Foreign Countries by Sea from 1819 to 1855 (New York: August J. Kelley, 1855), 199, 201.

  47. Kay Schriner and Lisa A. Ochs, “Creating the Disabled Citizen: How Massachusetts Disenfranchised People under Guardianship,” Ohio State Law Journal 62 (2001): 481–533.

  48. Ibid.

  49. George L. Marshal Jr., “The Newburgh Conspiracy: How General Washington and His Spectacles Saved the Republic,” Early American Review (Fall 1997), available at http://www.earlyamerica.com.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  1. Thomas A. Perrine, “A Sinister Manuscript,” undated, William Oland Bourne Papers, Box 2, Folder 4, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

  2. Thomas A. Perrine was promoted to sergeant April 2, 1863; lost his arm at Chancellorsville, May 3, 1863; discharged on surgical certificate August 7, 1863; and died July 21, 1890. Per the website of the 140th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry Reenactors, http://www.140pvi.us. Louisa May Alcott, Hospital Sketches, ed. Alice Fahs (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2004), 73.

  3. Fred Pelka, ed., The Civil War Letters of Colonel Charles F. Johnson: Invalid Corps (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004), 224.

  4. Undated letter of Albert T. Shurtleff, William Oland Bourne Papers, Box 5, Folder 6, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC; John Bryson, June 11, 1867, William Oland Bourne Papers, Box 5, Folder 2, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.; B. D. Palmer, undated letter, William Oland Bourne Papers, Box 5, Folder 2, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC; Laurann Figg and Jane Farrell-Beck, “Amputation in the Civil War: Physical and Social Dimensions,” Journal of the History of Medicine & Allied Sciences 48, no. 4 (1993): 474; Jeffrey W. McClurke, Take Care of the Living: Reconstructing Confederate Veteran Families in Virginia (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009), 104, 109.

  5. Robert A. Pinn, undated letter, William Oland Bourne Papers, Box 2, Folder 2, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC; William B. Neff, Bench and Bar of Northern Ohio (Cleveland, OH: Historical Publishing, 1921), 131.

  6. Pelka, The Civil War Letters, 27, 28.

  7. Ibid., 14.

  8. Donald R. Shaffer, “‘I do not suppose that Uncle Sam looks at the skin’: African Americans and the Civil War Pension System, 1865–1934,” Civil War History 46, no. 2 (June 2000): 132–47.

  9. Peter Blanck and Chen Song, “‘Never Forget What They Did Here’: Civil War Pensions for Gettysburg Union Army Veterans and Disability in Nineteenth-Century America,” William and Mary Law Review 44 (February 2003): 907–1520. See also: Peter Blanck, “‘The Right to Live in the World’: Disability Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow,” Texas Journal on Civil Liberties and Civil Rights (Spring 2008): 367–401; Larry M. Logue and Peter Blanck, Race, Ethnicity, and Disability: Veterans and Benefits in Post–Civil War America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

  10. McClurke, Take Care of the Living, 124, 138.

  11. Ibid., 119, 130, 138; Pelka, The Civil War Letters, 2.

  12. Larry M. Logue and Peter Blanck, “The Civil War,” in Encyclopedia of American Disability History, ed. Susan Burch, vol. 1 (New York: Facts on File, 2009), 181–83; Jennifer Davis McDaid, “‘How a One-Legged Rebel Lives’: Confederate Veterans and Artificial Limbs in Virginia,” in Artificial Parts, Practical Lives: Modern Histories of Prosthetics, ed. Katherine Ott, David Serlin, and Stephen Mihm (New York: New York University Press, 2002), 136; Geoffrey C. Ward, Ric Burns, and Ken Burns, The Civil War: An Illustrated History (New York: Knopf, 1990), 206; Figg and Farrell-Beck, “Amputation in the Civil War,” 463; McClurke, Take Care of the Living, chap. 6.

  13. McDaid, “‘How a One-Legged Rebel Lives,’” 136; Figg and Farrell-Beck, “Amputation in the Civil War,” 460; Pelka, The Civil War Letters, 23.

  14. Figg and Farrell-Beck, “Amputation in the Civil War,” 471–72, 474.

  15. Susan M. Schweik, The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 291, 293. See also: Adrienne Phelps Coco, “Diseased, Maimed, and Mutilated: Categorizations of Disability and an Ugly Law in Late Nineteenth-Century Chicago,” Journal of Social History 44, no. 1 (Fall 2010): 23–37.

  16. Lauri Umansky, “Lavinia Warren,” in Encyclopedia of American Disability History, ed. Susan Burch, vol. 3 (New York: Facts on File, 2009), 950–52. For more on freak shows, see: Robert Bogdan, Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988); Rosemarie Garland Thomson, ed., Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body (New York: New York University Press, 1998).

  17. John Paterson is a pseudonym. John S. Hughes, “Labeling and Treating Black Mental Illness in Alabama, 1861–1910,” Journal of Southern History 58, no. 3 (August 1993): 435–60.

  18. J. F. Miller, “The Effects of Emancipation upon the Mental and Physical Health of the Negro of the South” North Carolina Medical Journal 38 (1896): 285–94.

  19. Vanessa Jackson, “Separate and Unequal: The Legacy of Racially Segregated Psychiatric Hospitals,” cited with author’s permission; Hughes, “Labeling and Treating Black Mental Illness,” 441.

  20. Hughes, “Labeling and Treating Black Mental Illness,” 445–54, 456.

  21. Jim Downs, “The Continuation of Slavery: The Experience of Disabled Slaves during Emancipation,” Disability Studies Quarterly 28, no. 3 (2008).

  22. Edward H. Clarke, Sex in Education; or, A Fair Chance for the Girls (Boston: J. R. Osgood, 1873), 103.

  23. Katherine Jankowski, “’Til All Barriers Crumble and Fall: Agatha Tiegel’s Presentation Day Speech in April 1893,” in Deaf World: A Historical Reader and Primary Sourcebook, ed. Lois Bragg (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 286, 289. For more on Tiegel see: O. Robinson, “Agatha Tiegel Hanson,” in Encyclopedia of American Disability History, ed. Susan Burch, vol. 2 (New York: Facts on File, 2009): 423–24.

  24. Ibid.

  25. Lindsey Patterson, “Residential Schools,” in Encyclopedia of American Disability History, ed. Susan Burch, vol. 3 (New York: Facts on File, 2009): 778–80.


  26. Douglas Baynton, Forbidden Signs: American Culture and the Campaign against Sign Language (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 26, 28–29.

  27. Baynton, Forbidden Signs, 77. For more on Hanson, see: John Vickrey Van Cleve and Barry A. Crouch, A Place of Their Own: Creating the Deaf Community in America (Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 1989), 132–35; Robert Buchanan, Illusions of Equality: Deaf Americans in School and Factory, 1850–1950 (Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 2002), 37–51.

  28. Agatha Tiegel Hanson, “Inner Music,” in American Annals of the Deaf, vol. 48, ed. Edward Allen Fay (Washington, DC: 1903), 207.

  29. John Lee Clark, ed., Deaf American Poetry: An Anthology (Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 2009), 86–88.

  CHAPTER SIX

  1. Calvin Coolidge, “1923 State of the Union Address,” in State of the Union Address (1790–2001) by United States Presidents, available from Project Gutenberg, www.gutenberg.org.

  2. Harry Laughlin, Eugenical Sterilization in the United States (Chicago: Psychopathic Laboratory of the Municipal Court of Chicago, 1922).

  3. Jennifer Terry, An American Obsession: Science, Medicine, and Homosexuality in Modern Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 82.

  4. Laughlin, Eugenical Sterilization, 451–52. Laughlin built on the work of Charles Davenport, Heredity in Relation to Eugenics (New York: Henry Holt, 1911). See also: Harry Bruinius, Better for All the World: The Secret History of Forced Sterilization and America’s Quest for Racial Purity (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2006) and Paul A. Lombardo, Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008).

  5. Jay Dolmage, “Disabled upon Arrival: The Rhetorical Construction of Disability and Race at Ellis Island,” Cultural Critique 77 (Winter 2011): 45; Douglas Baynton, “Defectives in the Land: Disability and American Immigration Policy, 1882–1924,” Journal of American Ethnic History 24, no. 3 (2005): 33, 35; Douglas C. Baynton, “‘The Undesirability of Admitting Deaf Mutes’: US Immigration Policy and Deaf Immigrants, 1882–1924,” Sign Language Studies 6, no. 4 (Summer 2006): 393.