A Disability History of the United States (10 page)

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.

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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 households 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.

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.
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Thomas Jefferson, whose contradictory and uneasy relationship with race continues to plague our national identity, wrote in his 1800
Notes on the State of Virginia
that although “in memory they [slaves] are equal to the whites,” they were “in reason much inferior . . . in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anamolous [
sic
].” Because they “seem to require less sleep,” slaves could be made to work long hours.
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In the 1839
Crania Americana,
Samuel George Morton “proved” that European descendants had larger skulls, thus larger brains and greater intelligence, than African Americans. Medical doctor Samuel Cartwright, perhaps one of the most influential proponents of scientific racism, argued in his 1848 “The Diseases and Physical Peculiarities of the Negro Race” that “blacks’ physical and mental defects made it impossible for them to survive without white supervision and care.” Cartwright even turned the desire not to be enslaved into physical defects to which the inferior black body was predisposed: drapetomania caused the enslaved to attempt escape; hebetude caused laziness, shiftiness, and the damaging of property such as farm tools; and dysaethesia aethiopica was the psychotic desire to destroy an owner’s property. According to Cartwright, these conditions all developed due to and within the defective black body. Similarly, in the 1840s prominent surgeon Josiah C. Nott warned that African Americans were not “sufficiently enlightened to qualify . . . for self-government,” maintaining that the cold of northern climates “freezes their brains as to make them insane or idiotical.”
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The “experts” of scientific racism also expressed their racist ideology in gendered terms. In 1843 Knott invited the readers of the
American Journal of Medical Sciences,
a leading medical journal founded in 1820 and read by a variety of intellectuals, to “look first upon the Caucasian female with her rose and lily skin, silky hair, Venus form, and well chiseled features—and then upon the African wench with her black and odorous skin, woolly head and animal features—and compare their intellectual and moral qualities, and their whole anatomical structure.” Their intellectual, moral, and physical defects, Knott believed, would be clear. He also pointed out that American Indians had “many peculiarities which are just as striking.”
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The deficiencies of enslaved women supposedly also included animalistic and uncontrollable sex drives.

While slave owners and the intellectuals who supported them used the concept of disability to justify slavery, abolitionists used disability to argue against slavery. White and black abolitionists emphasized the physical and psychological damages wrought by slavery, the abuses experienced by slaves with disabilities, and the debilitating and forced dependency of slavery. The literature and fiery speeches of abolitionists detailed the scars, the incapacitating beatings, and the horrific impairments caused by slavery in order to emphasize its depravity and cruelty. Abolitionists displayed—in text, illustrations, and in person—the crippled, disfigured, and disabled bodies of enslaved persons as moral suasion.

The 1840 Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society’s annual report argued, “He [the slave] is weak and unable to move. Why is he so? Because your dominion has palsied him. Will any man, who pretends to a jolt of philosophy, deny that it is
slavery
that has disabled the slave?” Abolitionists implied that emancipation would heal the bodies and minds of African Americans from the metaphorically and literally disabling consequences of slavery. Freed from coerced dependency and inequality, they would enter society as “independent, hard-working (and by implication, able-bodied) citizens.”
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The palsying, disabling results of slavery would disappear with freedom.

Abolitionists were right that slavery significantly damaged the bodies and minds of enslaved African Americans. Slavery involved significant and often repetitive physical labor, inadequate subsistence and housing, poor working conditions, corporal punishment, and emotional, physical, and sexual abuse. Runaway-slave advertisements include frequent mention of “bowlegged” or “bandy-legged” slaves, sometimes indicating dietary deficiencies, as well as descriptions of deaf slaves, details of gunshot wounds, cropped ears, significantly scarred slaves, those with improperly healed fractures, lame slaves as well as those with fingers or toes lost to frostbite, limbs lost in accident, and those who stuttered. For example, an 1815 advertisement in the
Richmond Enquirer
sought a runaway named Doctor, who “once had his right arm broken, in consequence of which, his arm is smaller & shorter than the left one, and stands a little crooked.”
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While abolitionists used the advertisements for runaway slaves to note the horrors of slavery, such notices also indicated that slaves with disabilities had not lost their will or ability to resist slavery. For example, Bob, a New Orleans slave who had an amputated leg, stole away from his master in 1840 with the assistance of a crutch. The abolitionist and women’s rights activist Sojourner Truth had, in her words, “a badly diseased hand, which greatly diminished her usefulness” to her master but not for future political activism and leadership. A slave named Peggy was “very much parrot toed and walks badly,” but similarly ran away from her Virginia master in 1798.
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Another, Jonathan, was deaf, and yet managed to escape—with a horse—in 1774.