A Disability History of the United States (13 page)

Day’s defense that her education enabled people with disabilities to be “useful and industrious” mattered. Some institutions for people with disabilities sought to address issues of economic production—not by confronting ableism directly, but by finding employment, home industry, or trade opportunities. The regulation and standardization of industrialization, though it increased in uneven stops and starts, had made it more difficult for people with impairments to earn a living. A young woman unable to walk had easily worked in her family’s shoemaking industry. She could not, however, continue to make shoes as shoemaking slowly transferred from home industry to the factories of New England. She would not be able to live in the inaccessible dormitories available to female factory workers in mill towns such as Lowell, Massachusetts; she would not be able to walk the distances demanded of her; nor would other factory workers be as willing as her family members to make food available to her nearby her residence or aid in emptying her chamber pot. Additionally, increased industrialization (discussed further in the next chapter) caused increased impairments. Christopher Tomlin suggests that industrial accidents were quite rare in the first four decades of the 1800s, but that death and accident rates rose significantly from the 1830s to the 1860s as employers attempted to speed up and intensify production processes (while being held increasingly less liable by the courts).
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This had significant consequence in a culture in which disability was defined with respect to the lack of ability to be economically productive.

In the years following the American Revolution, the United States came to grips with its chosen political system: a democracy. Leaders in the original thirteen states hoped that their bold risk would result in political and economic success. Many had sacrificed a great deal to achieve independence. The new nation, many insisted, thus needed the support of a capable and competent citizenry. Disability became one ideological means by which to adjudicate worthy citizenship.

One manifestation of the concern over disability, unfit bodies and minds, was early immigration law. While colonial Massachusetts had tried to prevent the “lame, impotent, or infirm persons, incapable of maintaining themselves” from landing ashore, by 1848 Massachusetts and Alabama used what is now known as an LPC (“likely to become a public charge”) clause. Alabama law, for example, required that “any person commanding any vessel which brings into this State any infant, lunatic, maimed, deaf, dumb, aged, or infirm person, who is likely to become chargeable to any county,” had to provide a bond of $500. Massachusetts law required each port to have an examiner. If that examiner found “among said passengers any lunatic, idiot, maimed, aged, or infirm person, incompetent . . . to maintain themselves,” the shipmaster needed to post a bond of $1,000.
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The actual process of implementing LPC clauses in the early years of the nation remains historically sketchy. How could one tell if a blind man, a woman with a limp, or a seventy-year-old would become a public charge? Did class matter? Was any disability or old age, as read by the port official, enough to disqualify someone from landing ashore? Clearly LPC regulations left significant power in the hands of port officials. Evidence from the latter nineteenth century and early twentieth century indicates that wealth and European descent aided successful immigration to the United States. While Revolutionary War pension policy did not assume that impairments resulted in an inability to labor, early immigration policy made such assumptions.

Between the 1820s and the Civil War, states also began to disenfranchise disabled residents by means of disability-based voting exclusions. Massachusetts began by prohibiting men under guardianship (considered
non compos mentis
) from voting in 1821. Virginia excluded “any person of unsound mind” from voting in 1830 (it went without saying that women and African Americans were excluded from the vote). Between 1830 and 1860, Delaware, California, Iowa, Louisiana, Maryland, Minnesota, New Jersey, Ohio, Oregon, Rhode Island, and Wisconsin variably prohibited men considered insane and those under guardianship from voting.
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Early exclusions, such as that in Massachusetts in 1821, were based on property: since those under guardianship could not control property, they could not vote. Similar arguments were made for women and the enslaved. In the 1830s and 1840s, however, this changed. The insane and the idiot, legal theorists now argued, were incapable of voting wisely and thus should not vote.
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Voting exclusions moved from being justified on economic grounds to being justified by racial, gender, or disability inadequacies.

The relationship between disability and citizenship in the first decades of the new nation, however, was complicated and contradictory. The physical disabilities of people such as Revolutionary War veterans mattered relatively little, and could be seen as a physical marker of patriotic devotion and heroism. When George Washington attempted to squelch a possible rebellion among military forces in 1783, his success is still sometimes attributed to his use of spectacles. While addressing the troops, he pulled out his eyeglasses in order to read his speech. In an era in which most people were illiterate and in which few had access to eyewear, most of the men had never seen Washington so attired. The president and former general put his eyeglasses on while saying, “Gentlemen, you will permit me to put on my spectacles, for I have not only grown gray but almost blind in the service of my country.” Purportedly such a sign of great sacrifice made grown men cry. Wartime service may have made Washington “gray” and “almost blind,” but these would also have been a factor of his fifty-two years of age. His diminished sight, however, was interpreted as a sign of humility and sacrifice.
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In the case of George Washington, blindness (or, more realistically, the use of eyeglasses) served as the marker of his worthy leadership. For most other residents of the new nation, however, disability rendered the full exercise of citizenship highly unlikely and unattainable.

However handsome Thomas A. Perrine of Pennsylvania may have been, the poor guy got dumped after returning from the Civil War. It hadn’t been a good year. Shrapnel did significant damage to his arm in his very first battle, at Chancellorsville, Virginia, in May 1863, resulting in amputation. In early August the army discharged him, and his fiancée broke their engagement. Aside from his sense of humor and his skill with rhyme, little is known about him. The young white man signed up for the 140th Pennsylvania Volunteers, likely with two relations, lived in Ann Arbor, Michigan, for a while after the war, and died in 1890. While Louisa May Alcott, who would go on to write
Little Women
and other novels, had served as a nurse in a Civil War hospital, she had reassured one young soldier with a prominent facial injury that “all women thought a wound the best decoration a brave soldier could wear.”
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Perrine’s fiancée, however, obviously thought otherwise.

Charles F. Johnson, who married before the war, had better luck in love. He and his wife, Mary, had both a son and a daughter prior to his enlistment. In the June 1862 battle of Charles River Crossroads, he received multiple gunshot wounds in the thigh and testicles. He went home to heal and then rejoined the military. Two years later, while he served as a colonel in the Invalid Corps, Charles and Mary exchanged frequent letters, expressing their appreciation and fondness for one another, and revealing their deep involvement in each other’s lives. Responding to her mention of a neighbor’s new baby, he reflected obliquely on their relationship, future children, and their future sex life. “Mary that thing is ‘played out’—or more properly or correctly or definitly [
sic
] speaking ‘
I
am played out’—I am sorry (for your sake) that I can not accommodate
you.
”
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As the bloodiest war in US history, the Civil War fought between the federal government and the Southern Confederate States of America, which sought to secede from the Union, redefined lives and forced a rethinking of disability in the United States. Fought between 1861 and 1865, the war killed more than 620,000 people. Like Revolutionary War soldiers, if wounded, Civil War soldiers were more likely to die than survive. Those who survived found themselves in a nation shocked by the devastation of war. The continuation and expansion of pensions begun after the Revolutionary War, the establishment of “homes” for Union and later Confederate veterans, and increased use of photography of veterans generated national conversations about disability. Emancipation meant new experiences of disability for African Americans, and renewed debates about race and the health of the nation. The war and its consequences generated new adaptive devices and medical advances—from the first wheelchair patent in 1869 to improved prostheses—that improved the lives of many, not just disabled veterans. For some, the period was a reminder that people with all kinds of disabilities, including those with psychological disabilities incurred during the war, had a place in the community. For others, the growing visibility of people with disabilities caused fear and suspicion.

Perrine’s fellow veterans in the Invalid Corps—the “one-armed corps,” as they often called themselves—had varying luck with employment after the war. Albert T. Shurtleff worked as a watchman in the DC War Department office. John Bryson returned home, “naturally anxious” about how he would provide for his family. He needn’t have worried: his neighbors in Lansingburgh, New York, elected him tax collector. He later clerked in the Adjutant General’s Office in DC, where he was working the night of President Lincoln’s assassination. Shurtlett and Bryson may have been helped by Section 1754, a federal measure passed in 1865 that gave preference to disabled veterans in civil service employment. B. D. Palmer found employment as a Kansas hotel clerk, but only after he learned to write with his left hand due to the loss of his right. George W. Thomas, on the other hand, had not yet found employment two years after being mustered out. The white farmer and fisherman from Nantucket, then twenty-five years old, did not know what to do to support himself. William Baugh, a Confederate veteran from Danville, Virginia, had worked as a wheelwright before the war. Wounded during the Seven Days Battles and at Gettysburg, he could neither farm nor repair wheels. He sought the assistance of a wealthy cousin in order to secure the lease on a local toll bridge, as an alternative means of making a living: “I am Disabled, and must go at something else besides hard Labor. . . . I shall take it as a great favor if you will see the Parties concerned about this matter.”
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Many disabled Civil War veterans found that re-creating an economic and social life with a newly disabled body could be very difficult.

Civil War veteran Robert A. Pinn (1843–1911), in comparison, achieved significant professional success. The grandchild of slaves, born free in Massillon, Ohio, he had, in his words, “experienced all the disadvantages peculiar to my proscribed race. Being born to labor, I was not permitted to enjoy the blessings of a common school education.” He and four siblings helped his parents to farm. He had been “very eager to become a soldier, in order to prove by my feeble efforts the black man rights to untrammeled manhood.” At first denied a chance to serve, he joined Company I of the Fifth US Colored Troops immediately upon its creation in June 1863. In September 1864, he lost his arm due to a battle wound, and for his valor under fire he earned the Congressional Medal of Honor. After the war he returned to Ohio, and despite his lack of formal schooling he entered Oberlin College, trained as an attorney, and was admitted to the Ohio bar in 1879. At some point during this time he married, had a daughter, and raised her as well as a niece. The disabled veteran was the first African American attorney in his hometown of Massillon.
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Labor based on intellectual work rather than physical work, made possible by access to one of the few racially integrated institutions of higher education at the time, and undoubtedly by his own personal skills, served Pinn well.