A Disability History of the United States (11 page)

Even those unlikely to run away could and sometimes chose to resist. Abolitionist and escaped slave Lewis Clark told a Brooklyn audience of such an act of resistance by “an old slave, who was the most abused man I ever did see.” The man’s master had beaten him “till he had hardly a sound joint in his body. His face was all smashed up, and his right leg was broken to pieces.” When the enslaved man “got old and a cripple, he wan’t worth much,” and the master sought to get rid of him. Not wanting to drown the elderly slave himself, the master “thought he’d contrive to make him drown his self.” The slave owner “drove” the older man into a pool of water, “and kept throwing stones at him to make him go further in.” The slave caught the stones with his hat: “This made the master so mad, that he waded in with a whip, to drive him further.” Though the elderly enslaved man had been disregarded as physically ineffectual, “cripple as he was, he seized hold of his master, and kept ducking him, ducking him, without mercy.” Clark concluded that the elderly man meant to drown his owner, and may have done so if “the neighbors hadn’t come and saved him.”
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The enslaved man physically strong enough to drown his owner likely would have been characterized as “unsound,” for slave owners determined the labor capacity of those that they enslaved based on “soundness.” Bills of sale, plantation records, wills, and judicial records frequently listed enslaved people by this quality—a measure of a slave’s physical, moral, and mental capacity for laboring in a competent but subservient manner. Laws required those selling slaves to disclose any known or suspected unsoundness, for, as we have seen, any perceived loss of labor capacity diminished a slave’s economic worth. Slave trader Samuel Browning, for example, had to provide an exchange for Rose, a woman he had sold, because she was “an Ediot.” Blindness or diminished vision was a particular concern for owners, not only because it limited the kinds of duties a slave could perform and reduced their economic value but also because it was possible to fake.
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Slave owners feared fakery. Owners and overseers tended to challenge any sensory disability, as well as madness, infertility, or epilepsy (“fits”) out of a suspicion that slaves falsely claimed disability in order to avoid labor. Malingering was a related concern. It not only represented economic loss but played on the slave owners’ fear that their slaves, those they deemed inferior in every respect, were outwitting them.
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Slaves with disabilities, despite often being listed as “unsound,” labored. For example, in a list of those that he enslaved in the 1830s, Samuel Barker, of Charleston, South Carolina, noted some as “useless.” The “useless,” however, performed significant and vital labor: as historian Dea Boster has noted, “Among the slaves identified as ‘useless’ were Old Stephen, who ‘rakes trash’; Old Betty, a nurse and midwife; Peggy, who ‘cooks for negroes’; Bess, a 23-year-old ‘feeble’ woman who ‘can cook’; and Old Minda, a ‘first rate midwife and nurse.’” Others with disabilities worked in the fields, cared for nurseries that could include up to thirty children, or did household labor. A one-armed carpenter named Aaron engaged in skilled labor on Edmund Ravenel’s South Carolina plantation. One memoir of the time even noted a blind slave who daily drove the breakfast cart out to those working in the cotton fields, presumably a route that both he and the draft animals knew well.
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Clearly, many disabled slaves engaged in valued and skilled labor.

Their reproductive capacities meant that women experienced slavery and disability differently than men. Childbirth often resulted in disability for women regardless of race, but enslaved women forced into physical labor soon after childbirth more frequently endured prolapsed uteruses, a disabling condition in which the uterus partially protrudes from the vagina, causing near-constant pain and painful sex, difficult and limited mobility, and dangerous future pregnancies. The realities of slavery also meant that enslaved women were more likely than other women to endure vesicovaginal fistula, a condition generally resulting from difficult births or the misuse of forceps, in which urine continually leaks from the vagina due to a tear between the vaginal and bladder walls. The smell, mess, and embarrassment often meant that such women were socially isolated.

If an enslaved woman gave birth to a child with a disability, childbirth not only endangered her but meant greater fears for that child’s future. Children born with bodies considered significantly abnormal faced an uncertain future, and their mothers’ reproductive worth was questioned. Children considered “monsters” or “monstrosities”—either dead or alive—could be taken from parents and their bodies placed on public display for the white community: in disturbingly similar ways to a slave market. One of the most famous examples is that of Millie and Christine McKoy, conjoined twins born enslaved who were displayed for profit by their owner.
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One of the vicious tenets of scientific racism was that African Americans did not feel physical pain or anxiety due to their racially defective bodies. Either convinced of this or simply not caring, slave owner and medical doctor James Marion Sims, today often considered a founder of modern gynecology, performed years of “nightmarishly painful and degrading experiments, without anesthesia or consent, on a group of slave women.” He eventually perfected the surgery that could alleviate a vesicovaginal fistula, but only after years of physically restraining enslaved women during forced vaginal surgeries. He performed over thirty such surgeries on an enslaved woman named Anarcha and scores more on numerous other individuals.
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African American slaves felt a strong obligation to care for all in their community. Absent institutional structures on which to draw, they generally had to rely on one another. Mothers, for example, knew that if they were sold apart from their children or were otherwise unable to care for them, other women in the slave quarters would take on their role. The elderly and those who needed physical or cognitive assistance also had faith that their community would care for them as much as possible.

While the members of enslaved communities tried to provide care for one another, the larger white society often made that extremely difficult. Despite varying state laws against it, it was not unheard of for slave owners to “free” their very elderly or disabled slaves and leave them without support in southern cities. Frederick Douglass remembered his cousin Henny, disabled by severe burns in childhood, being “set adrift to take care of herself . . . a helpless child, to starve and die” after her master gave up on literally beating her into the kinds of labor he desired. Nor was it unheard of for owners to send elderly or blind slaves into isolated cabins in the woods, leaving them to fend for themselves. It galled Douglass that even after a religious conversion, his master Thomas Auld chose to hold “with tight grasp the well-framed and able-bodied slaves . . . who in freedom could have taken care of themselves” but turned “loose the only cripple among them, virtually to starve and die.”
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Debates about race, disability, and the state of the nation forcefully entered the public arena around the 1840 census. Each year the census had asked additional questions about the bodies of its citizenry. The 1830 census had recorded, for the first time, the numbers of deaf, blind, and “dumb” residents. The 1840 census added a query about “insane and idiot” residents (one category). Census results indicated that free blacks had a rate of insanity and idiocy nearly eleven times more than the enslaved. In Maine, a free state, the census indicated that 1 of every 14 black persons was insane or an idiot; in Louisiana, a slave state, that number was 1 in every 5,650. Indeed, according to the 1840 census, insanity and idiocy seemed to run rampant in the non-slave states: one out of every 162 African Americans in the North were supposedly insane or idiots, but only one out of every 1,558 in the South.
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Slavery advocates pounced on this data as proof of the incapacity of African Americans, the deleterious effects of freedom, and the nation’s moral obligations to maintain the practice. Slavery, apologists continued to insist, was the humane response to the deficient bodies of African Americans. The most publicized pro-slavery response to the census insisted that “the free negroes of the northern states are the most vicious persons on this continent, perhaps on the earth,” with distressingly high rates of insanity and idiocy. Conversely, slaves were “not only far happier in a state of slavery than of freedom, but we believe the happiest class on this continent.” Freedom, argued the pro-slavery interpreters of the 1840 census, resulted in insanity and imprisonment for African Americans unfortunate enough to no longer be enslaved.
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Mathematician Edward Jarvis pointed out gross errors, likely purposeful, in census calculations beginning in 1842, but the federal government never altered the 1840 census results. Jarvis noted, for example, that at least twenty-one Northern towns with only twelve black residents each were reported to have at least fifty-six insane or idiot black residents.
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To Jarvis, the point was scientific accuracy. To others, of course, the debate concerned racial ideology (or racism) and the legal and social frameworks necessary to keep a democracy functioning.

Debates regarding the role of indigenous people in a democratic nation were more muted in the dominant public sphere than those regarding African Americans, but only because death became the de facto strategy. Disease epidemics and their consequences continued to kill and disable huge numbers of people from indigenous nations. The numbers are almost too horrifying to comprehend. Indigenous communities repeatedly experienced death and cultural devastation. In 1738 nearly half of the remaining Cherokees died during a smallpox epidemic; similar outbreaks affected the Catawbas in 1759 and the Piegan nation during the Revolutionary War. Approximately two-thirds of the Omahas died after European expansion facilitated by the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, and some historians estimate that nearly half of the population residing between New Mexico and the Missouri River died of smallpox in the same period. In the 1820s, as many as 80 percent of the Columbia River area people died in a fever epidemic.
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Communities simply could not care for one another in the circumstances, and many who did not die as a result of the epidemic lost their lives in the resulting chaos. Once again, smallpox left many of those who survived blind and scarred.

The areas of devastation spread as Europeans traveled across North America with continued goals of conquest, religious conversion, the acquisition of “unowned” farmland, and economic trade. Permanent Spanish colonizers arrived in the coastal California region of the Tongva people in 1771. Colonial practices, such as forcibly separating female children from their parents and locking them in female barracks called
monjerios,
exacerbated the spread of disease. It’s estimated that the Tongva population declined 78 percent in the years after Spanish arrival and that children’s life expectancy averaged 6.4 years. Grazing animals introduced by the Spanish, and allowed to roam, depleted Tongva food supplies and further disrupted subsistence. Similarly, the Tongva’s neighbors, the Chumash, endured at least seven deadly epidemics in the first forty-nine years of Spanish and Mexican occupation.
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In the colonial period, disability was only one of many reasons why residents of European settlements might need assistance. Families had the first responsibility to care for those considered dependent. If families could not provide care, such care became the community’s responsibility. How, or why, or due to what diagnosis one became indigent mattered little in the colonial period.

In the early national period, however, the diagnostic explanation of indigence mattered profoundly.
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Indeed, expertise and diagnoses increasingly dominated evaluations of bodies and minds. This happened, not surprisingly, simultaneous to an expansion in the professionalization of medicine. Physician training slowly became standardized throughout the early nineteenth century, as those without access to formal education (such as female midwives) were slowly pushed from the medical trade. Physicians increasingly held diagnostic control, and thus treatment control. Medical determinations increasingly justified inequalities such as slavery and determined citizenship status. For example, medical expertise regarding women’s biological deficiencies buttressed the exclusion of white women from higher education, voting, and property ownership. Similarly, between the Revolutionary War and the passage of the 1818 Revolutionary War Pension Act, those administering veteran pensions slowly began to require that doctors (rather than local shop owners, neighbors, or ministers) determine impairments.

Across the new republic, beginning first in New England but spreading south and westward, public and private groups thus nearly fell over one another in efforts to establish insane asylums, schools for deaf and blind people, community hospitals for those in poverty, and schools for the feeble-minded and idiots. Public education expanded quickly. Religious reform movements emphasized the need for good works and human redemption. Even elite boarding schools, for both girls and boys, grew in number. Solutions were sought. The number of institutions that defined normative and deviant bodies and minds grew dramatically, both public and private, with recipients willing and coerced.