A Disability History of the United States (12 page)

In 1817 Laurent Clerc and Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet founded the nation’s first disability-specific institution in the United States, the American Asylum for the Deaf, in Hartford, Connecticut. Among others, its students would include the famous painter John Brewster Jr. As Clerc explained it, using himself as an example, the asylum would transform “those unfortunate beings who . . . would be condemned all their life, to the most sad vegetation” from “the class of brutes to the class of men.” “Regenerative hands” would redeem deaf Americans, just as they had done for Clerc himself at the national school for deaf students in Paris. The American Asylum and many other early schools were part of the wave of evangelical Protestantism that flooded the United States in the early nineteenth century, guided by the mission of using sign language to share Christianity with those formerly isolated from its blessings. By the 1850s, deaf churches, publications, advocacy organizations, sports teams, literary societies, and residential schools had fostered a rich and growing deaf culture and community. In 1864, at the encouragement of Thomas and Sophia Fowler Gallaudet’s son Edward Gallaudet, the US Congress authorized and formally recognized the National Deaf-Mute College (renamed Gallaudet College in 1894). With the expansion of deaf schools and communities in the nineteenth century, literacy, education rates, and economic success rates for deaf people rose significantly.
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Just as Clerc believed that education could transform both individuals and society, physician and abolitionist Samuel Gridley Howe argued that society had an obligation to educate those in its midst to their fullest extent. If society was to progress, and it could, Howe argued, it had to improve the lives of all. “The terrible ills which now infest society are not necessarily perpetual,” Howe insisted. “The ignorance, the depravity, the sufferings of one man, or of one class of men, must affect other men, and other classes of men.” Therefore, “the interest and the duty of society are common and inseparable.” All, even idiots, he argued, could be taught economic productivity and some could become self-sufficient.
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Howe led efforts to create schools for blind students, deafblind students, and idiots (including Boston’s Perkins School for the Blind in 1829, whose students included Laura Bridgman, Anne Sullivan, and Helen Keller, in Massachusetts). Similarly, students from the Connecticut Asylum for the Education of Deaf and Dumb Persons established other such schools in a widening expanse all over the country. Not everyone, however, had the resources, opportunities, or desire to leave home and enter an educational institution. The southern states generally had fewer institutional opportunities, and those available were segregated and of lower quality than those in the North. Parents of elite southern white deaf and blind children, however, often hesitated to send their children northward. Too much overlap existed between abolitionists and the educational reformers leading such institutions.
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It thus should be no surprise that understandings of disability transformed profoundly in the post–Revolutionary War period. Theological and supernatural explanations of madness began to be replaced by biological explanations. For example, prior to 1825 the Supreme Court had always referred to madness as “that most calamitous visitation from Providence.” After 1825, the Court began referring to it as a “disease.”
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Harvard established the nation’s first medical college in 1782 and medicine slowly became standardized. With badges of authority and expertise, doctors and educational experts embraced and then defended the tasks of explaining, diagnosing, and treating physical and intellectual differences. And even when not in institutions, people with disabilities and their families increasingly interacted with and relied on medical authorities.

Although experts became increasingly dominant, cultures continued to clash over definitions of madness. For example, in 1798 members of the Cree nation brought a man whom they considered dangerous to the Hudson’s Bay Company settlement of York Factory on the southwestern shore of the bay. The Cree lived in a region that stretched from the Great Lakes into what is now northern Canada and sold furs to the HBC. The fur traders of the York region treated the man, whom they believed was insane, by bleeding him—a common practice among the European colonists. HBC employees deemed the man much improved after the procedure, but he fled against their wishes. To the Cree, insanity was a meaningless concept; they believed the man was a
windigo,
a person possessed by the spirit of winter, made asocial, cruel, and consumed by cannibal desires. HBC traders were concerned that the man’s being on the loose would disrupt the upcoming goose hunt (or at least their ability to make money from it). Similarly, in 1816 a Cree man named Achappee warned the HBC’s James Clouston of a fellow Cree named Mistaenyu. Achappee likely believed he risked his life by informing Clouston of a man he was convinced was a windigo, who would “kill every person that he could see; [and] that sometimes . . . walks in the air invisible from where he can do Mischief” and feasted on human beings. Clouston believed Mistaenyu to be insane, “afflicted in so distressing a manner.”
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Similar reports of differing perceptions continued to be reported throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth century.

People of European descent considered to be insane, who likely would have remained unconfined in the colonial period unless considered dangerous, increasingly found themselves restrained in the years following the Revolutionary War—particularly in the northern states. A Massachusetts law of 1796, for example, allowed local authorities to confine the mad, without a formal process, to the local jail for years.
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Almshouses, prisons, and asylums often served as catch-all institutions; confining moral transgressors (poor pregnant women with no husbands), heavy drinkers, those considered idiotic or insane, people with “fits” (epilepsy), and others about whom local officials felt uneasy.

“Treatment,” even when administered while at home, varied considerably. Doctors frequently used purging, bleeding, frights, hard labor, and immersion in cold water. Mary Sewall, treated for insanity at her home in Maine in 1824, was restrained to a specially designed chair for seventy-three days, bled copiously, and given a highly restricted diet. Two local physicians visited the home to supervise the care given to the twenty-five-year-old white woman. No insane asylums existed in Maine. Sewall died six months after her treatment began, possibly because of these interventions.
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Despite the state’s lack of available institutions, Sewall’s case is an example of the medicalization of madness.

While Sewall’s “cure” clearly did not help her, institutionalization was not necessarily a better alternative. The appalling conditions that Dorothea Dix encountered while touring homes for the indigent insane in Massachusetts pushed her to engage in political reform efforts. While giving religious instruction in asylums, a not uncommon practice among Boston women of her religious background and class, Dix encountered criminals, idiots, and the insane confined together, in “cages, closets, cellars, stalls, pens! Chained, naked, beaten with rods, and lashed into obedience.” Dix was shocked by the lewd language, lack of heat in winter, inadequate food, and general abuse that pervaded these institutions. Her 1843 “Memorial to the Legislature of Massachusetts” listed the horrors of every asylum in the state, including the one in Westford: “Grant that I may never look upon another such scene! A young woman, whose person was partially covered with portions of a blanket, sat upon the floor; her hair disheveled; her naked arms crossed languidly over the breast; a distracted, unsteady eye and low, murmuring voice betraying both mental and physical disquiet.
About the waist was a chain,
the extremity of which was fastened into the wall of the house.” Using the moral righteousness and authority attributed to her class, gender, and race, Dix made a career for herself, publicizing and attempting to improve asylum conditions.
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The efforts of Howe and others to educate and thus institutionalize idiots, and likely many other communities of people with disabilities, had complex consequences. In the 1830s and 1840s most children and adults with cognitive disabilities from families who were not indigent lived at home and were integrated into the community. Kemp Battle of North Carolina remembered going to school in Raleigh in the 1830s: “We had in school a half-witted boy who was not expected to learn anything but was sent to school to keep him out of mischief.” In the same decade, Thomas Cameron, a white adult man with cognitive disabilities in rural North Carolina, attended local events, had a job carrying messages and at the local post office, and was adored by the nieces and nephews of his affluent family. And famed writer Margaret Fuller insisted that her younger brother Lloyd go to school, for “[even] if he does not learn much in lessons the influence on his character and manners is better.”
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Building on the work of French educator Edouard Séguin, in the late 1840s, Samuel Gridley Howe, Hervey Wilbur, and other Americans began to make the argument that idiots could be educated. In 1847 Howe undertook a major survey of Massachusetts, finding 574 “human beings who are condemned to their hopeless idiocy” lived there and had been “left to their brutishness”; if all the state had been surveyed, he argued, the number would be “between twelve and fifteen hundred.” He asserted that for both economic and moral reasons the state had an “imperative duty” to help such citizens. “It has been shown,” Howe went on, “that they are not only neglected, but that through ignorance they are so often badly treated and cruelly wronged that, for want of proper means of training, some of them sink from mere weakness of mind into entire idiocy; so that, though born with a spark of intellect which might be nurtured into a flame, it is gradually extinguished, and they go down darkling to the grave, like the beasts that perish.” The legislature agreed, and the state established the Massachusetts School for Idiotic Children and Youth in 1849. Other states followed.
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The goal was to integrate those considered idiots into the community via institutionalization.

By the 1870s, however, despite Howe’s presumably good intentions, the increased social attention had not universally improved the lives of those with cognitive disabilities or those of their families. In 1873 businesswoman, advocate for women’s rights, and 1872 presidential candidate Victoria Woodhull spoke of parenting her teenage son Byron: “I am cursed with this living death.” The 1870 census had counted idiots in the same column as convicts. Howe had generally blamed families for their idiot children—the result of alcohol abuse, masturbation, family traits, physical feebleness, or moral weakness. Removing them from their parents and siblings, he argued, would benefit society. Family members of those with cognitive disabilities, once admired for their devotion and care, now experienced shame.
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With increased shame came increased institutionalization.

Institutionalization was not exclusive to whites. In the late 1860s, and with some federal government financial support, the Cherokee nation voted to build the Cherokee Asylum for the Insane, Deaf, Dumb, and Blind. At nearly the same time, the nation voted to establish an orphan asylum; both institutions were outside what is now Tahlequah, Oklahoma. In its first year, residents of the former included one person diagnosed with general debility, two with rheumatism, eleven as blind, four cripples, three insane or idiots, and one with consumption. The Cherokee asylum, like all asylums of the time, cannot simply be dismissed as a horrible place just because it was an institution. A letter from local community leader Wat A. Duncan to the
Cherokee Advocate
suggests that the reality was more complex. Born in Georgia, near a Cherokee village known as Dahlanegah, in 1823, Duncan and his parents survived the deadly and forced exile to Oklahoma known as the Trail of Tears. As an adult, Duncan became a Methodist preacher.
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Using English, the language of the colonizers, Duncan wrote to celebrate the Cherokee asylum.

Duncan understood the asylum and its residents to be the community responsibility of all Cherokee nation members. More research needs to be done regarding the Cherokee Asylum for the Insane, Deaf, Dumb, and Blind. How similar or dissimilar it was to other manifestations of institutionalization in the United States is unclear; nor is it clear how much leadership came from within the Cherokee nation.

Some individuals experienced institutional life as empowering. Mary L. Day, one of the first graduates of the Maryland Institute for the Blind (which opened in 1854), thought her institutional experience and education vital: “So anxious was I to become a pupil that I made every personal effort to attain so desirable an end,” she wrote. “I found unshrinking perseverance necessary to bring it about.” The woman, orphaned as a child, defended the importance of education for blind people in terms of their economic production. “The educated blind in their own home are as useful and industrious as are those who have not been deprived of their sight. They are handy and ingenious.”
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Day’s experiences and those of others suggest that institutional life was neither inherently empowering nor destructive: among other things, it depended on the level of leadership and the extent of control by those with disabilities.