A Disability History of the United States (14 page)

Attempting to solve the employment needs of disabled veterans, while also resolving staffing problems in the federal government and Union military, in 1863 President Lincoln and the War Department had established the Invalid Corps. Eventually including nearly twenty thousand men scattered across the country, the Invalid Corps was designed to release able-bodied men for fighting while using disabled veterans for other labor. The disabled soldiers guarded military prisoners, protected warehouses and railways, squelched antiwar uprisings in both Vermont and Pennsylvania, and enforced the unpopular draft in the face of fierce opposition, including during a series of draft riots in New York City in 1863. Nearly every man in the Invalid Corps, despite the unit’s original intentions, encountered violence while in its service.

Charles Johnson, whose wartime injuries, as he’d written to his wife, Mary, had left him sexually “played out,” led Invalid Corps troops in major combat with Confederate forces in June 1864 when Confederate general Wade Hampton attempted to raid Union supplies stockpiled at White House Landing, in Virginia. In the midst of battle, Colonel Johnson’s commander sought reassurance from Johnson that his men would not retreat: “Will your invalids stand?” the general asked via a messenger. “Tell the general,” Johnson replied with deadpan humor, “that my men are cripples, and they can’t run.” His troops’ successes delighted Johnson—especially as their success ran counter to stereotypes about disability. Military officials, he wrote to his wife, “appear to be tickled at the idea that 2000 men
under an ‘Invalid’
should repulse between 5 and 6000 picked troops under such leaders as [General Wade] Hampton and [General] Fitz Hugh Lee.”
⁶

Despite Johnson’s pleasure at his troop’s performance, the Invalid Corps and its members were frequently ridiculed as cowardly slackers who habitually tried to avoid service. It did not help that “IC” was also the military designation for “Inspected, Condemned”—a label applied to rotten meat, faulty rifles, and rotting ammunition. Their detractors called them the “Condemned Yanks,” the “Inspecteds,” as well as the “Cripple Brigade.”
⁷
In the Invalid Corps, in pension programs, and on the streets, people with disabilities, even when disabled as a result of military service, were often looked at suspiciously.

How many of the Invalid Corps members eventually filed for veterans’ disability pensions is unclear. African American disabled veterans had less of a chance of being awarded pensions than did their white colleagues. If poor, which many blacks were, the travel costs required to file papers and obtain documentation were onerous. If illiterate, filling out paperwork required significant assistance. And even once a pension application was successfully filed, racism and hostility on the part of claims agents approving pensions was likely. Agents looked with greater skepticism on the claims of African American veterans.
⁸

Veterans with nonapparent disabilities that resulted from the war—disabilities not easily discerned by those gazing on their bodies—were not only less likely to apply for a pension but, like African Americans, had a decreased chance of their pension being approved. Wartime damage to one’s neurological system, brain injuries, or what is now called posttraumatic stress disorder often carried stigma for veterans and sometimes their families.
⁹
Many men, perhaps all men, could not sustain masculine ideals—unfaltering, a heroic warrior, a successful breadwinner, and able to stand strong despite all—which undermined their status in society.

For some, the war simply generated too much psychological strain—particularly when blended with poverty, a physical disability, family trauma, and previously existing psychiatric disabilities. Confederate soldier Benjamin Carder presumably left his Virginia hometown for the battlefield with both fear and excitement. Carder returned home from a Union prisoner-of-war camp physically disabled and unable to continue his work as a stonemason. Two of his children had died during his absence, and he bore complete fiscal responsibility for his remaining nuclear family, his ill mother, a blind sister, and a sister with five children.
¹⁰
His experiences as a prisoner of war likely had been horrific.

Carder became what doctors overseeing his treatment at Virginia’s Western State Lunatic Asylum called “delusional.” He believed that if President Lincoln would only let him speak to Union troops, he could bring about the war’s end. It is unclear what behaviors led to Carder’s institutionalization, but his family must have felt desperate. Presumably his behaviors included violence, for his absence would have made harsh family economics even worse. Doctors at Western attributed the psychological problems of at least 10 percent of their patients admitted between 1861 and 1868 to “the War.” Some across the country referred to the postwar emotional struggles of veterans as “soldier’s heart.”
¹¹
It is reasonable to assume that many struggled for decades afterwards.

Forty-five thousand veterans, like the lovelorn Thomas Perrine, the unemployed George Thomas of Nantucket, and the attorney Robert Pinn, survived the war and the amputation of at least one limb. All were more likely than their able-bodied male neighbors to struggle with employment and family issues, but disabled Confederate veterans had less financial and institutional support than disabled Union veterans. As W. H. Carter of Abingdon, Virginia, wrote, “Our Cripple Soldiers is starving & many of them [are] in the poor house. I for one am a one legged man all most on Starvation.” Confederate veterans were less likely to have access to prosthetics; even though, for example, Mississippi spent one-fifth of its state budget on artificial limbs in 1866. Women’s groups also helped raise funds for prosthetics for Confederate veterans. Disabled Union veterans, however, had potential access to pensions significantly larger—and paid more timely—than did disabled Confederate veterans.
¹²

The war, however, spurred technological inventions in adaptive equipment—as have all US wars. While many companies and individuals promoted prosthetics, one of the most successful (and one that still exists) was that created by James E. Hanger—a Confederate veteran who himself had a leg amputated in the war. Veterans routinely traded prosthetics that did not work, trying to help others while seeking a proper fit for their own limbs, and crafted or modified their own. Other disabled veterans sought adaptive equipment such as canes or glass eyes, in order to increase comfort, continue with employment, or for aesthetic reasons. In the years between 1861 and 1871, the number of patents issued for prosthetic limbs and assistive devices increased threefold from the previous fifteen years. Samuel A. Craig, who served in the Invalid Corps after being wounded in the face and neck, improvised his own adaptive equipment: “By fixing a wax plate over the whole in the roof of my mouth,” Craig chronicled, “I was enabled to talk and drink soup.”
¹³
The wax plate also allowed him to continue military service.

Craig’s ingenuity and his insistent efforts to direct his own life, along with an expanding pension program for veterans with disabilities, shaped his experience of disability. It also shaped his relationship to government. Union soldiers could turn to the federal government; Confederate soldiers had to turn to their individual states. The pension system did reveal societal stigma and skepticism regarding mental disabilities and African American soldiers. Yet the system, which expanded significantly from the Revolutionary War to the Civil War, provided vital support for many veterans and their families—support that ranged from prosthetics to employment assistance to money.

Referred to as disability pensions, and increasingly reliant on medical determinations, the pension system once again defined disability as incapacity to perform manual labor. This meant that people with disabilities who did labor for wages or other financial remuneration became increasingly disregarded as a contradiction in terms, for they didn’t fit the preconception of someone with a disability. It also meant that the definition of disability, as it became increasingly regulated by law and the medical profession, became more gendered, raced, and class-based. Our African American veteran Robert Pinn, for example, may not have been able to perform some manual labor because of having only one arm, but he labored quite successfully as an attorney. Despite Pinn’s personal success, African American veterans in general had less access to the pension system and individual advancement. Most men experienced the incapacity to perform manual labor as a masculine deficiency. If lucky, they came from or were able to elevate themselves to labor that was not manual, labor considered befitting of a middle- or upper-class man.

As noncombatants, women could not receive disability service pensions. Could they be disabled? Women’s lives did not easily mesh with the definition of disability as an inability to labor. White women, particularly white women of middle- or upper-class status, were considered
incapable
of performing labor. Class- and race-based definitions of femininity presumed them unfit for labor. Race and gender paradoxically impaired and privileged such women. Working-class women, however, regardless of race or ethnicity, frequently engaged in rigorous manual labor: carrying heavy buckets of water up and down the steps of tenement housing or the narrow servant steps hidden in the back of luxury housing, planting and picking cotton, or daily milking cows. In the period after the Civil War, African American women sometimes were forced to perform wage work. They could be arrested for vagrancy if they did not engage in manual labor, while nearly all of society assumed that upper-class white women should never engage in manual labor. The increasing bureaucratic and social tendency to define disability as the incapacity to perform manual labor had radically different implications for different groups of people.

Despite sometimes being unable to perform manual labor, disabled veterans embodied a unique disability status. Veterans had, by definition, proved their masculinity in wartime. They were, many insisted, the valiantly and deservedly disabled. As one Union surgeon wrote in 1864, “Suffering is unpleasant; but, if one must suffer it is better to do so in a good cause: therefore I had rather have my leg blown off by a rebel shell, than crushed by a locomotive, or bitten off by a crocodile.” Some men used their amputations to political advantage. Lucius Fairchild, for example, whose arm was amputated after being wounded in the Battle of Gettysburg, made much of his empty sleeve when he successfully ran for the position of Wisconsin governor (1866–1872). Disabled veterans Francis R. T. Nichols of Louisiana and James H. Berry of Arkansas used similar strategies while running successfully for their state’s highest office.
¹⁴

Wartime made disability heroic—but only for male veterans, and only for men with physical, and visibly exhibited, disabilities. Even heroic manhood, however, didn’t guarantee social acceptance and financial security for disabled veterans. Despite the expansion of federal pension and support programs, disabled Civil War veterans struggled to find employment and family economic stability; Confederate veterans even more so than Union veterans. Wartime also drew lines between those who became disabled valiantly and those who were unable to claim the status of hero.

From the Civil War of the 1860s until the early 1920s, the numbers and kinds of institutions for and about (and only sometimes by) people with disabilities expanded. By the time of the Civil War, the nation’s citizens, and many of those who sought to be citizens, increasingly saw education as the means by which social reforms could happen, upward mobility could be achieved, and social integration could be either coerced or realized. This subsequently increased debates over who could appropriately and healthfully access higher education, and the race, class, gender, and ethnic appropriateness of education and educational contexts. Throughout all of this, people with disabilities sought to exercise their own educational, civic, and institutional leadership. Conversely, in contestations over who was fit to be present in the civic world, and who was not, people with disabilities often found themselves increasingly regulated. Those considered not fit for public life were variably shut away, gawked at, and exoticized.

Important in this story is urbanization, industrialization, and class disparities. Between 1870 and 1920, the number of Americans increased from ten million to fifty-four million, and a growing number resided in major cities. In the 1870s, the nation experienced economic crisis, the consolidation of labor unions, and political unrest. Expanding and crowded cities meant a greater need for schools, running water, sewage systems, transportation, and food distribution—but often those needs went unmet. Poor hygiene and crowding facilitated the spread of disease. The explosion of industries such as steel and textiles that were enabled by technology meant expanded employment opportunities, wealth for some, and poverty and pollution for others. Industrial technologies also brought an increase in industrial accidents.

What was to be the role of people with disabilities in these newly configured communities, if not in institutions? As Civil War veterans returned home, as urban areas expanded and the number of industrial accidents increased, cities across the United States began to pass what have been referred to as “ugly laws.” People with disabilities were to be made invisible. In 1867 San Francisco banned “any person who is diseased, maimed, mutilated, or in any way deformed so as to be an unsightly or disgusting object” from the “streets, highways, thoroughfares or public places of the city.” Chicago and many other cities adopted similar bans. Portland prohibited “any crippled, maimed, or deformed person” from begging in public spaces. In 1911, Chicago updated its law to prohibit “exposure of diseased, mutilated, or deformed portions of the body.”
¹⁵

City officials and the proponents of ugly laws justified them on the basis of class. Crippled, unsightly beggars, they argued, had taken over the public spaces of American cities. Through the creation of anti-begging ordinances, city officials perhaps unwittingly drew distinctions between deserving people with disabilities (those with money) and the undeserving, ugly, unsightly, and disgusting people with disabilities (those without). The laws also penalized people for whom street begging or peddling was often the only means of making a living. Locales sought to eliminate “any crippled, maimed, or deformed person” from public reminder. Such laws reflected unease: industrialization and all the eventual Progressive Era efforts between the 1890s and the early 1920s to study, regulate, and improve society had neither eradicated bodily difference nor prevented misfortune. To the contrary, industrialization actively generated disability.