A Disability History of the United States (5 page)

The Spanish explorers assumed they encountered discrete gestures—not a language. Today’s scholars confidently argue that signed language among indigenous nations served deaf and hard of hearing people as well as the communication needs of peoples of different languages. European explorers benefited from already existing signed languages or signed communications, but dismissed them as unsophisticated hand signals. Spanish explorers were contemporaries of the Spanish Benedictine monk Pedro Ponce de León (1520–1584), who was just beginning to argue that deaf people could be educated and is credited with developing the first manual alphabet. North American indigenous sign languages thus existed long prior to any signed language in Europe. (France, the home of other early explorers, became a leader in deaf education, but not until the 1700s.) Members of indigenous nations believed that people born deaf had intellect and personal capacity. European peoples tended to believe the opposite. The European assumption of the inferiority, the primitive savageness, of the North American peoples they encountered made it additionally unlikely that they would recognize that indigenous peoples had developed something Europeans had yet to accomplish.
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Signed language, however, was not enough to bring cultural harmony.

Those who survived the grueling ocean passage from Europe tromped with relief and trepidation onto the unfamiliar landscapes of North America, carrying with them household items and clothing as well as weapons and disease. Disease, more than weapons, profoundly affected and decimated the bodies, and thus the societies, of peoples already living on the continent. The smallpox, measles, influenza, bubonic plague, cholera, whooping cough, malaria, scarlet fever, typhus, and diphtheria that Europeans carried with them brought massive death as well as blindness, deafness, disfigurement, and the loss of caregivers to indigenous North Americans. The lack of acquired immunological resistance and a relatively homogeneous gene pool among Native peoples, as well as malnutrition and environmental stressors, facilitated the spread of disease. The social chaos caused by massive death rates forced changes in community interactions and reciprocity, and profoundly altered lives. Colonial efforts to expand settlements, the enslavement of Native peoples by the Spanish, and the consequential slave trade that emerged in the southeastern parts of North America, as well as the movements of peoples and goods along the commercial trade routes used by the French, Spanish, and British, also sped the spread of disease.
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Disease epidemics were widespread. The first recorded epidemics swept through New England in 1616–1619, killing an estimated 90 to 95 percent of the indigenous Algonquian peoples living there. Throughout the 1630s and 1640s smallpox claimed approximately 50 percent of the Huron and Iroquois people living in the Saint Lawrence River and Great Lakes region. Scholars estimate that along what became the southeastern US coastal areas of Virginia, the Carolinas, and Louisiana, less than five thousand indigenous people remained by 1700. Of the more than seven hundred thousand indigenous people in Florida in 1520, only two thousand surviving descendants remained by 1700.
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In the 1630s, disease swept once again through the New England indigenous communities already decimated by the 1616–1619 epidemic. William Bradford wrote of the Algonquians near Plymouth Colony:

Thomas Morgan wrote of the same community in 1637 that they “died on heapes as they lay in their houses . . . in a place where many inhabited, there hath been but one left a live to tell what became of the rest . . . the bones and skulls upon the severall places of their habitations made such a spectacle.”
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Neither Bradford nor Morgan recorded their own responses to such a horrible plight.

The arrival of an epidemic weakened a community’s physical and cultural environment, making it even more vulnerable to further epidemics. When disease disrupted community labor cycles because few people were left to do the planting, or because those remaining alive moved in hopes of avoiding further epidemics, villages, according to the historian William Cronon, “often missed key phases in their annual subsistence cycles—the corn planting, say, or the fall hunt—and so were weakened when the next infection arrived.”
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The environmental changes brought on by European incursion and disease also disrupted subsistence. As historian David Jones has written, colonists deforested traditional living areas, which “led to wider temperature swings and more flooding.” Colonists’ livestock grazed and overran the crops of indigenous communities, which exacerbated tensions and often resulted in the attempted seizure of Native lands. Jones also notes that Europeans “introduced pests, including blights, insects, and rats. All of these changes fueled rapid soil erosion and undermined the subsistence of surviving Indian populations.”
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Weakened by an initial round of disease, and subject to environmental changes wrought by colonists, and, in some cases, depletion in their numbers as a result of massacres and the slave trade, many indigenous communities faced subsequent waves of disease with few resources.

When viral epidemics such as smallpox, measles, chickenpox, and mumps arrived in a village, those between the ages of fifteen and forty experienced the brunt of the outbreaks and had the highest death rates. Their fully developed immune systems responded most aggressively, meaning that they experienced the most virulent reactions—pustules, swelling, fever, weakness, and fatigue. With those most responsible for physical labor incapacitated, “the everyday work of raising crops, gathering wild plants, fetching water and firewood, hunting meat, and harvesting fish virtually ceased.” The young, the old, and those physically unable to engage in such labor likely received little food or care. Many who might otherwise not have died of disease did so simply because they had no one to provide them with food and water. In such physically and culturally depleted communities, caring for one another, engaging in community reciprocity, and sustaining vital cultural traditions became nearly impossible. As one European colonist wrote of the indigenous peoples near Charleston in 1710, “They have forgot most of their traditions since the Establishment of this Colony, they keep their Festivals and can tell but little of the reasons: their Old Men are dead.”
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Understandably, such devastation wrought spiritual and cultural crises.

For those with physical or mental disabilities, and for those whose bodies or minds made physical escape, gathering food or firewood, and finding water difficult, disease epidemics frequently and simply meant death. Though they may have possessed excellent storytelling or basket-making skills, wisdom, the ability to nurture children, these things meant little in the face of overwhelming communal stress. Those with disabilities likely were disproportionately affected by the arrival of Europeans in North America.

Epidemics often left disability in their wake. Survivors of smallpox experienced high rates of blindness and physical disfigurement. Scarlet fever could leave those afflicted blind, deaf, or deafblind. The consequences of European colonization and conquest not only altered the ways in which indigenous peoples experienced what is now called disability, but it disproportionately killed people with disabilities and also produced disability.

The period of European conquest in North America reveals much about the relationship between disability and disease. While the two are not synonymous, disease can lead to disability. Sometimes the resulting disability has little social or economic consequence, sometimes the consequences are significant. The large-scale onset of disease, however, when coupled with war, racism, environmental decline, and displacement, was extremely debilitating and brought significant levels of disability to people of indigenous nations. It also made the material realities of disability profoundly harsher.

Disease brought disability to European settlers as well, but the material realities were less significant and less widespread than for the indigenous peoples of North America. Physical disability was relatively routine and unremarked upon among colonists unless it resulted in an inability to labor in gender-, class-, and racially appropriate ways. European settlers paid far greater attention to those with mental or cognitive disabilities, and provided community care as they saw fit.

The Spanish, French, British, and other Europeans who traveled to North America did so with many different goals. Some dreamed of establishing orderly and permanent colonies of like-minded individuals and families, others sought slaves, gold, and long-term trading relationships from which wealth and power would result. A few sought fame. Nearly all who organized such expeditions sought able-bodied and able-minded peoples to carry out and support these formidable tasks. They generally excluded people considered to have disabilities from the groups that boarded the wooden ships in European ports.

But what did it mean to Europeans to be able-bodied and able-minded in the 1600s? In 1616 Jesuit missionary Pierre Biard recorded that many of the men with him had “some defect, such as the one-eyed, squint-eyed, and flat-nosed.”
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Neither France, nor England, nor Spain offered physically easy lives in the early 1600s; nor did traveling by ship to North America. Bodily variations due to disease, accident, or birth were common and included in definitions of able-bodied. Thus, while those Europeans arriving in North American might have met seventeenth-century standards of able-bodiedness, their bodies varied substantially. Within the early capitalist systems beginning to dominate Europe during the seventeenth century, the primary definition of disability was an inability to perform labor.

European colonists paid relatively little attention to physical disability, but substantial attention to cognitive or mental disabilities. This reinforces the argument that bodily norms were relatively fluid and that bodies themselves varied immensely. One-armed men and women, or those with slight palsies or limps, or those who could not hear, and on and on, could plant fields, mind children, sail, build a barrel or a hunting trap, fish, shoot a gun, or spin and weave. Unlike the physically disabled, however, those that today we would categorize as having psychological or cognitive disabilities attracted substantial policy and legislative attention by Europeans attempting to establish social order, capitalist trade networks, and government in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century North America.

Just as there was considerable variability in the experience of Native communities, English settlements also varied. The English Puritans who settled in New England did so as families and households who sought to establish permanent settlements built on religious ideals. Their leaders thus considered female bodies appropriately able-bodied for their colonial hopes. The English who settled in the Chesapeake Bay region did so largely as individuals who sought economic advancement on a commercial outpost, either as landholders or as indentured servants, or because they were coerced into doing so. The desired body for working tobacco fields was young, male, and able to perform significant physical labor.

Because the English, far more than the French or Spanish, sought permanent settlements of men, women, and children (rather than military, trading, or religious outposts), they focused more attention than did the Spanish or French on community and social policy. The Puritans of New England thus more quickly established their own legal structures. Those of the Chesapeake Bay region, in comparison, tended to rely on English courts.

The Puritan social ethic pervaded all aspects of life in early New England. Believing that God had created the world to be orderly and hierarchical, the Puritans sought to replicate that design in their social structure and community covenants. Intending originally to settle in Virginia but landing much farther northward, English Puritans led by William Bradford settled in 1620 in what is now Plymouth, Massachusetts. They chose a site already cleared and farmed by Patuxet Indians, who had abandoned it after a disease epidemic swept through in 1617. The members of Plymouth Colony came to be known as Pilgrims, in remembrance of whom US children now often create hats at Thanksgiving time. The colonial settlers established a male-disabled-veterans’ benefit in 1636, promising that “if any that shall goe returne maimed [and] hurt he shalbe mayntayned competently by the Colony during his life.” In 1641 the Massachusetts “Body of Liberties” guaranteed that no one would be made to perform public service if they were unable to due to “want of years, greatness of age, defect in mind, failing of senses, or impotency of Limbs.” It also established legal protections for those considered mentally incapable of making sound financial decisions—“any woman that is married, any child under age, Idiot or distracted person.” A subsequent edition of the Body of Liberties omitted the previous statement, but provided that “Children, Idiots, Distracted persons, and all that are strangers, or new commers to our plantation, shall have such allowances and dispensations in any Cause whether Criminall or other as religion and reason require.”
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Massachusetts law, and generally that of other colonies, distinguished between “idiots” and “distracted persons” throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Idiots were those, according to the poor law of 1693, who were “naturally wanting of understanding, so as to be uncapable to provide for him or herself.” Idiots were generally born idiots, and their condition was lifelong and permanent. A distracted person (sometimes referred to as a “lunatick”), in comparison, “by the Providence of God, shall fall into distraction, and become
Non compos mentis
”—for whom perceived mental instability occurred later in life and could be temporary.
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The relatively large amount of colonial law dedicated to what we now call cognitive and psychological disabilities remained consistent until the American Revolution.