A Disability History of the United States (9 page)

Without exception, enslaved individuals experienced the voyage from Africa to North America, known as the Middle Passage, as horrific. Already traumatized and physically embattled, crowded into a ship’s hold and into the narrow portions between the ship decks, surrounded by strangers who frequently spoke unfamiliar languages, possibly imprisoned with members of enemy tribes and communities, and often tied or in chains, the enslaved endured a journey that could last from fifty-five to eighty days (depending on ports of departure and arrival). Crewmembers raped women and likely sometimes men. Food and water were inadequate.

In such conditions, disease could spread quickly. One of the most horrendous examples of slave-trade cruelty, and of the consequences of disease and disability, is the story of the French slave ship
Le Rodeur.
Fifteen days into its 1819 voyage, the first symptoms of the “frightful malady” of “ophthamalia” (or ophthalmia, a highly contagious eye disease that can cause blindness) appeared. Crewmembers initially paid little attention to the “considerable redness of the eyes” among the enslaved, crediting it to the scarcity of water: slaves received eight ounces per day (later reduced to “half of a wine glass”). Cases of the disease and its resulting blindness increased quickly, and were made worse by dysentery. Eventually crewmembers were also afflicted. Ultimately, almost forty Africans failed to regain eyesight, twelve lost sight in one eye, and fourteen “were affected with blemishes more or less considerable.” Twelve of the crewmembers lost their sight, including the ship’s surgeon; and five became blind in one eye, including the captain. Any loss of sight among the enslaved would reduce the trader’s profit. As a later government report stated, “even those blind of one eye would sell for a mere trifle.”
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The end of the story of
Le Rodeur
is best told by J. D. Romaigne, a young boy serving on the ship, in the letters he wrote to his mother:

Since the slave trade existed to make money, disability in a slave resulted in a loss of profit. Following the perverse logic of slavery and the prevailing ableist belief that blind people could not labor—and that “even those blind of one eye would sell for a mere trifle”—the crew simply threw overboard those persons who were worth more to them dead than alive. As poet John Greenleaf Whittier wrote in 1834 about the event,

As with nearly all slave-trading ships, the sharks followed in the wake. While clearly not all such voyages ended as horrifically as
Le Rodeur’
s, the devaluing of human beings—and particularly of human beings with disability, considered useless—was omnipresent in the slave trade.

When slave ships landed in North America, slaves with discernible physical, psychiatric, or cognitive disabilities were damaged goods. They became, in the parlance of the time, “refuse slaves.” Slave company agents noted disease or disability on a sales invoice in order to justify receiving low prices. When first put up for sale, enslaved Africans with visible disabilities often sold slowly, if at all. In 1680 a Barbados slave agent complained that his cargo had not been sold after three weeks because it included “very ordinary Slaves both Old some Poore & Blind and many burst ones . . . made them ly long on our hands & goe off at low prices.” Similarly, South Carolina slave trader Henry Laurens complained about “refuse slaves” in 1755: “We have this day sold forty-two to the amount of £7,455 12 shillings [in] currency, in which are included that sold at vendue [auction] for only £35 12 shillings. They seemed past all hopes of recovery. God knows what we shall do with those that remain, they are a most scabby flock . . . Several have extreme[ly] sore eyes, three very puny children and, add to this, the worst infirmity of all others with which six or eight are attended, viz. old age.” Entry ports were often riddled with such slaves, who had been abandoned and left to die.
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Many owners and slave traders sold refuse slaves northward. One trader, with a “negro man” characterized as “craizie [and who] does little or noe work,” was advised to “dispose of him to ye northward.” Northern colonies, however, did not want these undesirables. In 1708 Rhode Island passed one of the first laws attempting to discourage the importation of refuse slaves, describing them as “som[e] Sent for murder Som[e] for thifing Som[e] Runaways & most Impudent Lame & distempred.”
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The brutality of slavery rendered those who maintained it and benefited from it increasingly horrific and inhumane. The poisonous combination of racism, ableism, and economic drive left slaves with disabilities extremely vulnerable.

The experiences of people with disabilities in colonial America varied tremendously according to one’s familial resources (economic as well as physical), race, legal status, gender, and class. For those brought to North America by force and trapped in the slave trade, disability often meant being consigned the status of “refuse,” which frequently resulted in abandonment and death. For people of indigenous nations, disability often came as the result of the disease and violence that accompanied European arrival. Native Americans had fewer resources to share with the vulnerable in their communities, and physical abilities became more valued. For disabled people of European descent, the economic resources of one’s family often mattered tremendously. Unless one was considered threatening, mental disability could be of relatively benign consequence. For those deemed threatening, even family money and care did not make confinement pleasant.

In the century prior to the creation of the American nation, the legal and economic condition of one’s family and community shaped the definitions, experiences, and consequences of disability. Conversely, it shaped the standards and consequences of ableism. Given the lack of even a weak nation-state, the well-being of one’s community mattered tremendously.

By the 1770s, the British government and colonists loyal to it had made their intentions clear to those Europeans living in disparate regions throughout North America. King George and the British Parliament intended to maintain and expand British political and economic control. The French and Spanish governments still had influence, but the British wanted them out. What Great Britain saw as masterful leadership, however, a growing number of colonists considered the illegitimate abuse of power. When unfairly exploited, the Declaration of Independence proclaimed, the people had the responsibility to resist.

King George, the colonial revolutionaries proclaimed, desired their continual subservience. In his paternalism, he sought to make decisions for them. He sought their dependency. Revolutionaries such as Thomas Paine, John Adams, James Otis, and, later, Otis’s sister, Mercy Otis Warren, argued that they were not children—indeed, as human beings they had basic rights, they desired and were entitled to a say in their government, and they could govern themselves.

In the decades following the American Revolution, the new nation sought to define and distinguish between good and bad citizens. Democracy was a grand and potentially dangerous experiment that presumed its citizens could and would make reasoned political decisions. How could the new republic survive unless the bodies and minds of its citizens were capable, particularly its voting citizens? Political theorists contrasted idiots, lunatics, women of all races, people of indigenous nations, and African Americans with those considered worthy of full citizenship. States increasingly developed disability-based voting exclusions, alongside and often as a part of those of race and gender. Inherent to the creation of the United States was the legal and ideological delineation of those who embodied ableness and thus full citizenship, as apart from those whose bodies and minds were considered deficient and defective.

The process of differentiating between fit and unfit citizens raised many legal, ideological, and practical questions. How could unfitness be determined? When was it threatening? Could the unfit be salvaged? If so, how?

Legal frameworks provided some solutions to those shaping the nation’s legal, economic, and civic structures. Racist ideologies defined male and female African Americans as fundamentally inferior specimens with deformed bodies and minds who were best confined to slavery. Indigenous peoples were killed or removed, and generally made ineligible for citizenship. And like these other categories, but often privileged by whiteness, most white women remained as
feme coverts
—legal nonentities determined unfit for civic life. Disability, as a concept, was used to justify legally established inequalities.

The post-Revolutionary years as well as the first part of the nineteenth century brought a rapid expansion of private and public institutions that increasingly categorized and organized those people considered unfit. Historian David Rothman argued in 1971 that the vast multiplication of institutions for “the deviant and the dependent” represents the post-Revolutionary unease with disorder. Driven by a democratic republic’s need for a competent voting citizenry, the nation sought to regulate and impose order via institutions. The social changes wrought by the twin forces of early industrialization and urbanization—such as children who no longer had to rely on parents as their only source of economic development, wage laborers who sought greater control over their work, and those who journeyed westward to escape growing regulation—only heightened concern about unruly chaos. The nation sought to transform the questionable citizen into a good one and confine those either refusing or incapable of transformation. While institutions each had varying histories, they shared the underlying assumption that human behavior could be managed and altered through professional intervention.
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Whether Rothman is accurate or not, the creation of institutions and the increasing regulation that accompanied them further defined the normal and the abnormal, ableness and disability. White citizens considered insane, idiotic, or unable to support themselves economically due to physical difference were increasingly institutionalized, and voting restrictions based on justifications of mental inadequacy expanded. States and the federal government began to strengthen immigration laws that restricted entrance to those considered disabled. Individuals considered unfit but redeemable or deserving received educational opportunities. Founded in 1817, the Connecticut Asylum for the Education and Instruction of Deaf and Dumb Persons is just one example of institutional creation often experienced as empowering and liberating. Its students and advocates established similar schools in a widening expanse all over the country—and perhaps the leadership of those in its target population, deaf people, further made the difference. Those whose bodies or minds were believed to be beyond redemption were variably warehoused or removed. Their leadership in institutional development was definitely not encouraged. Perceived intellect, bodily capacity, race, class, gender, ethnicity, and circumstance all intersected to determine one’s civic competency.

When individuals and groups denied full citizenship sought to claim it, they consequently often used language of disability and able-bodiedness. For example, in 1791 an unnamed contributor to the
Universal Asylum and Columbian Magazine
warned of the deleterious effect of limiting women’s education. No one should be surprised, the author wrote, at the “pale-faced, decrepid, weak, deformed women, daily presented to view, who have been tortured into a debility which renders their existence wretched.”
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The nation required women’s education, the author insisted, in order to ensure able-bodied women that it might succeed in its grand experiment of democracy. How could women—if deformed and decrepit—help the new nation at such a critical moment? Embedded in these arguments was the unstated premise that good citizens were citizens able and competent in all ways.

When advocates for women met at the Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Convention of 1848, they made their claims for equal citizenship by emphasizing their own civic fitness—again, often silently contrasting it with those seen as lacking. Attendees resolved that “the equality of human rights results necessarily from the fact of the identity of the race in its capabilities and responsibilities.” Abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass agreed, similarly asserting that “the true basis of rights was the capacity of individuals.”
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