A Disability History of the United States

by Kim E. Nielsen

  The actual process of implementing LPC clauses in the early years of the nation remains historically sketchy. How could one tell if a blind man, a woman with a limp, or a seventy-year-old would become a public charge? Did class matter? Was any disability or old age, as read by the port official, enough to disqualify someone from landing ashore? Clearly LPC regulations left significant power in the hands of port officials. Evidence from the latter nineteenth century and early twentieth century indicates that wealth and European descent aided successful immigration to the United States. While Revolutionary War pension policy did not assume that impairments resulted in an inability to labor, early immigration policy made such assumptions.

  Between the 1820s and the Civil War, states also began to disenfranchise disabled residents by means of disability-based voting exclusions. Massachusetts began by prohibiting men under guardianship (considered non compos mentis) from voting in 1821. Virginia excluded “any person of unsound mind” from voting in 1830 (it went without saying that women and African Americans were excluded from the vote). Between 1830 and 1860, Delaware, California, Iowa, Louisiana, Maryland, Minnesota, New Jersey, Ohio, Oregon, Rhode Island, and Wisconsin variably prohibited men considered insane and those under guardianship from voting.47

  Early exclusions, such as that in Massachusetts in 1821, were based on property: since those under guardianship could not control property, they could not vote. Similar arguments were made for women and the enslaved. In the 1830s and 1840s, however, this changed. The insane and the idiot, legal theorists now argued, were incapable of voting wisely and thus should not vote.48 Voting exclusions moved from being justified on economic grounds to being justified by racial, gender, or disability inadequacies.

  The relationship between disability and citizenship in the first decades of the new nation, however, was complicated and contradictory. The physical disabilities of people such as Revolutionary War veterans mattered relatively little, and could be seen as a physical marker of patriotic devotion and heroism. When George Washington attempted to squelch a possible rebellion among military forces in 1783, his success is still sometimes attributed to his use of spectacles. While addressing the troops, he pulled out his eyeglasses in order to read his speech. In an era in which most people were illiterate and in which few had access to eyewear, most of the men had never seen Washington so attired. The president and former general put his eyeglasses on while saying, “Gentlemen, you will permit me to put on my spectacles, for I have not only grown gray but almost blind in the service of my country.” Purportedly such a sign of great sacrifice made grown men cry. Wartime service may have made Washington “gray” and “almost blind,” but these would also have been a factor of his fifty-two years of age. His diminished sight, however, was interpreted as a sign of humility and sacrifice.49

  In the case of George Washington, blindness (or, more realistically, the use of eyeglasses) served as the marker of his worthy leadership. For most other residents of the new nation, however, disability rendered the full exercise of citizenship highly unlikely and unattainable.

  FIVE

  I AM DISABLED, AND MUST GO AT SOMETHING ELSE BESIDES HARD LABOR

  The Institutionalization of Disability, 1865–1890

  ’Twas in the year of Sixty three,

  And on the third of May,

  A rebel shell brought harm to me

  And took my arm away . . .

  They bore me to a hospital

  And gave me chloroform;

  I slept, and when I woke again

  Was minus a right arm.

  From hospital to hospital

  They carried me about,

  And though they watered well the stump

  They couldn’t make it sprout . . .

  That May-day made a maid a jilb!

  (Miss Mary Dey was her name.)

  May day like that come ne’er again,

  So fraught with grief and shame.

  To accept my hand she had agreed,

  “Her love would ne’er grow cold.”

  But when I lost my hand, she said,

  The bargain didn’t hold.

  I offered her my other hand

  Uninjured by the fight;

  ’Twas all that I had left, I said,

  She said, ’twould not be right.

  “Gaze on these features, Dear,” I cried,

  “They’re fair as you will see.”

  “Without two hands,” she made reply,

  “You cannot handsome be.”1

  However handsome Thomas A. Perrine of Pennsylvania may have been, the poor guy got dumped after returning from the Civil War. It hadn’t been a good year. Shrapnel did significant damage to his arm in his very first battle, at Chancellorsville, Virginia, in May 1863, resulting in amputation. In early August the army discharged him, and his fiancée broke their engagement. Aside from his sense of humor and his skill with rhyme, little is known about him. The young white man signed up for the 140th Pennsylvania Volunteers, likely with two relations, lived in Ann Arbor, Michigan, for a while after the war, and died in 1890. While Louisa May Alcott, who would go on to write Little Women and other novels, had served as a nurse in a Civil War hospital, she had reassured one young soldier with a prominent facial injury that “all women thought a wound the best decoration a brave soldier could wear.”2 Perrine’s fiancée, however, obviously thought otherwise.

  Charles F. Johnson, who married before the war, had better luck in love. He and his wife, Mary, had both a son and a daughter prior to his enlistment. In the June 1862 battle of Charles River Crossroads, he received multiple gunshot wounds in the thigh and testicles. He went home to heal and then rejoined the military. Two years later, while he served as a colonel in the Invalid Corps, Charles and Mary exchanged frequent letters, expressing their appreciation and fondness for one another, and revealing their deep involvement in each other’s lives. Responding to her mention of a neighbor’s new baby, he reflected obliquely on their relationship, future children, and their future sex life. “Mary that thing is ‘played out’—or more properly or correctly or definitly [sic] speaking ‘I am played out’—I am sorry (for your sake) that I can not accommodate you.”3

  As the bloodiest war in US history, the Civil War fought between the federal government and the Southern Confederate States of America, which sought to secede from the Union, redefined lives and forced a rethinking of disability in the United States. Fought between 1861 and 1865, the war killed more than 620,000 people. Like Revolutionary War soldiers, if wounded, Civil War soldiers were more likely to die than survive. Those who survived found themselves in a nation shocked by the devastation of war. The continuation and expansion of pensions begun after the Revolutionary War, the establishment of “homes” for Union and later Confederate veterans, and increased use of photography of veterans generated national conversations about disability. Emancipation meant new experiences of disability for African Americans, and renewed debates about race and the health of the nation. The war and its consequences generated new adaptive devices and medical advances—from the first wheelchair patent in 1869 to improved prostheses—that improved the lives of many, not just disabled veterans. For some, the period was a reminder that people with all kinds of disabilities, including those with psychological disabilities incurred during the war, had a place in the community. For others, the growing visibility of people with disabilities caused fear and suspicion.

  Perrine’s fellow veterans in the Invalid Corps—the “one-armed corps,” as they often called themselves—had varying luck with employment after the war. Albert T. Shurtleff worked as a watchman in the DC War Department office. John Bryson returned home, “naturally anxious” about how he would provide for his family. He needn’t have worried: his neighbors in Lansingburgh, New York, elected him tax collector. He later clerked in the Adjutant General’s Office in DC, where he was working the night of President Lincoln’s assassination. Shurtlett and Bryson may have been helped by Section 1754, a federa
l measure passed in 1865 that gave preference to disabled veterans in civil service employment. B. D. Palmer found employment as a Kansas hotel clerk, but only after he learned to write with his left hand due to the loss of his right. George W. Thomas, on the other hand, had not yet found employment two years after being mustered out. The white farmer and fisherman from Nantucket, then twenty-five years old, did not know what to do to support himself. William Baugh, a Confederate veteran from Danville, Virginia, had worked as a wheelwright before the war. Wounded during the Seven Days Battles and at Gettysburg, he could neither farm nor repair wheels. He sought the assistance of a wealthy cousin in order to secure the lease on a local toll bridge, as an alternative means of making a living: “I am Disabled, and must go at something else besides hard Labor. . . . I shall take it as a great favor if you will see the Parties concerned about this matter.”4 Many disabled Civil War veterans found that re-creating an economic and social life with a newly disabled body could be very difficult.

  Civil War veteran Robert A. Pinn (1843–1911), in comparison, achieved significant professional success. The grandchild of slaves, born free in Massillon, Ohio, he had, in his words, “experienced all the disadvantages peculiar to my proscribed race. Being born to labor, I was not permitted to enjoy the blessings of a common school education.” He and four siblings helped his parents to farm. He had been “very eager to become a soldier, in order to prove by my feeble efforts the black man rights to untrammeled manhood.” At first denied a chance to serve, he joined Company I of the Fifth US Colored Troops immediately upon its creation in June 1863. In September 1864, he lost his arm due to a battle wound, and for his valor under fire he earned the Congressional Medal of Honor. After the war he returned to Ohio, and despite his lack of formal schooling he entered Oberlin College, trained as an attorney, and was admitted to the Ohio bar in 1879. At some point during this time he married, had a daughter, and raised her as well as a niece. The disabled veteran was the first African American attorney in his hometown of Massillon.5 Labor based on intellectual work rather than physical work, made possible by access to one of the few racially integrated institutions of higher education at the time, and undoubtedly by his own personal skills, served Pinn well.

  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 compani
es 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.