In keeping with the popular use of the word, "disability" is defined here rather narrowly as the presence of a long-term physical or mental impairment in an individual. Traditionally, historians have neglected to examine the experiences of disabled people, and our knowledge of the circumstances they faced in the past is very limited. This is as true for early American history as it is for other periods. It is difficult to know how many disabled Americans there were in the colonies or the early Republic, as it was not until 1830 that the decennial federal census began to include data on disability; even then, the census was concerned only with the deaf, "dumb," and blind (of which there were, according to the 1830 count, 11,550 in the United States). The precise number of Americans with nonsensory impairments at that time remains unknown. Despite the problem of quantification, it is certain that disability was widespread throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Congenital disorders, accidents, wars, disease, or simply the effects of aging, coupled with the rudimentary state of medicine, meant many Americans were disabled in body and mind.
A disability that restricted a person's ability to work for a living often compounded, or caused, the poverty of America's most needy citizens. Unsurprisingly, therefore, the poor-relief records of early American towns are littered with references to the "lame," "crippled," "impotent," and "lunatic." Yet not all disabled people were confined to the lower classes. There is abundant evidence that disability was common to all socioeconomic groups, including the economic and political elites. For example, though it is rarely acknowledged by historians, several important members of America's Revolutionary leadership were disabled. Such individuals include the one-legged Gouverneur Morris (1752-1816), who helped write the federal Constitution, and Stephen Hopkins (1707-1785), who is reputed to have had cerebral palsy and was a governor of Rhode Island and a signer of the Declaration of Independence.
As well as a failure to quantify the scope of disability in early America and acknowledge its presence in the lives of prominent Americans, historians have yet to study adequately the social, economic, and political consequences of physical or mental impairment to ordinary people. A central research question that needs to be answered concerns the level of marginalization, or exclusion, experienced by the disabled during this time. Were they more integrated into American society than is the case today? Research into the experiences of disabled Revolutionary War veterans suggests at least that they may have been. A recent study indicates that, compared to nondisabled veterans, disabled veterans occupied no worse an economic or social position in the early Republic than nondisabled ones. These men achieved almost identical levels of wealth over the course of their lives and appear to have been no more susceptible to poverty than the rest of the veteran population. Disabled veterans also labored for a living, got married, had children, established households, and generally participated in the life of their local communities in a similar manner, and number, as their nondisabled comrades. Of course, the fact that these disabled people were veterans, men, and overwhelmingly white may have affected their status and standing. Until historians have more fully examined the lives of disabled women and blacks, it is difficult to know how exactly gender and racial identities affected the experiences of the disabled, though they surely did.
Unlike the situation faced by many disabled people in the twentieth century, institutionalization was not a common feature of the disability experience in early America. The institutions specifically designed for the disabled, such as the American School for the Deaf in Hartford, Connecticut (founded in 1817), that did exist were few in number and only established very late in the early national period (the first American schools for the blind were not opened in Boston and New York until 1832). Rather than being confined to hospitals, asylums, or residential schools, most disabled Americans living in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries who required disability-related care or support usually received it in their own homes, or in those of their family, friends, and neighbors. Nevertheless, the emergence of special-education schools and insane asylums in the early national period, while admittedly very small in scale, promoted the idea that disability was a "problem" that required the intervention of trained staff within a specially created institutional setting. This laid the ground for the more widespread and systematic institutionalization of disabled Americans that was to occur in the future.