18
Mary Klages
In 1818, Congress passed the Revolutionary War Pension Act, which established disability as a legal and social welfare category. The act defined disability as any condition that rendered a person unable to perform economically productive labor. Earlier legal definitions of disability had focused on a person’s capacity for rational thought; the 1818 law relocated disability in the context of a capitalist manufacturing economy: disability was the inability to support oneself, for whatever reason. What follows is a discussion of the conversations about disability as they appear in a variety of forms of nineteenth‐century American writing, including fiction and poetry, biography and autobiography, institutional reports, legal opinions, medical diagnoses, and religious exhortations. All of these voices in print were talking to each other about disability; the conversations overlapped, contradicted, corrected, and applauded each other in the public forums of print culture.
Antebellum Conversations
Deaf and dumb. Mute. Blind. Palsied. Idiotic. Lame. Crippled. These are the terms for discussing disability in the antebellum period, in popular culture and in the emerging discourses of professional social management that appeared in the middle decades of the century.1 In the early days of the Republic, people with disabilities existed as “afflicted” individuals, rather than as part of a specifically named group or category. Throughout the nineteenth century, however, people with disabilities would be increasingly classified into “the blind,” “the deaf,” and “the idiotic,” as separate institutions for their education and welfare offered specialized education and training for individuals whose bodies placed them in those categories. Deafness was the first disability to be recognized as a specific category of impairment; institutions for “the deaf” opened in Europe at the end of the eighteenth century, and the American Asylum for the Deaf and Dumb opened in Hartford, Connecticut in 1817. “The blind” were the next identifiable group to receive attention; the Perkins Institution and Massachusetts Asylum for the Blind opened in Boston in 1829. The 1830 Census confirmed the organization of people with disabilities into identifiable groups, being the first to count how many “deaf and dumb” and “blind” there were in each state. Census statistics justified the establishment of state‐run tax‐supported institutions; by 1860 every state in the union had some sort of government‐funded school or asylum for the deaf and for the blind.
Scottish Common Sense philosophers like Dugald Stewart in his Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind (1792) had wondered whether it would be possible to educate a person both deaf and blind, but earlier attempts in Paris and Edinburgh had failed. Thomas Gallaudet tried to educate Julia Brace, a woman who was both deaf and blind, but with little success. Samuel Gridley Howe discovered deaf‐blind Laura Bridgman in 1837 and achieved a miracle. Bridgman was the first deaf‐blind person to acquire an education: she learned to read and write, and to interact appropriately with others, and could read the Bible for herself. Howe’s Annual Reports of the Perkins Institution for the years 1837–1844 are devoted to accounts of Bridgman’s progress, which were widely reprinted in the United States and in Europe; Bridgman’s success made her name a household word (see Gitter 2001: 103–104; Klages 1999: 121).
Charles Dickens gave an account of Bridgman in his American Notes that illustrates why so many found Bridgman’s education so wonderful:
I sat down in another room, before a girl, blind, deaf, and dumb; destitute of smell; and nearly so, of taste: before a fair young creature with every human faculty, and hope, and power of goodness and affection, inclosed within her delicate frame, and but one outward sense – the sense of touch. There she was, before me; built up, as it were, in a marble cell, impervious to any ray of light, or particle of sound; with her poor white hand peeping through a chink in the wall, beckoning to some good man for help, that an Immortal soul might be awakened.
(Dickens 1842: 73)
Bridgman is a prisoner inside her own body, a “marble cell,” which must be breeched to liberate her. This image posits that a whole sentient being exists inside, ready to be released, like a butterfly; only the constricting body prevents its emergence.
The popular poet Lydia Huntley Sigourney, the “Sweet Singer of Hartford,” often used the American Asylum for the Deaf and its residents as subjects. She gives a similar portrait of Bridgman in her poem “Laura Bridgman, The Deaf, Dumb, and Blind Girl, at the Institution for the Blind in Boston” (1841):
That mind! It struggles with its fate,
The anxious conflict, see!
As if through Bastile‐bars it sought
Communion with the free.
Sigourney insists that, despite Laura’s deprivations, “happy childhood’s beaming sun / Glows in each bounding vein,” just waiting for “bless’d Philosophy” clothed in “Christian armor bright” to find the way “to intellectual light.” Dickens’s account credits Howe, the “good man” summoned for help, with freeing Bridgman; her soul needed to be awakened by the hero who frees her. Sigourney’s poem, in contrast, wonders if her soul would find its way to God even without intellectual enlightenment. Is there some power within every soul that innately understands the divine?
And, sweet one, doth our Father’s hand
Place in thy casket dim
A radiant and peculiar lamp
To guide thy steps to him?
(Sigourney 1841: 202–203)
All of these accounts frame Bridgman’s disability as a vehicle for metaphysical inquiry about what is innate in human beings and what is learned behavior. Learned behavior can be amended and corrected; what is innate in a human body before the acquisition of any external knowledge is unalterable, essential. Howe sees in Bridgman the hope that every human mind contains an inherent spark which education will ignite, and which no external conditions can extinguish – if reached in time. Sigourney finds evidence for the soul’s innate understanding of a divine power, and the longing for a relationship with it. Both mind and soul exist, in protean form at least, in every human form, regardless of race, sex, gender, sensory perception, or physical or intellectual ability. Both require only to be liberated from whatever bodily conditions incarcerate them in order to be fully developed.
Dickens’s image of the little white hand “peeping out” from a chink echoes this idea. His focus, however, is on the results of her disinterment, her successful education. Through Howe’s efforts, Bridgman emerged from her prison and was folded into the warmth of the human family. He describes her present appearance as a model of Victorian girlhood, no different from his fictional characters little Nell or little Dorritt: “Her face was radiant with intelligence and pleasure. Her hair, braided by her own hands, was bound about a head, whose intellectual capacity and development were beautifully expressed in its graceful outline, and its broad open brow; her dress, arranged by herself, was a pattern of neatness and simplicity; the work she had knitted, lay beside her” (Dickens 1842: 73–74). Bridgman exhibits all the characteristics of the True Woman: she is neat and tidy, self‐controlled, graceful, and open and intelligent – and productive, as her knitting shows. Later accounts emphasize her compassion for the less fortunate, and her joy at being able to make items to be sold for the benefit of others. Though upheld as a moral lesson, Bridgman never left the Perkins Institution. The miracle of education did not free her to marry or form her own family, but left her an articulate dependent – a role entirely suited to Laura’s white, middle‐class womanhood.
Poems and stories in the numerous magazines published during this time often used disabled characters as the vehicle for discussing dependence. “Gabrielle; or, the Sisters,” a story published anonymously in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine in 1851, describes both Ruth and Gabrielle as beautiful, and both are in love with the same suitor. But Ruth is crippled and cannot walk, while Gabrielle is mobile. The suitor proposes to Gabrielle, not knowing that Ruth is lying on the couch behind him. The crippled sister hides her love and disappointment and rejoices with the happy couple. Though the future brother‐in‐law promises Ruth that she will always have a place in their home, the story ends with Ruth anticipating her own death, declaring herself a nonentity: “my place is prepared among the green grass mounds, for no tablet or record shall mark the spot where ‘Ruth the cripple’ reposes” (Anonymous 1851: 810). The author chooses death for Ruth knowing that marriage and family are impossible, except as a grateful dependent.
Depictions of disability in the antebellum period are often pathetic. They focus on arousing the pity and compassion of readers by presenting disabled bodies as suffering and helpless, incapable of participation in the able‐bodied world. Some of the most expressive voices in cultural discussions of disability in the antebellum period came from women authors writing in a tradition that has been labeled “sentimental.” Open any issue of Godey’s Lady’s Book or The Ladies’ Repository – widely circulating magazines designed for domestic readers – and scan the contents for titles like “The Blind Beggar” and “The Little Cripple.” Poems and stories about people with disabilities were perfect vehicles for conveying Christian doctrine and domestic ideologies which make dependence and “affliction” into virtues. Sentimental writings insisted on the social and political necessity of empathy, so that dependents would receive the help they need. Domestic literature performed the cultural work of modeling and applauding compassion and caring; it often pits the sentiments of the home as refuge against the heartlessness of the competitive marketplace, to show how Christian charity can triumph over capitalist greed. The most well‐known example of this kind of story is probably Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (1843), in which Tiny Tim’s disability ultimately softens Scrooge’s heart, allowing him to become part of the Cratchit family and its circle of love and care.
Maria Cummins, in her bestselling novel The Lamplighter (1854), describes how a poor orphan girl learns lessons in love and caring from an old man and a young blind woman. The novel poses the question of what happens to a child if there is no loving mother at the heart of the home to love and care for her and to model for her how to love and care for others. The novel begins with orphan Gerty living in urban poverty and abused by her custodian, Nan Grant. Nan’s cruelty threatens to extinguish Gerty’s innate flame of compassion; rather than encouraging the girl’s love for a stray kitten, Nan throws it into a pot of boiling water. The novel asks, how will Gerty learn empathy from this uncaring caregiver? The answers lie in an old man, the Lamplighter of the title, who takes her in and teaches her to read, and in a young blind woman, Emily Graham, who takes the adolescent Gerty in to teach her the arts of True Womanhood. Emily Graham lives with a rich father, and embodies the essence of piety, purity, obedience, and submission to God’s will. She shows Gerty how to bear the affliction of blindness with patience and faith, and consistently urges Gerty to feel compassion, not just for her, but for any who suffer. These Christian domestic values, the novel hopes, will fortify Gerty when she leaves to find honest work to support herself, as an unmarried American woman without a disability and without a family must.
Sentimental literature, by women and men, represented the Christian home as the sanctuary where all could find care by imagining what would happen if that home, or its loving Mother center, was absent. By placing disabled characters firmly within the boundaries of home, sentimental authors presented disability as feminization, confining one to the domestic sphere. Images of disabled people as angelic messengers, or as sufferers whose woes teach a valuable moral lesson, mesh perfectly with Christian teachings on charity, which explains why such images dominate antebellum representations of the blind, the deaf, and the crippled. Sentimental rhetoric and disabled characters also appear frequently in the religious tracts and stories printed and distributed for working‐class readers by the American Tract Society and the American Sunday School Union, both before and after the Civil War. Disabled characters in tracts like “The Deformed Boy,” “The Happy Mute,” “The Little Hunch‐Back,” “Poor Matt,” “The Clouded Intellect,” “The Patient Cripple,” “Crazy Mary,” “Blind Nelly,” “The Lame Boy,” and “The Deaf Boy’s Triumph” learn to bear their afflictions with patience, while able‐bodied children learn to pity them and help them. Often, the tracts emphasize that disabilities are caused by human vices and sins, especially intemperance. Temperance literature follows the punitive logic that abuse of the body with alcohol is also disobedience to God – a lesson that must be learned through the chastisement of disability.
Disability was so powerful a vehicle for sentimentalism that even authors who disdained the mushiness of most domestic writings resort to it when presenting a disabled character. Fanny Fern, known for her caustic mockery of silly sentiment in her newspaper columns, cannot help insisting that “poor little crippled Lucy,” suffering from an amputated leg necessitated by a streetcar accident, is “a living sermon,” though Fern does warn that “if I am not better for seeing you, it will not be because I don’t need improving” (Fern 1857: 139). And writings that came from outside the domestic sphere, such as the Annual Reports of the state institutions for the deaf and the blind, though they denounced sentiment and pity as handicaps to the full integration of the disabled, resorted to it when needed. Samuel Gridley Howe’s reports from Perkins insisted repeatedly that, despite all his educational efforts, what the blind really needed more than anything was “a comfortable home!” and the care it would provide (Klages 1999: 106; see Howe 1836–1860).
Like the reports of the other state‐run institutions, Howe’s reports became the authoritative discourse on blindness for scientific and medical researchers, as well as for legislators and social policy makers. By mid‐century writings about disability from the taxonomic perspective of the state institutions for their care framed disability as a correctible social evil, a view that was supported by nineteenth‐century science. Rather than valuing the disabled for the lessons they teach, as domestic literature did, writings from the scientific or institutional angle looked at disability as an error that could be corrected or eliminated. The worldview here was that a benevolent God had designed the universe to run according to natural laws which were discoverable and understandable by human beings. It was our duty to know these laws and to follow them, and good health and whole offspring would result. Any disease or deformity, any abnormality, represented someone’s failure to know and follow these laws – either the bearers themselves, or their ancestors, had been intemperate or vicious and had brought the abnormality on themselves and on succeeding generations.
Walt Whitman offers a different attitude to disability. In the early editions of Leaves of Grass, Whitman celebrates the well‐made body, the healthy body, particularly the male body, and invites all to cherish their bodies and sexualities. He might be read as the premier poet of able‐bodiedness. But he is also the premier poet of democracy, and his vision of democracy is all‐inclusive. In “Song of Myself,” the untitled opening poem of the first edition of 1855, Whitman proclaims, “Whoever degrades another degrades me”; while in the extended catalogue of those he sees and salutes in “Salut au Monde,” first published as “Song of Salutation in the 1856 edition, he includes “the defective human bodies of the earth, / The blind, the deaf and dumb, idiots, hunchbacks, lunatics” (Whitman 2002: 46, 123). His accepting attitude is not surprising, given that Whitman’s youngest brother, Eddy, was described as profoundly mentally retarded, and probably epileptic. Eddy Whitman lived all his life with his mother, Louisa, and with his brother, George Washington Whitman, and his wife, Louisa Orr Halsam Whitman; he required constant personal care, and could contribute only the most minimal labor to household chores. Whitman thus knew firsthand what lifelong dependence, in a body that could not exist without the help of others, was like – he was often the caregiver. Though he avoids the sentimentality of domestic representations of disability and minimizes the Christian framework that was a necessity of the genre, he nevertheless posits interdependence, as well as independence, as fundamentally American traits.
Antebellum writings about slavery and disability raise radically different issues than the domestic, institutional, or democratic worldviews. The rhetoric used in proslavery writings insist that the Negro is a helpless child, and that slavery is a benevolent system, without which the Negroes would not be able to support themselves. In a serialized Christmas story published in Godey’s Lady’s Book in 1847, southern novelist William Gilmore Simms painted a portrait of slavery that looked right at home next to the domestic Christian poems and stories. “Maize‐in‐Milk” describes the jolly holiday celebrations among the white family in the big house at the plantation, and then moves the party outdoors to include the slaves. Simms emphasizes that the benevolent slave owner treats his property “like family,” supporting them even when they are more of an expense than an asset:
Such a happy variety of voices in the same monotonous chaunt of “Merrie Chrystmasse.” There were voices of lame, halt, and blind; beginning with Old Dolly, a white‐headed matron of 93, whose memory was a complete chronicle of the revolutionary warfare. Blind and deaf, she sat between her great, great grand‐children, on the steps of the porch, and shook her palsied head with a feeble chirrup […] and there was Binah, the mute, and Tony, the one‐armed, and Polly the half‐witted, and Diana, the rheumatic, and a dozen more of both sexes, whom the master only knew as dependents for whom he had to provide, and who were of more trouble and expense to him than thrice their number of the rest. But of this, our excellent proprietor did not complain. Indeed, these poor creatures were particular objects of his attention. He was content to take the evil with the good, and he regarded these old heir‐looms as so many subjects of his father who, having served their time faithfully, deserved to be protected and provided for during the future, in consideration of the past. There was no discharging the operative the moment he ceased to be useful.
(Simms 1847: 201)
Simms makes a pointed reference to the argument that slavery was more benevolent than the northern factory system, where a disabled worker would be dismissed with no pension or insurance. But people with visible disabilities, when captured by slavers in Africa, were killed or let go as “refuse slaves,” as were those disabled by the horrors of the Middle Passage. And, in practice, slave owners often “freed” enslaved people who were unable to work, due to age or illness or disability, turning them out to fend for themselves. At the same time, for enslaved persons who were born with a disability or became disabled, useful work they could perform could always be found. Blindness or deafness did not exempt an enslaved person from being put to any task that justified their upkeep. Accidental disabilities like loss of limb could be accommodated if the enslaved person was otherwise “sound.” The term “sound” was used in the slave trade to describe a person who was physically fit and able to work, but also tractable enough to be dominated. A man or woman could be deemed “unsound” if he or she rebelled or fought back. One of the marks of being unsound was scars from whipping or branding or both; such a scar meant that a master had already had to use harsh corporal punishment to mark the enslaved person as submissive, obedient, and owned (see Boster 2013: 35–36).
Within the logic of slavery, the slave owner would not act against his or her own self‐interest by hurting an enslaved person enough to kill or disable them. But the need to enforce absolute obedience and submission in enslaved people often outweighed self‐interest. In the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (1845), Douglass describes his master whipping “a lame young woman” while justifying his “bloody deed” by quoting scripture – “He that knoweth his master’s will, and doeth it not, shall be beaten with many stripes.” Moreover, Douglass suggests that the master’s wrath is exacerbated rather than soothed by Henny’s disabilities:
Master would keep this lacerated young woman tied up in this horrid situation four or five hours at a time. I have known him to tie her up early in the morning, and whip her before breakfast; leave her, go to his store, return at dinner, and whip her again, cutting her in the places already made raw with his cruel lash. The secret of master’s cruelty toward “Henny” is found in the fact of her being almost helpless. When quite a child, she fell into the fire, and burned herself horribly. Her hands were so burnt that she never got the use of them. She could do very little but bear heavy burdens. She was to master a bill of expense; and as he was a mean man, she was a constant offence to him. He seemed desirous of getting the poor girl out of existence. He gave her away once to his sister; but, being a poor gift, she was not disposed to keep her. Finally, my benevolent master, to use his own words, “set her adrift to take care of herself.”
(Douglass 1982: 99)
Clearly the sentimentality that posited the sight of a disability as the prompt for benevolence and compassion had no place in the realities of slavery described by Douglass. Indeed, abolitionist literature placed the scarred and deformed enslaved body in the front lines of the rhetorical arsenal. Both black and white authors relied on vivid, almost at times pornographic, descriptions of abused enslaved bodies. Even more powerful was the abolitionist lecture which could place a formerly enslaved body, with its scars, right on stage for all to see.
The exhibitions of formerly enslaved bodies, like the exhibitions of deaf and blind students in the 1830s and 1840s, provided irrefutable evidence: the former, of the cruel realities of slavery; and the latter, of the reliability of the written accounts of their achievements. Both displayed the living body as unarguable truth. However wonderful might be the liberation of the souls and minds of the enslaved or the disabled, their bodies, exhibited for public view, still offered the most definitive proof of their status. Samuel Gridley Howe grew increasingly uneasy about exhibiting his blind students to the public; he was particularly concerned that Laura Bridgman’s fame, gathering hundreds to Perkins to see her for themselves, might be a violation of her womanly image, and he ended the displays in the 1840s. His concerns about the propriety of exhibiting his students may have been flavored by the image of the enslaved body on the auction block; it was certainly strengthened by the ballyhoo of P.T. Barnum’s exhibitions, which began in 1836 with his display of Joice Heth, a deaf and blind slave whom he billed as George Washington’s nurse, aged 161.
Barnum understood that the exhibition of bodily variation, disability, and strangeness could be highly profitable. His American Museum, open from 1841 to 1865 in New York City, promised visitors displays of faked and real human oddities for 25 cents – and by 1865 more than 38 million people had paid their admission fees. The Feejee Mermaid, sewn together from the head of a monkey and the body of a fish, was fake – but the bearded lady, the Siamese twins Chang and Eng Bunker, and the 25‐inch‐tall “General Tom Thumb” were alive and real, and on exhibit to the public. Barnum’s flair for publicity made General and Mrs. Thumb – Charles Stratton and his wife, Lavinia – world famous, and also provided them with income. The “freak show” as the exhibition of bodily anomalies and disabilities would be a common element of American entertainment until well into the twentieth century. Contemporary disability scholars debate the question of whether the exhibition of disabled or radically different bodies is a form of exploitation. Performers often pointed out that they would be destitute if they were not able to exhibit themselves; many performers sold their pictures or biographies as supplemental income to spectators. Similar arguments appear in the autobiographies of deaf and of blind people, such as Mary L. Day’s Incidents in the Life of a Blind Girl (1859), which she wrote in order to profit from the sales. As Annie Kane, the author of The Golden Sunset, or, The Homeless Blind Girl (1870), wrote in her Preface, she hoped her “effusions” would “go forth from their privacy” to “enlist the patronage of the generous and humane” (Kane 1870: 8). At least in print form the disabled body was not directly on public display.
Barnum’s penchant for “humbug” and fakery blurred the lines between fiction and fact, between “real” anomalous bodies and “fake” exhibits, destabilizing the certainty of Victorian belief in the material reality of the body. Herman Melville addresses this uncertainty in The Confidence‐Man, His Masquerade (1857), where he questions the ontological truth of the human body. The novel begins with what seems to be a deaf‐mute, who writes Christian truisms on a slate as commentary about the scenes of trade and commerce being described. The man in the cream‐colored suit responds to discussions of trust, credit, and payment with remarks about charity and love – perhaps suggesting that he can hear what’s being said? Is he really a deaf‐mute? When the deaf‐mute goes to sleep, Melville moves to the Black Guinea, described as
a grotesque negro cripple, in tow‐cloth attire and an old coal‐sifter of a tambourine in his hand, who, owing to something wrong about his legs, was, in effect, cut down to the stature of a Newfoundland dog; his knotted black fleece and good‐natured, honest black face rubbing against the upper part of people’s thighs as he made shift to shuffle about, making music, such as it was, and raising a smile even from the gravest. It was curious to see him, out of his very deformity, indigence, and houselessness, so cheerily endured, raising mirth in some of that crowd, whose own purses, hearths, hearts, all their possessions, sound limbs included, could not make gay.
(Melville 1857: 12)
When one passenger asks who his master is, Black Guinea, continuing the canine metaphor, refers to himself as a dog without a master; when the white passenger expresses disdain for a masterless slave, Guinea points to his deformed legs and asks what anyone would pay for them. Various other comments from bystanders frame Guinea as an “odd fish,” a “moon calf,” an “escaped prisoner,” and “a humbug,” as each interprets Black Guinea’s body in his own context. Gradually the suspicions begin to outweigh the pity, and a white gentleman asks Guinea to prove that he is really disabled. The bystanders ask Guinea to produce a living character witness, or any paper certification, that will prove his claim to disability more convincingly than the sight of his body crawling like a dog around the deck. At stake is the idea that a person’s body speaks the essential truth about who they are – an idea that abolitionists’ invocation of the scarred enslaved body relied upon. Anticipating a perspective that the twentieth‐century modernist movement would validate, Melville suggests that we can no longer have confidence in the material body as the locus of irrefutable evidence and knowledge.
Postbellum Conversations
The American Civil War radically shifted the cultural conversations about disability. Amputation was the most common form of surgery during the Civil War because the soft lead Minie bullets caused enormous damage to whatever body part they struck. Surgeons chose to amputate limbs rather than risk a longer healing process that would invite gangrene, in this era before anesthetics and antibiotics. It is estimated that more than 300 000 soldiers came home with disabling wounds; 45 000 of those had survived the amputation of at least one limb. For decades after, newspaper accounts of reunions would marvel at the sheer number of veterans using crutches or wheelchairs. Indeed, the large number of amputations made disabilities among veterans highly visible, and they were viewed as badges of honor, marks of service and sacrifice, whether the disabled soldier wore grey or blue. The Charleston Mercury, for example, remarked in 1863 that “we frequently see passing along our streets silent momentoes [sic] of heroism. They are the empty sleeves dangling by the sides of warworn privates.” The article then presents the image of the “venerated mother” who weeps at the thought of “her darling boy with one arm,” and insists that “the poor fellows hobbling along on crutches, with only one leg spared to them” are “objects of tender sympathy to the whole people.” Using the sentimental and domestic imagery made popular before the war, the article reassures soldiers, “who probably miss the sympathies of home,” that “all look upon you as heroes” (Anonymous 1863b: n.p.).
A newspaper item that appeared two days later in the Vincennes, Indiana Gazette also described the sight of a crippled veteran, noting that “the right sleeve of the blue coat flutters uselessly in the breeze, as does also the right leg of his pantaloons.” But the northern article interprets the “empty folds,” not as signs of heroism, but as narratives that “speak volumes” about the soldier’s hardships: “They tell of privations, forced marches, hardships and dangers endured. We see the conflict, the carnage, the mighty rush of battles; hear the whistling of the pitiless bullets, the shouts of the victors, and the groans of the dying. Then comes the weary days and nights in the hospital [and] […] the long days of intense pain and suffering.” Here there is “no loved one near to smooth the hardened pillow,” nor, on returning home, a hero’s welcome; rather, the article laments, the soldier returns “a burden to self and friends, unfit for employment, an encumbrance to society, and dependent on the government for a pittance of support” (Anonymous 1863a: n.p.). The southern article promises that the heroic veteran will receive sympathy and care from civilians, just as if they were family; the northern article, by contrast, offers no such comfort, imagining the disabled soldier as shamefully dependent on other people and on the government’s charity. The difference may be attributable to the economic situation each was returning to: the northern manufacturing system offered fewer employment possibilities to the disabled veteran who could not operate machinery or tolerate the demands of factory timetables.
The antebellum meanings of disability persisted after the war. Disabilities still were used as vehicles for conveying Christian morality and for evoking sentimental emotional responses; characters with disabilities abounded still in the pages of religious magazines, ladies’ magazines, and children’s literature – all of which were produced in larger numbers after the war as modes of production and distribution expanded across the country. Exhibition of deformed or abnormal bodies also grew with the sideshows of traveling circuses. Postbellum writings about disability, however, added to the existing tropes by working to dignify the disabilities of the wounded warriors, asking questions about how they can be folded back into domestic and public interactions.
One of the first pieces to ask this question appeared in the Southern Literary Messenger in 1862. In a poem entitled “Crippled for Life,” the author, “Leola,” describes a soldier “young, helpless, and hopeless” lying on a couch despairing because he has heard the surgeon say “‘Poor fellow! He’s crippled for life, I’m afraid.’” The next stanza confirms that “his doom has been spoken,” because he will never fight for his country again, and “his proud manhood” lies stricken, “unable to rise.” The poem turns next to the soldier’s mother’s tears, evoking a sentimental response, and then moves on to the heart of the issue: will his betrothed accept him?
“When again she will see me, a cripple for life,
Will she not shrink from becoming my wife?”
This was a crucially important question for returning veterans and for the future of family life in the United States after the war. Would women still want to marry men disabled in the war? And if they did, who would support the men if they were unable to support themselves, their wives and families? The young soldier then remembers the angelic faces of “the Ladies of Richmond! God’s angels on earth!” who took care of him in the hospital:
How they watch over those by diseases laid low,
Or wounded and torn by the balls of the foe;
How kind and unshrinking they watch by the bed,
Comfort the dying, close the eyes of the dead.
As he realizes that those women could see the horrific results of war “unshrinking” and respond only with kindness, he begins again to hope that his betrothed might have the same constant nature “of woman’s true love.” The poem ends with his firm conclusion that “She will not desert me – she’ll yet be my wife.” (Leola 1862: 672–673).
Other writers weren’t so sure. In an 1876 story entitled “Crippled for Life!” Susan H. Wixon told of Frank Hamilton’s bravery and the injuries that changed him “to a mangled, mutilated lump of clay” with “one arm gone, shot clear away, a sabre‐cut so deep that one of those flashing black eyes must surely be lost, and two or three gaping bullet‐wounds.” Despite his inherent nobility and “perfect manhood,” his betrothed weeps “a few bitter tears” and concludes that “he cannot expect me to keep my engagement now.” Such an untrue woman cannot be left unpunished, of course; Ellen Dale weds another, who, though healthy, had paid for a medical deferment, and the scoundrel makes her life miserable. By the story’s end, she tragically realizes that her callous rejection of Frank has made her “crippled for life!” The heroic Frank Hamilton, meanwhile, could not long bear “the consciousness that he was a cripple” and he quietly dies, acknowledging that “my work was finished at Fredericksburg” (Wixon 1876: 257–262).
Marriage was important to the disabled soldier because the middle‐class home, with a real True Woman at its heart, was still touted as the best place for a disabled veteran to receive the care he deserved while preserving his traditional gender role. At the same time, there were concerns that American manhood was endangered by the dependence resulting from a disabling wound. “The Empty Sleeve at Newport, or, How Edna Ackland Learned to Drive,” a sketch published anonymously in Harper’s Weekly in 1865, presents the inner monologue of Captain Henry Ash, who has lost an arm, mournfully watching his former betrothed driving her own pair of horses at Newport Beach. Henry “had old fashioned prejudices, and liked womanly women”; he had fallen in love with Edna before the war because she “seemed so womanly and gentle – a dainty thing to be watched over and guarded from harm.” How can she be off driving herself, in public, when she should be waiting for him at home? His dismay comes from his sense of dependence: “what was he – a helpless, one‐armed fellow, shut off from manly sports for life at 26 – an invalid to be nursed and tended, who needed so much and could give so little?” If Edna could drive herself, she might not stay at home, might not be the True Woman he had admired – and if she didn’t stay home, who would care for him?
Edna and Harry talk, and Edna explains that she learned to drive, not to be independent, but so that she could drive Harry around. When she learned of his loss, she knew he would feel helpless, and wanted to be “left hand and right hand also,” and so got driving instructions. Edna declares that, if Harry had lost both arms, it only would have made her love him twice as much, and they marry. The final paragraph, though, allays any doubts that male dependence might mean female independence, as the author reinscribes the status quo, explaining: “Her hands guide the reins, and he sits with his empty sleeve beside her. Yet, for all that, his eye is on the road and his voice guides her; so that, in reality, she is only the left hand and he, the husband, drives” (Anonymous 1865: 534).
Despite such affirmative visions, there was widespread concern about whether efforts to reintegrate wounded warriors would succeed. The federal government granted pensions to wounded soldiers in 1862, as the Confederacy did for their veterans in 1864. Soldiers were allotted $75 for an artificial leg, and $50 for an arm, which was to cover the cost of travel to a showroom for fitting as well as the prosthetic limb itself. The best result of the war may have been the inventiveness it sparked, as patents for adaptive equipment like prosthetics and wheelchairs and mobility aids multiplied in the next two decades. The emphasis on assistive technology imagined the disabled soldier returning to the workplace rather than staying protected at home, and thus fostered a spirit of adapting work to the worker, rather than the other way around. The US government formed the “Invalid Corps,” nicknamed “The Cripple Brigade,” in 1863 to hire back disabled veterans and set them to work doing whatever they could as a way to employ them and give them back a sense of independence. In the era just after the war, no one could speak against the claim the disabled veteran had against the government for support and assistance, but as decades passed, taxpayers did begin to chafe at the cost of those claims. The US Sanitary Commission had proposed a “System of Economic Relief for Disabled Soldiers,” stressing that wounded veterans should go back home to their families and communities, which would employ them in “the lighter occupations.” By no means, they argued, should disabled soldiers be separated from their families, because, as in antebellum logic, “Home is generally the best hospital, even as repose is often the best remedy.”2
The best hospital, that is, for returning soldiers who had homes. The Sanitary Commission admits that the main problem in preparing for the reintegration of disabled soldiers was “to keep them from ultimately drifting into town or county pauper asylums.” They proposed instead the creation of “Soldiers’ Homes,” institutions which would provide modest and economical care for those without families. These institutions were originally conceived as temporary homes, rather than permanent ones; they turned out to be a version of a poorhouse for soldiers (see Kalten 2015). Disabled veterans who could not be or did not want to be reintegrated into their families and towns of origin often congregated in cities, and often begged for a living, displaying the empty sleeve to attract charity. Beginning in 1867 and continuing, in some cases, into the twentieth century, many cities passed “ugly laws” to rid city streets of anyone displaying a deformed, disgusting, or repulsive body, in an effort to eliminate begging (see Schweik 2010). The alternative to begging, however, was the poorhouse or almshouse that the Sanitary Commission had feared – or prison.
In advocating for a Soldiers’ Home, the Sanitary Commission anticipated the postbellum trend of institutionalization for populations needing particular care or correction. In the antebellum period, reformers like Howe and Gallaudet insisted that their Institutions were educational, not custodial; graduates were required to move away, to prevent the Institution from becoming a refuge for the non‐productive. In the decades after the war, however, institutionalization became the preferred solution for the mentally retarded, who had proven more difficult to educate and integrate than the blind or the deaf. Institutional “care” was provided also for people with epilepsy, and in 1893 the Institution for Crippled and Deformed Children opened.
The solution to dependent populations in the Gilded Age was warehousing. It was economical and practical, and offered the benefits of containment and surveillance found in the designs of panopticon prisons. Social scientists, social workers, and the directors of Institutions offered their opinions on how best to manage those who could not or would not behave correctly, linking together “the defective, dependent, and delinquent classes” as requiring institutional control. By the end of the century, when the eugenics movements lobbied for the sterilization of mentally retarded and violent wards of the state, the institutional system already in place made the task easier (see Nielsen 2012: 101–102). So, while the middle‐class white world was working to reinscribe disabled veterans back into the familiar networks of home, town, and job, those who fell outside of those networks increasingly became “social problems,” solvable at the municipal, state, and federal level by institutional incarceration. Within that system, disability appeared, not in a context of Christian charity or as a sign of valiant bravery, but as a threat to social order which needed to be at least controlled and at best eliminated. As in the earlier period, the constant association of disability with poverty structured the ways in which governments would cope with the problems of dependence.
Many writers connected poverty and disability with the expanding factory system of production, noting that, as Simms had earlier suggested, disabled wage laborers had no form of what we now call “social security” – no retirement fund, no pension, no compensation for injury on the job, or any of the protections that began to be put in place at the turn of the century. In her novel The Silent Partner (1871), Elizabeth Stuart Phelps presents Perley Kelso, who inherits a partnership in a factory when her father dies. She goes to the factory town and is appalled by the conditions of poverty and suffering she sees. She tries to convince the male partners to change things, and when they laugh her off she decides to try on her own. She makes friends with some of the factory operatives, including Sip Garth; when Sip invites Miss Kelso to her meager home, she meets Sip’s sister Catty, who is deaf and blind. Phelps attributes Catty’s disability directly to her mother’s long hours in the mills when in labor. While Perley Kelso and Sip Garth try to figure out ways to improve mill conditions, Catty becomes wild, and is finally destroyed in a flood, her body crucified on the mill town bridge. The novel ends, however, without any redemption. Instead of using the sentimental trope of changing the world through the suffering and death of a disabled Christ figure, Phelps does not make Catty’s death transformative. The mill system and its operatives, despite Kelso’s attempts to bring them classical music and good literature, do not change for the better.
Questions about returning veterans, the ever‐growing factory system of production, and institutionalization arose in the discussions of disability for cripples, blind people, and idiots in the postbellum period. Deaf people in this period wrestled with a new construction of ability and disability that changed the ways institutions for their education taught them. As noted above, the “problem” of deafness was a problem of language: deaf people had their own language, their own communication system, the manual sign language. The earliest schools for the deaf embraced the manual alphabet as superior to the gestural and imitative “natural” signs used by deaf people, savages, and idiots worldwide; with alphabetic language, deaf people were the same as hearing people in their ability to communicate and read. By the late 1870s, however, many educators began to believe that teaching deaf people to speak orally would be superior to the manual alphabet, and “oralism” became the watchword of the day among directors of institutions for the deaf. Like Native American children forced into Indian boarding schools and forbidden to speak their native tongues, deaf students were forbidden to use any sign language, and were torturously made to imitate sounds they could not hear. Deaf activists refer to this time period as “the Dark Ages of deaf education” (Baynton 1998: 87).
Why had oralism become so urgent an issue? Deaf communities had thrived in the decades since the creation of state‐sponsored schools, and in 1864 Edward Gallaudet (son of Thomas) got Gallaudet University certified as the first college for deaf people. Deafness was not singled out as a social problem creating dependence and poverty, as blindness had been in the antebellum period. While vision had been the most important sense in the factory world, creating problems of unemployment even for educated blind people, by the end of the century sound was coming into prominence. Among the most avid advocates of oralism was Alexander Graham Bell, who had a lifelong interest in deafness and deaf education; his father, Alexander Melville Bell, developed Bell’s Visible Speech as an aid to oral pronunciation. Graham Bell invented the telephone, which required that one have understandable oral speech, a necessity for employment in the white‐collar world. Deaf people who could not communicate directly with their coworkers and supervisors, whether on the phone or in person, would be not be qualified for these positions, and would have to resort to manual labor – which, by this time, had become the job of the non‐white and immigrant populations. Oralism was also fostered by a Darwinistic suspicion of any form of manual sign language as savage and primitive, entirely unsuited to the competitive worlds of late Victorian capitalism; failure to teach deaf students oral speech would doom them to extinction as a lesser species if “survival of the fittest” became American economic and social doctrine.
Deafness had frequently been a source of humor in American writings, as the possibilities for misunderstanding and word play were virtually endless. Though the deaf were sometimes evoked as pathetic figures in sentimental discourses, they were seen as socially isolated, like any community that spoke a language foreign to English speakers. In Twain’s Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), the villainous “Injun Joe” disguises himself as a deaf and dumb Spaniard, echoing a trend in the work of novelists such as Dickens and Wilkie Collins, who cast disabled men as criminals rather than as charity cases. Deafness is also associated with deceit in the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), as the Duke pretends to be a long‐lost deaf brother of the recently deceased, whose estate he and the King will inherit, if their fraud is convincing. Huck describes the Duke “goo‐gooing” and making meaningless signs as part of the pair’s charade to defraud the three sisters – Mary Jane, Susan, and “the hare‐lip,” Joanner – whose trusting naivety allows them to be taken in by the con men.
Twain is humorous and cynical when debunking the scams of such con men, but earlier in the novel he deftly uses sentimentalism and disability in relation to Jim. Crying over a memory of mistreating his daughter, Jim tells Huck that he had struck his daughter for disobedience, forgetting that, due to scarlet fever, she was “deef and dumb.” When he realized it, Jim wails: “O, Huck, I bust out a‐cryin’, en grab her up in my arms, en say ‘o de po’ little thing!’ de Lord God Amighty fo’give po’ ole Jim, kaze he’s never gwyne to fogive hisseff as long’s he live. O, she was plumb deef and dumb, Huck, plumb deef and dumb, and I’d been a‐treat’n her so!” (Twain 1985: 168). Jim expresses a parent’s remorse, embellished by the pathos of deafness; calling her a “po’ little thing” echoes the sentimental rhetoric that makes a disabled child twice as pathetic as a non‐disabled one. That rhetoric is familiar to Huck, and helps Huck understand that Jim “cared just as much for his people as white folk cared for theirn. It don’t seem natural, but I reckon it’s so.”
Emotional identification of a common humanity occurs through shared feelings about family, home, and disability. Throughout the novel Huck practices putting himself in the position of others, trying to understand the logic by which they operate, and often exposing that logic for hypocrisy. But the exchange around Jim’s deaf and dumb daughter is sincere; Huck understands Jim’s reaction as the same as his own, however unnatural that may seem within slavery’s insistence on casting black people as incomprehensible backwards beasts.
The humanity Huck discovers was being challenged by scientific racism and social Darwinism by the time the novel appeared in 1885. Twain’s hope that disability would be a means to form a common identification gets challenged by the viewpoint that disability was defect and should be eliminated, which fostered institutionalization for defective populations. The eugenics movement in the late decades of the century argued for the elimination of inheritable forms of disability, rather than their accommodation, through forced sterilization of incarcerated offenders.
Stephen Crane’s short story “The Monster” (1898) illuminates turn‐of–the century responses to disability, from institutionalization and ugly laws to eugenics. The story of the black hero who is horrifically burned rescuing a white boy opens up questions about responses to disability. Henry Johnson’s appearance is unbearable; he has no face, and the townspeople cannot tolerate seeing him. The doctor whose son he rescued feels responsible for him, and tries to find a home for him – but the black community he came from cannot tolerate him either, no matter how much they might be paid to take care of him. The white townspeople are confronted with the difference between their notions of their own compassion and their responses to Henry. Unlike Civil War nurses, whose often grisly work was commemorated in narratives such as Louisa May Alcott’s Hospital Sketches (1863), they cannot stomach Henry’s deformities. The black community is confronted with a similar dilemma, responding to his courtship with horror but acknowledging his right to pursue a normal life. Like other discourses on disability from this time period, Crane’s story perhaps suggests that the doctor should have killed Henry rather than saved him, that euthanasia would be a practical solution to the town’s problem. Another character makes reference to finding an institution for Henry to get him out of sight, which at least would make it easier for the townspeople, both black and white, to ignore the contradictions in their beliefs and their actions.
In another story that appeared near the end of the century, “Chickamauga” (1889), Ambrose Bierce employed disability to heighten the impact of his radical challenge to the mythology of the heroism of the Civil War. The story describes a young boy wandering from home into the forest, dreaming of being a warrior and leading troops. Scared by a rabbit, he gets lost and eventually falls asleep. When he wakes up, he sees hundreds of men crawling, wounded and dying, through the forest. He mimics them, and tries to climb on them, as he has done with his family’s slaves, but they brush him aside as they continue their crawl. The boy imagines he is leading them as their general; he leads them across a creek and finds he recognizes the buildings around him as his home. He realizes his house is in flames, and then sees a woman’s body lying on the ground. Bierce does not name the woman as his mother; the word “mother” instantly evokes the Victorian images of home, love, and care. Instead, his description is unrelentingly graphic:
There, conspicuous in the light of the conflagration, lay the dead body of a woman – the white face turned upward, the hands thrown out and clutched full of grass, the clothing deranged, the long dark hair in tangles and full of clotted blood. The greater part of the forehead was torn away, and from the jagged hole the brain protruded, overflowing the temple, a frothy mass of gray, crowned with clusters of crimson bubbles – the work of a shell.
We know the woman is the boy’s mother because of Bierce’s description of the boy’s reaction to seeing the smashed body. While he had no reaction to the mangled bodies of the soldiers as anything frightful or awful, at the sight of the woman’s body “the child moved his little hands, making wild, uncertain gestures. He uttered a series of inarticulate and indescribable cries – something between the chattering of an ape and the gobbling of a turkey – a startling, soulless, unholy sound, the language of a devil.” Only then does Bierce inform the reader that the child is a deaf‐mute (Bierce 1988: 58).
The revelation of the boy’s disability transforms our understanding of the story. There are no sound images in the narrative – no descriptions of guns, or moans, or speech. The boy does not see or hear the battle, so he cannot understand that the crawling men are wounded and dying soldiers; in fact, through Bierce’s shifting narrative perspective, it’s not clear that the boy understands the red color of the men is blood. Knowing the boy is deaf makes his imitation of the soldiers less of a game and more of an indication of his ignorance; imitating is all that the child, age six, has ever learned to do to communicate with other humans. Bierce uses the boy’s deafness as a form of innocence that prevents him from understanding the meaning of the crawling bodies he sees; he does not know what war is until he returns home. The brutal sight of his mother’s torn body drives the meaning of dead bodies home with a vengeance, prompting the boy’s inhuman wails of grief. Bierce brutalizes the boy as well, turning him from an imaginative child pretending to go to war into an inhuman animal. The story closes abruptly, leaving the boy standing “motionless, with quivering lips, looking down upon the wreck” of what used to be his life. He has learned the meaning of both war and his own disability.
The most famous late‐century story of disability was far more affirmative. Annie, a half‐blind Irish orphan girl, lives in the Tewksbury Almshouse outside of Boston. One day in 1878 the Board of Charities does an inspection, and the orphan girl grabs the sleeve of a well‐dressed gentleman and asks to go to school. The gentleman arranges for her to attend the Perkins Institution for the Blind. At Perkins, the girl learns eagerly, and becomes a favorite with the director and the teachers. Wanting to be useful, Annie generously spends time reading to and conversing with an old deaf‐blind woman who had lived at the school all her life. Meanwhile, in Alabama, a mother reads Charles Dickens’s account of his visit to Perkins and writes to the director, hoping someone will still know, in 1886, what had been done in 1839, because she needs a teacher for her deaf‐blind daughter Helen. This story could have appeared in the pages of a mid‐century ladies’ magazine: the orphan girl struggles on her own to escape her poverty and get an education, in order to support herself. She becomes competent and able to help another unfortunate being escape an imprisoning body to become fully human through communication, knowledge, and love.
The story of Helen Keller and Annie Sullivan transformed discussions of disability for the twentieth century. Though descriptions of Keller in the 1890s painted her within the familiar framework of pathos and pity, her own writings challenged the assumption that a disabled woman would be helpless and dependent. Her autobiography, The Story of My Life, was published in 1903, and the dozens of books and essays she wrote during her lifetime about her own experiences of disability gave voice to new ways of thinking about how to integrate people with disabilities into mainstream American culture. Keller’s works called attention to the need for rehabilitation and training programs for disabled veterans of World Wars I and II. Her activism on behalf of blind, deaf, and disabled people everywhere made disability increasingly an issue of equality and freedom, rather than one of pity, and continues to inspire disability rights movements all over the world.
References
Further Reading
SEE ALSO: CHAPTER 13 (SEX, THE BODY, AND HEALTH REFORM); CHAPTER 17 (LITERATURE AND THE CIVIL WAR); CHAPTER 25 (NATURALISM).
Notes