A Revolutionary War novel. A fugitive slave advertisement. Benjamin Franklin’s correspondence. Patient treatment records. The artwork of Edward Calendon Bruce. What do these materials reveal about the history of disability in early North America? How can we read disability into these sources? Where do people with seemingly exceptional bodies and minds appear, and where are they absent in the historical record? What can people’s understandings of disability and the experiences of individuals with varying bodyminds teach us about the early American past? What do we learn when we view disabled people in history as sources of knowledge?
The essays in this series, the first of its kind in All of Us, draw on a range of primary sources to begin to recover the lived experiences of diverse peoples with anomalous bodies and minds in eighteenth and early nineteenth-century North America. Although scholars have increasingly studied physical, sensory, intellectual, and psychological incapacities during this time period, there is still so much that we do not know about the experiences of individuals with disabilities and how they navigated their everyday lives. Moreover, scholars new to the study of early American disability often hesitate about where and how to find sources. How can we locate disabled people before disability emerged as a modern, often medicalized term and concept?
The six essays in this series provide a model for doing this work. Drawing on an array of primary sources–literature, art, newspapers, asylum records, medical treatises, and private correspondence–they offer snapshots into the lives of diverse peoples with extraordinary or marginalized bodyminds. In doing so, the authors suggest how these individuals conceived of their bodies and minds; how they managed their impairments; how they confronted ableism that was structural, interpersonal, and internalized; and how they worked to gain greater degrees of autonomy and agency where possible. As the essays reveal, ableism was entrenched during the period and deeply entwined with racism, ageism, and sexism in ways that constrained people’s opportunities. Nevertheless, some individuals resisted, advancing alternative, more empowering conceptions of disability.
Chris Gismondi’s essay considers how the dehumanization and labor demands of slavery in Northern locations, such as Canada, affected enslaved people’s mental health. Newspaper advertisements document people whom enslavers described as “sullen” and “down cast.” Gismondi reflects on how enslaved people may have experienced depression and also mobilized it as a tool of resistance. A. Nicholas Powers also considers how enslaved people leveraged disability as a tool of resistance, although not by deploying their own incapacities but rather those of their enslavers. Studying the nineteenth-century Virginia artist Edward Calendon Bruce, who was deaf, Powers speculates about how Bruce interacted with the enslaved people he owned. Were they taught to “read and write in order to fulfill their domestic roles and communicate with the man who held them in bondage, despite laws forbidding literacy?” Although source limitations restrict Powers from answering such questions, he finds examples of similar allowances during the period.
Chayyim Holtkamp turns our attention to the resistance of patients at the South Carolina Lunatic Asylum in the mid-nineteenth century. Holtkamp finds that patients performed assertive behaviors, complained about their ill treatment, and sometimes escaped the institution, but hospital staff and medical professionals pathologized such acts of agency as further evidence of their mental illness. Patient resistance took different forms from everyday behaviors such as refusing to speak to the collective violence of rioting. Taking a disability history approach, Holtkamp reframes these so-called symptoms of lunacy as patients’ assertions of autonomy. Andrew Erlandson uncovers examples of disabled agency and expression in nineteenth-century literature and body reform movements. Reading James Fenimore Cooper’s Lionel Lincoln; or, The Leaguer of Boston and a testimonial by a follower of Sylvester Graham, Erlandson reveals how such venues provided spaces in which disabled people resisted ableist standards and “imagine[d] and create[d] a more liveable and accessible world.”
Rebecca Brannon further considers how disabled people navigated constraining corporeal expectations, particularly around the experience of aging. Focusing on white, elite, eighteenth-century British Americans, she finds that people typically ascribed to one of two competing models of aging. Either they understood disability to be an inevitable part of getting older or, alternatively, they embraced a model of “healthy” aging which denied the fact that disability was an inevitable outcome. Brannon demonstrates how these opposing models shaped the lives of eighteenth-century individuals, including Benjamin Franklin. Reflecting on the ageism and ableism embedded in both models, she also reflects on how these corporeal imperatives reverberate in our own time.
The series concludes with an essay by the editors, Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy and Laurel Daen, about locating disability in the archives of premodern America. Because the word ‘disability’ was not in everyday use in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries, it can be difficult to find stories of individuals with anomalous bodies and minds as well as people and groups who were considered disabled by those in power. Our essay features a list of the search terms we use in our own research to locate such stories in early North America and the early colonial Caribbean. Our list suggests that there were many words—sometimes overlapping, other times conflicting and contradictory—that people used to describe their own and others’ physical, sensory, intellectual, and psychological impairments, whether real or perceived. In our commitment to advancing the field of disability history and, in particular, disability scholarship on the early Americas, we offer our list of search terms to assist scholars in discovering disability in the premodern archive.
Together the essays in this series work to decenter disability history’s favoring of the modern period. The authors document the experiences of diverse eighteenth and early nineteenth-century peoples—white and Black, free and enslaved, rich and poor, institutionalized and not—who had or were perceived to have disabilities. Such evidence suggests the many ways that people confronted the disabling effects of ableism, racism, sexism, and ageism in their own lives. The essays also reveal how people resisted such constraints. Whether it was escaping from institutions or escaping from slavery, subverting the wishes of a disabled enslaver or imagining access through literature, early Americans with disabilities worked to find ways to live as they wanted to in their worlds. We hope this series inspires scholars of disability to engage earlier histories and early Americanists to look at their archives anew.
Laurel Daen is an Editor of All of Us and Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University of Notre Dame, where she is affiliated with the Program in Gender Studies and the John J. Reilly Center for Science, Technology, and Values. Her research and teaching focus on disability, sickness, medicine, and health in America, primarily during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy is the Executive Editor of All of Us and Associate Professor of History at the University of New Brunswick. Her research and teaching focus on disability, colonialism, madness, race and gender in the Caribbean, Atlantic World, and vast early Americas from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries.
