A Disability History of the United States (6 page)

Early colonial legal frameworks protected from punishment those who could not understand the law. Massachusetts, as stated earlier, guaranteed in 1639 that “Children, Idiots, Distracted persons, and all that are strangers, or new commers” would not be punished for failing to adhere to the law—adopting an already firmly established English practice. Rhode Island adopted a similar provision in 1647. It stated that in cases of manslaughter, punishment would not be given to “a natural foole that hath not knowledge of good or evil; nor a felonious intent . . . neither doth it concerne a madd man, who is a man, as it were, without a mind; for the saying is: an act makes not a man herein guiltie, unless the mind be guiltie.”
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The final concern of New England law regarding mental or cognitive disabilities was financial. Families always bore primary responsibility for those who could not labor and thus care for themselves—whether due to youth, old age, or mental, cognitive, or physical disabilities. Communities considered both idiots and the distracted undesirable inhabitants, particularly those without families, because of their general inability to provide for their own financial support. Beginning in 1693, poor laws allowed local officials to use the estates of either idiots or the distracted to defer the cost of community support.
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Laws also sought to protect and manage property owned or inherited by those considered idiots or the distracted, ensuring that the larger community would not end up financially responsible for their daily needs.

The implementation of laws regarding idiocy required standards, and those standards generally involved work, self-care, perceived intellectual capacity, and the maintenance of property. Massachusetts resident Mighill Smith voted three times in the same election, but the 1647 colonial court decided not to fine him: “His putting in of three beanes at once for one mans election, it being done in simplicity, & he being pore & of harmless disposition.” Mary Phipps was determined “void of common reason and understanding that is in other children of her age [and] . . . next to a mere naturall in her intellectuals.”
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Both adults were thus idiots not culpable for their actions, considered innocent and harmless and in need of protection.

Just as people with cognitive disabilities today are vulnerable to physical and sexual assault or economic exploitation, so were colonial idiots. The cases of Benomi Buck and his sister Mara Buck are one example. Their father, the Reverend Richard Buck, was hired by London’s Virginia Company to provide spiritual guidance to the several thousand indentured servants and masters of the company. Buck and his second wife, whose name in the historical record is given as “Mrs. Buck,” left England in 1609 only to be marooned for nine months in Bermuda before finally arriving in Virginia in 1611. Mara, whose name means “bitter,” was born in 1611, and Benomi, “son of my sorrow,” in 1616. (Between those births, in 1614, Buck officiated at the marriage ceremony of John Rolfe and Pocahontas.) The reverend and his wife died in 1624. At his death, Buck owned substantial property, at least several indentured servant contracts, personal property such as livestock and tobacco, and other goods valued at 320 pounds of tobacco.
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What we know of Benomi and Mara Buck largely comes from the legal battles regarding their portions of their father’s estate. Death and the attempted crimes of others put them in the historical record. Benomi, considered an idiot and “in no way able to governe himself, or to manage that small estate left him by his said father,” lived until 1639, having both in childhood and adulthood always been under legal guardianship. When Governor John Harvey investigated Benomi’s case, he found that several of Benomi’s guardians “had much inriched [themselves] from the stocks” intended to support the young man. Mara received the Crown Court’s attention after rumors surfaced that a man sought to marry her, at age thirteen, in order to gain access to her portion of her father’s estate. The court determined her to be disabled and in need of guardianship. She was, her guardian in 1624 testified, “very Dull to take her lerninge.”
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Mary Phipps also only entered the historical record after a crime. In 1689 the unmarried nineteen-year-old granddaughter of Thomas Danforth (the judge of the Salem witch trials) of Charlestown, Massachusetts, gave birth to a child. Phipps twice named John Walker, a forty-nine-year-old bricklayer, the father. He had, she told the midwife, “took several opportunities to abuse her body in his wicked lustfull manner” while preventing her from crying out by covering her mouth. Servant Hannah Gilson described Walker as “so nasty & his language so base that she would not have been alone in a house with him for all the world hee was so wicked.” Mary’s father reported that she had been “enslaved . . . with fear that if she did tell anybody he [Walker] would kill her.”
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Though clearly Phipps had been raped, she and her child came to the courts only because the child was a bastard. The courts sought to determine fiscal responsibility and found John Walker responsible. Perhaps the legal situation was made worse by Phipps’s idiocy and palsy. She was, court depositions stated, “void of common reason and understanding that is in other children of her age, not capable of discerning between good and evil or any morality . . . but she knows persons and remembers persons. She is next to a mere naturall in her intellectuals . . . She is incapable of resisting a rape hav[ing] one side quite palsied . . . [we] have to help her as a meer child.”
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Walker’s punishment was to provide for the child financially. When the baby died, Walker had no more involvement. Phipps’s famous grandfather later died in 1699 and left her a portion of his estate, but what happened to Phipps is unclear.

Just as communities expected families to provide care and finances for idiots, so did communities expect families to care for the distracted and the lunatic. Those from well-to-do families lived with family members and, as long as they had financial support, generally didn’t enter the public record. Ann Yale Hopkins, the wife of the governor of Connecticut in the mid-seventeenth century, had “fallen into a sad infirmity, the loss of her understanding and reason.” Colonial leader and family friend John Winthrop recorded her condition, blaming it on her husband’s indulgence of her intellectual pursuits. Despite the medicinal water that Winthrop prescribed for her, she remained considered insane for over fifty years.
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Poor people deemed insane, and those violent or uncontrollable, became a community responsibility. A 1694 Massachusetts statute guaranteed that each community had the responsibility “to take effectual care and make necessary provision for the relief, support and safety of such impotent or distracted person.” If the insane person was destitute, they became the town’s fiscal responsibility. Connecticut, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Virginia followed with similar statutes. When Jan Vorelissen of Pennsylvania could no longer support his son Erik, “bereft of his naturall Senses and [who] is turned quyt madd,” the city provided support. The colony of New Haven provided funds for the town marshal to care for distracted Goodwife Lampson, “so far as her husband is not able to do it.”
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When those considered insane threatened public safety, communities attempted to restrain them. A Virginia court ordered that the sheriff restrain John Stock, who in 1689 “keeps running about the neighborhood day and night in a sad Distracted Condition to the great Disturbance of the people.” The sheriff was to restrain Stock in “some close Roome, where hee shall not bee suffered to go abroad until hee bee in a better condition to Governe himselfe.”
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Local responsibility appears to have been accepted, but colonial communities strongly resisted caring for the stranger. Laws with titles such as “For the Preventing of Vagabonds” or “For the Preventing of Poor Persons” required newcomers to guarantee their economic viability. Strangers unable to do so would be “warned out,” with the threat of a lash. Historian Albert Deutsch notes that towns might have even, under the cover of night, rid themselves of their own insane paupers by dumping them in other communities or locales. A man named “Mad James” apparently wandered throughout Kings County, New York, in 1695, leaving the deacons of each town to eventually meet together to share the costs of maintaining him. “Warning out” came from fiscal concerns, not a fear of insanity—and, as Gerald Grob writes, “the fate of the insane was not appreciably different from that of other dependent groups.”
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Grob’s analysis is helpful in many respects. The treatment and comprehension of those considered insane was not “appreciably different from that of other dependent groups” because insanity, just like idiocy, was not believed to be particularly shameful. The influential Puritan theologian Cotton Mather considered insanity, just as his own stuttering, a punishment for sin. The temptations and struggles of sin, however, beset everyone and, as one historian characterized it, “the failure to win the struggle was not necessarily a cause for shame.”
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In this period of early colonization and conquest, bodily variabilities pervaded families, communities, and daily life. Europeans thus made little comment on such anomalies—
as long as one could labor.
Early European colonists defined disability in such a way that emphasized economic productivity in a manner appropriate to one’s race, class, gender, and religion. If well-to-do families could economically gloss over the laboring inability of their lunatic, idiot, or distracted family member, that individual’s disability generally remained irrelevant to community proceedings. If the blind, if the slow to walk, if the lame individual could still produce labor, which they were generally able to do in preindustrial North America, physical disability remained unnotable.

Disability, however, remained a central organizing principle. In 1701, as increased settlement pushed each of the Colonies toward increasingly sophisticated regulations, Massachusetts passed the first of many similar statutes. The laws, designed to prevent the “poor, vicious, and infirm” from embarking onto North American ground, required the master of each seagoing vessel to post bonds if any of their passengers embarked as “lame, impotent, or infirm persons, incapable of maintaining themselves.” If the captain was unable to provide such a guarantee, he had to return the passenger to their port of embarkation at his own cost.
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Disability was defined as the inability to “maintain” oneself economically, and those unable to do so were discouraged from ever boarding ship for North America.

There is one sharp exception to the laboring and economic focus of the definition of disability in the early history of North American Europeans: monstrous births. Like the members of some indigenous nations, many Europeans believed that pregnant women with inappropriate thoughts, women who engaged in deviant actions, could produce deviant offspring. Theological and popular literature common in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England warned that monstrous births signified divine displeasure, and such children were commonly displayed at local fairs. Fetuses or children considered monstrous, whether born alive or dead, were those with extreme bodily variabilities.

In all of the colonial historical record from this period, the births considered most horrific and momentous were those of Mary Dyer and Anne Hutchinson.

Puritan theology emphasized hierarchy and order: just as God lovingly and wisely ruled the people of His kingdom (the Puritan God was male), so must male household heads lovingly and wisely rule their households. While humanity’s profoundly sinful nature always tempted one away from God, those who carried out good works and adhered to the community covenant could become one of God’s elect. Puritans traveled to North America seeking space to create new communities ordered on their theological framework. Anne Hutchinson, a highly educated woman and the eventual mother of fifteen children, left England as one of many. She, her husband, and their children arrived in Massachusetts in 1634. Onboard ship she and other immigrants had often discussed the sermons they heard. Once in Boston she began hosting theological discussions in her own home. Hutchinson, however, began to emphasize the redemptive nature of God’s grace rather than the importance of an individual’s good works, and the ability of all to communicate directly with God (rather than through clerical intermediaries) and receive God’s forgiveness.

At Hutchinson’s heresy trial in November 1637 a minister stated bluntly to her, “You have stept out of your place, you have rather bine a Husband than a Wife and a preacher than a hearer; and a Magistrate than a Subject.”
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Via her actions and her theology, she and those who followed her, including Mary Dyer, subverted clerical hierarchy and by so doing subverted gender and political hierarchies.

In the midst of this, Massachusetts Bay Colony governor John Winthrop accused both Mary Dyer and Anne Hutchinson of monstrous births. Dyer had delivered a stillborn child in October 1637, after which Winthrop testified as follows: