A Disability History of the United States (7 page)

In 1638 Hutchinson also had what Winthrop characterized as a monstrous birth. She, he later wrote, “brought forth not one, (as Mistris Dier did) but (which was more strange to amazement) 30 monstrous births or thereabouts, at once . . . some of one shape, some of another; few of any perfect shape, none at all of them . . . of humane shape.”
²⁹
Each of the thirty births represented one of Hutchinson’s heresies.

After the heresy trial in late 1637, religious leaders excommunicated Hutchinson. She, her family, and her remaining followers were exiled to Rhode Island. Years later, in 1660, Dyer was hanged in Boston Commons as a Quaker dissident, likely the first European female hanged in the colonies.

Many women in this period experienced stillbirths or gave birth to children with nonnormative bodies. Indeed, few childbearing women did not. What, however, does it mean that in this period the two bodies of European descent described as most anomalous, most horrific, and most frightening issued from the bodies of two theologically dissident females? Other women who gave birth to nonnormative children received very little public or theological attention. Of all European women in North America, Hutchinson and Dyer most threatened religious, political, and gender hierarchies. Their supposed monstrous sin manifested itself on the supposed monstrous beings that literally developed in their wombs; and as Joseph Winthrop charged, the act of giving birth to these beings proved the women’s sinfulness. As Winthrop insisted, deviant bodies signified maternal sin—the more monstrous the sin, the more monstrous the birthed body. Female challenges to patriarchy and theological power combined to render the bodies of Dyer’s and Hutchinson’s stillborn children, as well as the bodies of Dyer and Hutchinson, deeply deviant and threatening. Disability was material reality for many European colonists, but it also served as a potent metaphor and symbol.

The colonial theologian Cotton Mather may have considered his stuttering a sign of sin, but like the disabilities of many, it was not thought to have resulted from a sin of great shame, nor was it a matter of great consequence. The same could not be said of Dyer and Hutchinson, female theological dissidents whose stillborn children, in their bodily variability, were considered indicative of dangerous moral deviance.

Samuel Coolidge and his parents must have had big dreams for his future. Born in 1703 in Watertown, Massachusetts, the fifth son of Richard and Susanna Coolidge, the young white man preached in various pulpits and graduated from Harvard in 1738. We remember him, however, not as a great preacher or as a great intellect, but as someone who exemplifies the life of one with psychological disabilities—insanity, as those around him called it—in late colonial America. First and foremost, families provided care. As European colonists became greater in number, however, and more established in their community structures, care for those who needed assistance in caring for themselves, and whose families could not or did not provide it, became the responsibility of individual villages and towns.

Coolidge’s unruly and unpredictable behavior got him banished from Cambridge, Massachusetts, and sent home to Watertown in 1743. There, Coolidge largely depended on the goodwill of neighbors for food and lodging, but in 1744 he left—“being far gone in Despair, sordidness and viciousness.” He wandered back into Watertown in 1749 and the community once again agreed to care for him, but only if he would serve as the town’s schoolmaster. Coolidge remained the town’s charge for the rest of his life, and taught school when able to do so. When struggling, he wandered the streets of Watertown and Cambridge half-naked, yelling profanities, and disrupting classes at his alma mater. Neighboring towns repeatedly returned him to Watertown. Town officials paid community members to house and feed Coolidge, and sometimes locked him in the schoolhouse at night to make sure that he would be there to teach the next day. In 1763 he worsened, and Watertown residents refused to board him. Selectmen then found someone who agreed to house him if he remained locked up in a room, the room where he stayed until his death in 1764.
¹

Like others with disabilities who could not support themselves and had no family support, Coolidge became the responsibility of his hometown—indeed, other locales refused to care for him and forcibly returned him to Watertown. Watertown was not the only community to “warn out” indigents—with both physical and verbal threats—who were not its own, avoiding fiscal responsibility. Indeed, Onondaga County in upstate New York eventually became known for smuggling paupers into neighboring regions under cover of nightfall. Similarly, in 1785, a blind man named John Skyrme was transferred from one local official to another twenty-four times as he traveled the twenty-one-day journey from Eastchester, New York, back to his home of Providence, Rhode Island.
²

Only when Coolidge became unmanageable (and clearly a wide spectrum of behavior was tolerated as manageable) did town leaders isolate him in a locked room. Before then townspeople considered him troublesome enough to lock him in the schoolhouse at night but harmless and lucid enough to teach their children. Townspeople expected him to use the skills he had—in his case, an education—to support himself by teaching, and indeed forced him to do so.

Like Coolidge, revolutionary thinker and hero James Otis Jr. (credited with the phrase “taxation without representation is tyranny”), also of Massachusetts, was believed to have developed insanity, but his prior political leadership, and his family’s money and stability, meant that he experienced a less traumatic community response. From childhood on, Otis’s behavior included actions that others considered unpredictable and incomprehensible. In late 1769, a British tax collector attacked Otis and Otis suffered a significant head wound. After the attack he became, others believed, even less lucid, more violent, and less predictable.

By January 1770, Otis’s longtime friend and comrade, future United States president John Adams, wrote, “Otis is in confusion yet. He looses himself. He rambles and wanders like a Ship without an Helm . . . I never saw such an Object of Admiration, Reverence, Contempt and Compassion all at once as this. I fear, I tremble, I mourn for the Man, and for his Country. Many others mourne over him with Tears in their Eyes.” Otis’s language, Adams said, was full of “Trash, Obsceneness, Profaneness, Nonsense and Distraction.” That March, Otis’s behavior included what friends termed “mad freaks”: he broke windows and fired guns on the Sabbath.
³

The response of Otis’s family was to remove him to their country home in Barnstable. In 1771 the family successfully had Otis declared incompetent, which meant that others had control of his legal and financial affairs. Ultimately the family at Barnstable (in all practical matters, probably the family’s servants or slaves) could not cope with Otis’s occasional violence. It was not unheard of for respectable men to earn money by housing and caring for those considered insane at their rural homes, and until his death in 1783 Otis generally lived in the care of such men: a Mr. Osgood in Andover and a Captain Daniel Suther of Hull. In Hull, Otis even taught school for a period—just as Samuel Coolidge had done.
⁴

While Otis was still at the family home of Barnstable, Otis’s father, James Otis Sr., wrote him a classic letter of parental admonishment. In it the older man not only revealed himself to be an expert in fatherly manipulation but disclosed his beliefs about insanity. Otis’s condition, he implied, came because his son succumbed to inner weaknesses that could be shunned by exercising a stronger will and self-control. “Loeving Son,” he wrote, “what a dreadful example you are.” He insisted that if Otis would only “reform your manners [and] curb that unruly passion which you indulge too much,” and pray sincerely to God, all could be well. If Otis would simply “seek to him [God]
sincerely and heartily
for his Grace” a “Reformation of Life and Manners” would result. Considering the “pains and costs I have been at to educate my first born,” the father went on, and considering all of the “good prayers you have been the subject of and especially from your good Mother now in
Heaven,
” Otis needed to “sett down and seriously consider the way you are now in.” Otis Sr. signed the letter, “Afflicted Father.”
⁵

Otis’s colleague and fellow patriot Patrick Henry also lived with psychological disability, but that of his wife. After the 1771 birth of her sixth and last child, Sarah Shelton Henry’s behavior became so unmanageable to her family that “she was confined in a cellar room, bound in a straitjacket, and attended by a servant [slave].” (Family memoirs called it “one of the airy, sunny rooms in the half basement” of Scotchtown, the Henry estate in Hanover County, Virginia.) Her family and friends believed her to be insane. She died after several years of confinement at Scotchtown.
⁶
Her husband’s money protected her from the consequences of the poor laws, and we know tantalizingly little about her plight. Given the situation of his wife, one wonders what Patrick Henry thought of the fate of his fellow activist James Otis.

Thomas Jefferson’s sister Elizabeth, believed to be an idiot, similarly was protected by familial resources. Her famous brother cared for her financially and she lived in his household.
⁷
Those in need of community care more frequently entered the domain of the poor laws and public records. Elizabeth Jefferson, protected by family resources and perversely by her legal status of
feme covert
(which meant that she could not own anything and thus had no need to be under adult guardianship), largely remained out of the public record.

In comparison, without family to care for him sufficiently, Thomas Rathburn of Rhode Island entered the public record due to his need for community resources. He avoided the asylum and stayed in his home only by receiving a tax exemption from his local community. For sixteen years he had been unable to “walk one step on foot without crutches or two staves,” and had not found work.
⁸
It is likely that Rathburn, like so many others today (as evidenced by the independent-living movement of the late twentieth century) and in the past, preferred staying in his own home to life in an asylum. It is also likely, however, that Rathburn did not have significant say in the policy decisions of public poor-relief programs.

Rathburn was lucky not to end up institutionalized. Historian Karin Wulf found that in colonial Philadelphia, poor-relief officials were more likely to force men into institutions like an almshouse, but fund women in private homes. This even included paying others to care for them. “Crazy” Mary Charton, for example, could have been sent to an almshouse but instead lived in the home of Elizabeth Heany, who received two shillings and six pence a week to care for her. Wulf also found that in poor-relief applications, men were more likely to be described as having a permanent disability, such as blindness or paralysis, and their disability linked to their inability to work. Women tended to be described simply as poor, though we can assume that many were disabled. Indeed, as mariners, construction workers, horse drivers, and simply as people who spent more time on the streets, exposed to more risks, men had far greater opportunity to be seriously hurt in an industrial accident, and their disabilities became more public. With no form of workers’ compensation, such accidents generally ushered the entire family of an injured worker into poverty.
⁹

Prior to the Revolution, in the communities of European settlers, those like Coolidge and Otis, like Sara Shelton Henry and Elizabeth Jefferson, who were believed insane or idiots, were confined only if such was considered absolutely necessary. Those exhibiting madness were social irritants and annoying, but madness itself was typically not considered a dangerous threat to be isolated and ostracized at all costs—nor, as in the case of James Otis and Samuel Coolidge, did it keep one from being hired as a schoolteacher. As James Otis Sr. laid it out for his son, individuals could be held accountable for their own madness, but significant social shame did not come from it. As the famed religious leader Cotton Mather wrote regarding his wife in 1719, “I have lived for near a Year in a continual Anguish of Expectation, that my poor wife by exposing her Madness, would bring a Ruin on my ministry. But now it is exposed, my Reputation is marvelously preserved among the People of God.”
¹⁰

Indeed, significant evidence exists to suggest that unorthodox behaviors were simply part of everyday life. Unless violent, those considered insane were accepted in society. In Brampton, Massachusetts, residents went about their daily business despite the disruptive behavior of one Jack Downs. Downs regularly enjoyed plucking wigs off the heads of church worshippers with a string and a fishhook, and was well known for throwing rotten apples at the minister during the sermon. Bill Buck, of Hopkinton, lived in the town’s almshouse but was not confined there. Townsfolk apparently endured and even enjoyed the insulting speeches he gave residents, as well as the local cornfields, while he roamed the community.
¹¹