The Revolution
Disability was a common experience in colonial Virginia. People were born with physical, sensory, intellectual, and psychological impairments, while others acquired disabilities over the course of their lives, with aging-related disability common. Historians have also demonstrated the disabling consequences of colonialism, slavery, environmental degradation, and economic inequality, all of which characterized Virginia. Virginia was a diverse place that included Indigenous peoples, native-born white people of European descent, free and enslaved African and African-descended people, recent immigrants from Europe, and British soldiers and their families, among other groups. Many of these people became disabled at some point or encountered family and community members with disabilities.
The outbreak of hostilities between the American colonies and Great Britain in 1775 led to even more disability in Virginia and across the colonies. British and American soldiers were wounded at the Battle of Great Bridge, one of the first American victories of the Revolutionary War. Among those injured were enslaved men who heeded John Murray, fourth earl of Dunmore’s proclamation and fled their Patriot enslavers to fight for the British in exchange for the promise of freedom. Many Black men in Dunmore’s regiment, however, died or became disabled by disease, especially smallpox, which often resulted in blindness and scarring.
To support the war effort, Virginia troops traveled to northern and then southern colonies, where they faced disabling injuries. These men included Benjamin Kendrick of Culpeper County, who was wounded in the hip at Brandywine Creek in Pennsylvania in 1777, and Richard Marshall of Albemarle County, who was rendered “helpless” at the Battle of Hobkirk Hill in South Carolina in 1781. Other men fought and became injured at home in Virginia, including in the raids on Richmond and at the Battle of Yorktown.
Wartime disability strained care networks within military and civilian communities. Military hospitals often reported shortages of medicines, supplies, and labor. Although the Continental Congress created a Hospital Department in 1775, lack of a clear chain of command between the department and regiments resulted in logistical problems that frustrated the provision of care. Doctors also reported strikes among nurses who had not received pay for months. As a consequence of these challenges, many servicemen returned to their homes for care, placing pressure on their families and communities. In European, Indigenous, and enslaved communities, women performed the bulk of the nursing: wrapping bandages, applying poultices, and dosing medicines. After the Cherokee, who were allied with the British, clashed with Virginia troops at Boyd’s Creek in 1780, for instance, wounded Indigenous men would have received medicinal care from Cherokee healers and supportive care from women family and community members. European American women cared for their sons, husbands, and neighbors with therapies gleaned from older generations as well as printed medical manuals. Enslaved women performed both voluntary and coerced nursing as they tended to their biological and chosen kin as well as their enslavers.
The proliferation of disability during the Revolutionary War prompted the new United States to develop a system of compensation for injured veterans. In 1776, the Continental Congress authorized the dispensation of “invalid” pensions at half-pay to soldiers who lost a limb or otherwise became “disabled” and consequently were incapable of serving in the military or “afterwards of getting their livelihood.” At the time of the act’s passage, however, Congress had little authority and could only encourage states to adopt the pension scheme. Virginia legislators chose to issue pensions more liberally, passing several laws between 1777 and 1785 awarding disabled veterans full pay after discharge. Nevertheless, most pension allotments did not cover veterans’ health care and living costs. Black, Indigenous, and impoverished men generally had a harder time accessing support. Judges often rejected veterans of color, perceiving them as less deserving than white men. Judges also tended to award higher allotments to disabled tradesmen than to day laborers, believing that more generalized occupations required a less specialized skill set and less bodily ability, which hurt the pension applications of the most marginalized.
In 1792, the U.S. Congress passed a law allowing disabled veterans who had served in the Continental Line who were not receiving state pensions to apply to the federal government for a pension, which did not exceed $5 per month. The Federal Pension Act of 1806 provided pensions to all disabled veterans who had served in the Continental Line, as well as to those who served in state militias who previously had been excluded.
A New Nation
After the war, questions arose about how the new United States would be governed and who would be included as citizens. Republicanism, which derives its power from the people rather than from a supreme authority, was radical and attractive but also potentially dangerous. Political leaders and everyday people debated which kinds of people could be entrusted with national governance. Who was fit to hold public office or vote in an election, and who should be excluded from such duties or privileges? As legal scholar Barbara Young Welke has argued, “From the outset, personhood, citizenship, and nation were imagined in abled, racialized, and gendered terms: able white men alone were fully embodied legal persons, they were America’s ‘first citizens,’ they were the nation.” Along with race, gender, class, age, and legal status, disability determined people’s access to citizenship and its associated rights. In Virginia and across the nation, disability rationalized exclusions from privileges and obligations as varied and significant as voting, marriage, property ownership, court testimony, and independent living.
Although disability-based restrictions on voting dated back to the colonial era, Virginia statesmen formally excluded electors of “unsound mind” from suffrage in the Constitution of 1830. This exclusion based on disability prompted little discussion or controversy among delegates at the 1829–1830 state Constitutional Convention. As convention chair James Monroe declared, “We all agree to exclude the other sex—We all concur in excluding infants, those under military bondage in actual service—those rendered infamous by their crimes, and those of unsound mind. Who then are they whom we all agree to be fit and capable depositories of power? They are males of twenty-one years of age and upwards—of sound mind, not infamous, not subject to another man’s will—that is, freemen.” As a result of this decision, white propertied men deemed by county clerks to be intellectually impaired or who were under guardianship because of such a condition lost access to the vote.
While legal restrictions based on disability often affected elite Virginians since only propertied white men could vote, disability-based strictures could also affect marginalized people. In 1782, as Revolutionary rhetoric and religious revivals spurred a wave of manumissions in the Upper South, Virginia legislators discouraged the manumission of enslaved people deemed not “sound in mind and body” lest they became a “public charge.” At the signing of manumission deeds, court clerks were required to record enslaved people’s corporeal abilities, affirming that each person was “sound.” To discourage the manumission of those with impairments, Virginia also required enslavers to support their formerly enslaved persons who became disabled after obtaining freedom. After enduring years of physical and mental brutality and a system that privileged labor over health, enslaved people sometimes found that their disabilities precluded their emancipation.
Evolving Systems of Care
With the disestablishment of the Church of England following the Revolution, the provision of social services to poor people, including disabled people unable to work, moved from parish vestries to county overseers of the poor, making some care of disabled patients a government responsibility. Some counties created almshouses or workhouses to centralize care for the poor, where harsh, spartan conditions were supposed to incentivize work for the able-bodied. A list of residents of the Prince William County Poorhouse, which opened in 1794, however, demonstrates that most residents were elderly and/or disabled. Of the seven adult residents, three were elderly and deaf or blind, one was deaf and blind, one was “very infirm,” and one was categorized as “an insane women.”
At about the same time, a system of asylum internment for people with mental disabilities was created to house people who were unable to care for themselves or were perceived as a danger to society. In 1770, the colonial legislature established the Public Hospital for Persons of Insane and Disordered Minds in Williamsburg. This was the first public institution for people deemed mentally impaired in the British colonies that would become the United States. Magistrates were authorized in consultation with sheriffs to institutionalize any person, white or Black, “supposed to be disordered in his or her senses” following an investigation into their condition. Family members and friends also could recommend an individual’s placement in an asylum without a formal evaluation.
By 1799, all twenty-four of the public hospital’s patient cells were occupied. The General Assembly appropriated funding to expand the hospital throughout the early nineteenth century, and by 1841, the hospital housed 125 patients. A second mental health facility, the Western State Lunatic Asylum in Staunton, opened in 1828. Both facilities had primitive conditions by modern standards, including the use of leg irons, chains, straight jackets, and other restraints, and provided harsh treatments that were largely ineffective, such as purgatives, laxatives, and blistering agents. Yet at the time, the facility was seen as an advance in care for mentally disabled persons who would otherwise be left unhoused or prone to commit violence in the community.
The Public Hospital for Persons of Insane and Disordered Minds admitted Black patients, but the institution also owned as many as forty-five enslaved people who performed much of the labor needed to sustain the asylum.
Disability and Slavery
Disability structured life under slavery on Virginia plantations. Enslavers organized labor via the “hand” system, which differentiated enslaved people based on physical and intellectual ability in an attempt to extract maximum work and profit from each person. While “full hands” completed the most strenuous field labor, “three-quarter,” “half,” and “quarter hands” were assigned to perform supposedly less arduous tasks such as gardening and cooking. Enslaved people described as “useless” and “invalid” often did not receive specific hand ratings but performed essential work such as child care.
Enslavers also bought and sold people using the language of soundness to describe their corporeal capacities. Bills of sale described men and women as “sound, healthy, and clear of disease,” while “unsoundness” that occurred because of physical, sensory, intellectual, or psychological impairments that would impede work lessened the value of enslaved people. In 1808, William Sale of Caroline County tried and failed to return about twenty-five enslaved people he had purchased from Mungo Roy because, Sale argued, they were “diseased.”
The experience of slavery was physically and intellectually disabling. Enslavers kept their chattel in deleterious living conditions, restricted their movement, and required intense labor, all of which caused disabilities. Malnutrition led to diseases such as scurvy, which caused anemia and weakness, and rickets, which caused bone deformities and stunted growth. Some enslaved people were disabled in accidents or from harsh punishments that ranged from savage whippings to deliberate amputations. The Virginia slave code of 1792 authorized disabling punishments, including amputation, for enslaved people who gave “false testimony,” traveled without a pass, or acted violently toward white people, among other crimes. In addition, nearly all enslaved people’s bodies wore down over time as a result of exposure, unceasing labor, and violence.
At the same time that slavery was uniquely debilitating, proslavery theorists proclaimed the advantages of slavery for disabled enslaved people, arguing that benevolent enslavers provided for aged and infirm enslaved people in a way that the employers of free people did not. But this claim was belied by the fact that many Virginia communities took measures to ensure that enslavers did not dump disabled enslaved people in public workhouses and other places where they would become a public charge.
Some enslaved people also used the experience or representation of disability to contest their bondage. Some enslaved people feigned disability or attempted to pass as disabled to avoid or reduce labor. Others engaged in self-sabotage: injuring a hand or a foot or otherwise making oneself less valuable at market was sometimes a way to delay or avoid a sale. In fact, because disabled enslaved people had lower economic value, they often remained on plantations while others were bought and sold, becoming crucial sources of cultural continuity and local knowledge, sharing information about which overseers to avoid, how to acquire extra food or supplies, and even how to escape. Indeed, many enslaved people held their disabled counterparts in high esteem, looking to them for social, medical, and spiritual guidance. Compared to European American cultures, which generally marginalized and stigmatized disabled people, West African cultures valorized people with certain disabilities, such as albinism and vision impairments, leading them to assume important positions in enslaved communities as healers, guides, and conjurers.
Resistance
Slavery, institutionalization, and legal and political exclusions based on disability ensured that ableism (discrimination against and prejudice regarding disabled people) characterized post-Revolutionary Virginia. Yet as the resistance of disabled enslaved people suggests, the language, ideology, and circumstances of the Revolution also created opportunities for opposition. Vincent Brown and other scholars of slavery have argued that resistance can be assumed in all cases of unequal power relations or when people are denied resources and liberty, including those excluded, confined, or marginalized because of disability. Individuals barred from suffrage because of mental incapacity, for example, demanded their right to vote, while disabled enslaved people who were promised manumission by their enslavers but were rejected by county courts at times sued for freedom. Ableism may have intensified in the new republic, but so too did disabled people’s resistance.
Williamsburg’s Public Hospital
People confined in asylums challenged the authority and control of institution superintendents and staff. Late eighteenth-century financial records of the Public Hospital for Persons of Insane and Disordered Minds include the costs of repairing locks, window stays, and leg irons and chains, suggesting that some inmates damaged or destroyed these restraints. A 1786 hospital report noted that a patient had escaped and had not yet been retrieved. Other people resisted in subtler ways. In 1859, one patient wrote that she had questioned the staff about the selection of food, asking why they only had bacon or beef at dinner. She noted that she had been told it was because the doctor thought that his charges were “so liable” to diarrhea that “he did not like them to eat vegetables.” In both slight and significant ways, confined people resisted the terms of their incarceration.
