Read Online A Disability History of the United States by Kim E. Nielsen - Free Book Online

slaves who crossed Union lines, but only in exchange for performing often grueling manual labor. While other former slaves eagerly moved away from the land of their former owners, equating mobility with freedom, some of the newly freed literally could not do so. If a physical disability resulted in limited mobility, living out freedom became very difficult. A postwar 1867 report to the Union secretary of war Edward Stanton noted that many “helpless” former slaves remained working on the plantations of their former owners—simply unable to leave, and working for food. “Scores of disabled slaves,” in Downs’s words, “remained enslaved.” Hannah, of the Natchez district of Mississippi, for example, may have been emancipated, but the blind woman had no family to rely on. She remained in Natchez, unable to leave her former owner’s home, and continued to work for him. 21
    For Hannah, the material realities of disability, racism, social isolation, and a federal government that did not move to defend her, were tragic. Equally tragic were the lives of formerly enslaved individuals supposedly made insane by freedom. Such analysis on the part of experts makes clear that social attitudes and power dynamics influenced definitions of insanity and appropriate behavior in the nineteenth century. It also should make us seriously question the means by which people were committed to insane hospitals as well as educational institutions, and the populations of people both interred and not interred—such as Hannah.
EDUCATING THE APPROPRIATE CITIZENRY APPROPRIATELY
    In 1873 Edward H. Clarke, a prominent professor at Harvard Medical School, warned the country of an issue that he felt should “excite the
gravest alarm,
and . . . demand the serious attention of the country”: an important group of people had been “permanently disabled to a greater or lesser degree, or fatally injured, by these causes”: respectable white women. A higher education, he warned, could and had “permanently disabled” such women. He gave the example of “Miss G,” a fine young woman who had done well in college and her post-college life—but then died not long afterward, an autopsy showing no disease other than “commencing degeneration” of the brain. No woman, he warned, could simultaneously use “a good brain” and “a good reproductive system that should serve the race.” It was simply too much for the female body. 22
    By the 1870s the common school movement, which sought to establish tax-funded public schools, had greatly expanded educational opportunities across the United States. Its proponents argued that a successful democracy required an educated citizenry. While schooling was still limited by race, gender, and class, more Americans had access to basic literacy than ever before. By the 1870s, women (generally white women) increasingly taught in the public schools. While educational reformer Catharine Beecher had argued that women were uniquely suited for educating children due to their innate maternal qualities, female teachers, conveniently, could also be paid less than male teachers. As educational opportunities expanded, a small but growing number of colleges and universities began to welcome white women and African Americans, both male and female (such as the disabled Civil War veteran Thomas Perrine), into their classrooms and libraries.
    When Agatha Tiegel (1873–1959) graduated from DC’s National Deaf-Mute College in 1893 (renamed Gallaudet College in 1894), the young white woman engaged in direct conversation with Edward Clarke—as well as many others closer to home. In 1887, the institution that was to become Gallaudet, the premier educational institution for deaf Americans, had allowed female students to enroll as a two-year experiment. While a seven-year-old growing up in Pittsburgh, Tiegel had become deaf, and blind in one eye, due to spinal meningitis. She first attended public schools, then Western Pennsylvania