Examining the Effects of Disability on Citizenship in the Early United States, 1775-1840 - Project Summary/Abstract In the decades after the American Revolution, citizens imposed significant restrictions on physically and intellectually disabled people’s legal, political, and social rights. Increasingly towards the mid-nineteenth century, these restrictions were justified with medical theories and managed and implemented by physicians. As a result, disabled people—men and women, black and white, wealthy and poor, from across the nation—lost access to basic civil rights and privileges, including suffrage, marriage, property ownership, and independent living. At the same time, this project documents how disabled people challenged the exclusions they faced, claiming knowledge of the functioning of their bodies and minds as they fought for greater access and opportunity. Just as ableism has a long American history so too does disability rights activism as individuals used legal, political, institutional, and physical means to claim their status as equal citizens. This narrative of ableist exclusion, medical justification, and disability rights resistance has long been overlooked in accounts of our nation’s history. Scholars in the fields of early American history and the history of medicine have been slow to attend to disability and integrate findings from the discipline of disability studies into their work. Scholars in disability studies, meanwhile, have tended to focus on more recent historical periods. Academic oversight of early American disability history has also shaped popular national narratives. Museums, historical societies, and the media all rarely feature disabled people when they chronicle our nation’s founding period. Drawing on nearly a decade of primary source research in legal, medical, governmental, institutional, and genealogical records, this project centers disabled people to tell a more accurate and inclusive national story—crucial as our country nears its semiquincentennial anniversary in 2026. With publication (the manuscript is committed to a top academic press), this project seeks to accomplish three aims. First, it documents the structural ableism that defined our nation’s founding period. Second, it reveals how physicians rationalized ableist exclusions and implemented them in legal, political, institutional, and social settings. Third, the work chronicles the resilient individuals who challenged these restrictions as they worked to improve their lives, families, and communities. This history is crucial for a full and accurate understanding of our early American past as well as critical context as we confront and challenge ableism today.
