By Daniel Worthington
On March 15, 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed legislation granting $4,400 for salaries and incidentals and $9,000 for buildings to the Columbia Institution for the Instruction of the Deaf and Dumb and the Blind, a grammar school for children in the District of Columbia chartered by Congress. Two years later, on April 8, 1864, Lincoln signed a law letting the Columbia Institution confer college degrees.
Today, the institution is known as Gallaudet University, a world leader in educating the deaf and hard of hearing, and it celebrates April 8 as charter day because of Lincoln’s action.
Rose Cottage, the first building at what would become Gallaudet University, and Lincoln's signature on legislation for the school. (Historical Marker Database and National Archives)
With the Civil War raging and the presidential election of 1864 only a few short months away, why did Congress and Lincoln devote time to this small institution? Lincoln left no written record of his reasons, but his own experience in frontier Illinois and the social, cultural, and religious context of antebellum America may have influenced his decision.
Lincoln exhibited an affinity for people with disabilities from early adulthood. On February 9, 1833, just days before he turned 24, Lincoln wrote and signed a petition of citizens asking the County Court of Sangamon County to consider assisting Zery Elmore, who could not earn a living and was indigent because of psychiatric disability. In 1819 and 1827, the Illinois General Assembly had enacted legislation authorizing county commissioners’ courts to cover the expenses of people who were indigent “in consequence of any bodily infirmity, or other unavoidable cause.” On March 1, 1833 , the General Assembly extended the law’s coverage to those suffering from “idiocy” and “lunacy.” After the petition, county officials ordered that Elmore receive $32 per year for his support. Three years later, Lincoln wrote and signed another petition of citizens of Sangamon County requesting that the court increase the annual stipend for Elmore, but the court declined.
Lincoln’s unsuccessful petition to increase the “much too small”
level of support for “an absolute madman.” (ALPLM)
Lincoln’s concern for the disabled continued during his career in the Illinois House of Representatives.
In January 1839, the Illinois General Assembly began deliberations on a bill to establish a school for the deaf and mute. This was the brainchild of Orville H. Browning, a state senator from Quincy, Illinois, who conceived the idea after meeting an educated deaf-mute gentleman from Kentucky while making a journey on a steamboat down the Mississippi River.
Browning introduced his bill on January 2, 1839, and the Illinois Senate passed it on January 13. The Illinois House of Representatives concurred on February 13, Lincoln being among a large majority of fifty-nine representatives voting for the bill. Chartered as the Illinois Asylum for the Education of the Deaf and Dumb, the institution devoted itself to promoting the intellectual, moral, and physical culture of the hard of hearing and those unable to speak. It became the first charitable institution chartered by the State of Illinois.
Orville Browning and what is now the Illinois School for the Deaf, as it appeared in 1846. (Library of Congress and "Touring Historic Jacksonville," 1927)
Schools and other charitable institutions for people with disabilities reflected a revolutionary change in the way Americans, particularly Protestants in New England and the Midwest, perceived and responded to disability. Prior to the nineteenth century, Americans imbued in the pessimistic worldview of Calvinism viewed disability as evidence of sinfulness, divine punishment, or moral testing. From this perspective, the individual alone was responsible for his or her disability; they were shunned and received only what care their families could afford, with little societal empathy, sympathy, or support.
That began to change after 1800. Viewing life through the lens of the Second Great Awakening, Americans shifted to a more optimistic Protestantism that foresaw the perfection of society and spurred on movements for abolition, temperance, women’s rights, and prison, workplace, and educational reform. Reform-minded Americans saw disability not as evidence of an angry God’s displeasure and the disabled as irredeemable sinners to be shunned, but as an opportunity to redeem the disabled and bring them into the kingdom of God.
Though not an adherent to any Protestant denomination, Lincoln shared in the optimistic view of the potential for people with disabilities. In 1846, Lincoln composed a poem bemoaning the fate of Matthew Gentry, a boy with whom Lincoln attended school, who at age nineteen had a psychiatric episode that left him, in Lincoln’s words, “harmless insane.” Gentry remained in that condition when Lincoln visited his old schoolhouse in the fall of 1844, and Gentry’s wretched condition made a profound impression on Lincoln.
An excerpt from Lincoln’s poem "My Childhood-Home I See Again." (ALPLM)
Lincoln carried his concern for the disabled into his career in the U.S. House of Representatives. In February 1849, Lincoln presented a petition of citizens of Woodford County, Illinois, requesting a grant of 160 acres of public land for Conrad Summers, a native of Germany and naturalized citizen who had been blind for many years and had supported himself by playing his harp around the country with the help of his generous sister. His sister had left him, leaving him destitute.
Lincoln not only presented this petition to the House but also endorsed that he knew Summers, affirming that he was blind, and that the petition was factual. The House referred the petition to the Committee on Public Lands, but the committee apparently took no action.
Lincoln’s endorsement of a petition to aid Conrad Summers. (ALPLM)
This was the fate of most requests for government assistance; Democrats in Congress did not share Whig affinity for the disabled, and the Democratic majority either tabled or rejected petitions requesting land grants for people with disabilities. Democrats also took no action on a bill introduced by John H. Crozier, a Whig representative from Tennessee, to promote the education of the indigent hard of hearing and those unable to speak.
In the years to come, Lincoln and the nation would face far more questions about how to assist people with disabilities. The Civil War would offer unprecedented challenges, as we'll discuss next week in part two of this post.
Worthington is director of the ALPLM’s Papers of Abraham Lincoln project.