By Daniel Worthington
As president, Lincoln met or corresponded with several people with disabilities. Long interested in geology and the history of the earth, Lincoln met Fielding B. Meek, a deaf man and prominent expert on fossils who lived at the Smithsonian Institution. Meek corresponded with Amos H. Worthen, chief geologist of Illinois and an acquaintance of Lincoln. Deaf and hard of hearing people were among those who petitioned Lincoln to enact the Emancipation Proclamation.
(For information on Lincoln and disabilities before his presidency, click here.)
In August 1864, Laura C. Redden, a deaf war correspondent, poet, and author known by the pen-name Howard Glyndon, wrote Lincoln asking for his assistance in getting her brother a promotion in the Second Auditor’s Office. Lincoln acceded to the request and glanced over the page proofs of Redden’s book, Idyls of Battle and Poems of the Rebellion. He found her poems “all patriotic, and some very pretty.” Redden thanked Lincoln for the endorsement and expressed her wish that Ulysses S. Grant, not Andrew Johnson, had been Lincoln’s choice for a running mate in 1864.
Fielding B. Meek and Lauren C. Redden
Lincoln also encountered thousands of soldiers and sailors disabled in combat. The destructive weapons employed by both sides left thousands of men without limbs. Some lost their sight, others their hearing. Still others suffered post-traumatic stress disorder. Disabled veterans mustered out of the military found it difficult to adjust to civilian life, and their economic prospects were limited.
The Civil War, with its immense casualties, challenged the worldview of those who still clung to the belief that disability was a consequence of moral turpitude or personal failing. A large population of injured and maimed individuals, disabled not because of a lack of moral or spiritual worth but by service to the nation, forced American society to reevaluate its perception of the disabled. Realizing that disability could be a consequence of war service, Americans embraced the idea that disabled veterans deserved support and recognition.
Three of the tens of thousands of men left disabled by the Civil War.
Efforts to mitigate the physical, psychological, mental, and economic consequences of combat for the wounded and maimed began soon after the commencement of hostilities.
In June 1861, the War Department and President Lincoln authorized creation of the Sanitary Commission, a private agency created to assist sick and wounded soldiers. Members of the Sanitary Commission traveled to Europe to research how best to care for disabled soldiers and sailors. The commission sponsored sanitary fairs to raise funds for the support and provision of Union soldiers and sailors. President Lincoln supported these fund-raising initiatives, sending the original draft of the Emancipation Proclamation to the Chicago Sanitary Commission in 1863 for use at the Northwestern Sanitary Fair.
In April 1863, the War Department created the Veteran Reserve Corps (Invalid Corps) to allow partially disabled soldiers to perform light duty, freeing non-disabled soldiers for serve at the front and giving the disabled veterans an opportunity to both complete their terms of service and receive an income.
A hand-painted photo of two members of the Veteran Reserve Corps
in their distinctive sky-blue uniforms. (Library of Congress)
Philanthropic organizations and government initiatives encouraged the employment of disabled veterans. Relief agencies raised money to provide prosthetic devices to those who had lost limbs and to fund employment training programs. President Lincoln authorized his department secretaries to give jobs to relatives of disabled veterans and to disabled veterans themselves to mitigate the economic consequences of injury. States and the federal government constructed hospitals and homes to care for the infirm, injured, and disabled.
The apex of government initiatives to meet the needs of disabled veterans was the General Pension Act, which created a system for the disabled and their relatives to receive pensions for their war service. Enacted by Congress in July 1862 and extended in 1864, this pension law was the basis for military pension benefits until World War I.
Dorothea Dix, Samuel Gridley Howe, and other reformers volunteered for the Sanitary Commission and other relief agencies, bringing their optimistic notions of disability with them. Although appalled by the sheer number of maimed and crippled, some were confident that American technology and know-how would replace the limbs lost in combat with prosthetics, rendering moot the physical disability brought on by war.
Others believed that suffering veterans offered non-disabled citizens an opportunity to assist those who had sacrificed their mental and psychological health for the nation, proving their moral character and moving the country further on the road to the kingdom of God.
The physical and psychological costs of the Civil War increased awareness of disability and services for disabled veterans, but the war and its aftermath ultimately shattered antebellum notions of disability. The vast scale of problems created by the war simply overwhelmed religious and moral conceptions of disability and the capacity of Christian benevolent institutions to meet the needs of the disabled.
In the postwar years, disability became a national political issue. Many believed that Union disabled veterans deserved the gratitude of the nation for their sacrifice and that veterans with visible and invisible disabilities should be offered greater access to benefits and services. The Republican Party, the Grand Army of the Republic, and other organizations lobbied for increased pensions, hospitals, and homes, but opponents, especially Democrats, labelled increased services as socialism .
The large number of disabled individuals in the postwar years engendered indifference, fear, and revulsion in some Americans. Viewing life through the lens of Social Darwinism and laissez-faire economics, some viewed disabled veterans as a social, economic, and even biological burden for society. This perception extended to non-combatants suffering from sensory, cognitive, and psychiatric disabilities. Fear led some to see the disabled as a threat to the nation.
Editorial cartoons portraying disabled veterans as
shocking to women and a source of corruption.
Antebellum optimism about the potential for the disabilities encouraged inclusion, but postwar fear and the supposed threat posed by the disabled engendered exclusion.
Medical and rehabilitation models of disability and large institutions replaced the benevolent, localized model preferred by the antebellum reformers. Emphasis on medical and rehabilitation models in large institutions limited the disabled people’s agency and control of their treatment.
A case in point was soldiers’ homes. The Sanitary Commission had recommended placing disabled soldiers and sailors in homes throughout local communities, where they could be cared for by families and slowly reintegrated into civilian life. Instead, they were housed in large, impersonal homes with thousands of residents and little connection to society. Abuse of alcohol was rife in these institutions, which became a national scandal. Poverty, depression, and other maladies plagued many disabled veterans living in soldiers’ homes, many of whom, institutionalized away from family, succumbed to their wounds in the immediate postwar period.
A building at a soldiers home in Danville, Ill., and the grounds of a home in Quincy, Ill.
The public began to stereotype disabled veterans as drunkards, malingerers, and layabouts. Non-disabled veterans questioned the manhood of those unable to work or contribute to society. In a society increasingly driven by capitalism, imperialism, profit, and conspicuous consumption, the disabled veteran and the disabled in general seemed at best out of place and at worst an impediment to America’s national destiny.
Despite the negative perceptions of the disabled and harmful consequences of new conceptions of disability in the postwar years, the Civil War highlighted the complexity of disability in the United States and led to a more nuanced understanding of the disabled. Philanthropic and government programs to assist disabled veterans proved inadequate, but President Lincoln and others laid the groundwork for expanded services and benefits in the twentieth century.
The legacy of the antebellum reformers, the travails of Civil War disabled veterans, and Lincoln’s fledgling initiatives to support the disabled inspired later disability rights movements, leading to the American with Disabilities Act in 1990.
As discussed in part one of this post, President Lincoln signed two pieces of legislation that benefited the school that would become Gallaudet University, a leader in education of the deaf and hearing impaired. The school's president, Edward M. Gallaudet, invited President Lincoln to the school's inauguration, saying it was only appropriate that the “Chief-Magistrate of a nation so devoted to the elevation of the human race,” should give his “personal benediction” to an institution “whose influence will be felt for good not only in our own land but in every civilized nation.”
Busy with official duties and “slightly indisposed” on the day of the inauguration, President Lincoln did not attend the festivities, but undoubtedly shared Gallaudet’s optimism for the future.
Worthington is director of the ALPLM’s Papers of Abraham Lincoln project.