A Disability History of the United States Read Online Free

then townspeople considered him troublesome enough to lock him in the schoolhouse at night but harmless and lucid enough to teach their children. Townspeople expected him to use the skills he had—in his case, an education—to support himself by teaching, and indeed forced him to do so.
    Like Coolidge, revolutionary thinker and hero James Otis Jr. (credited with the phrase “taxation without representation is tyranny”), also of Massachusetts, was believed to have developed insanity, but his prior political leadership, and his family’s money and stability, meant that he experienced a less traumatic community response. From childhood on, Otis’s behavior included actions that others considered unpredictable and incomprehensible. In late 1769, a British tax collector attacked Otis and Otis suffered a significant head wound. After the attack he became, others believed, even less lucid, more violent, and less predictable.
    By January 1770, Otis’s longtime friend and comrade, future United States president John Adams, wrote, “Otis is in confusion yet. He looses himself. He rambles and wanders like a Ship without an Helm . . . I never saw such an Object of Admiration, Reverence, Contempt and Compassion all at once as this. I fear, I tremble, I mourn for the Man, and for his Country. Many others mourne over him with Tears in their Eyes.” Otis’s language, Adams said, was full of “Trash, Obsceneness, Profaneness, Nonsense and Distraction.” That March, Otis’s behavior included what friends termed “mad freaks”: he broke windows and fired guns on the Sabbath. 3
    The response of Otis’s family was to remove him to their country home in Barnstable. In 1771 the family successfully had Otis declared incompetent, which meant that others had control of his legal and financial affairs. Ultimately the family at Barnstable (in all practical matters, probably the family’s servants or slaves) could not cope with Otis’s occasional violence. It was not unheard of for respectable men to earn money by housing and caring for those considered insane at their rural homes, and until his death in 1783 Otis generally lived in the care of such men: a Mr. Osgood in Andover and a Captain Daniel Suther of Hull. In Hull, Otis even taught school for a period—just as Samuel Coolidge had done. 4
    While Otis was still at the family home of Barnstable, Otis’s father, James Otis Sr., wrote him a classic letter of parental admonishment. In it the older man not only revealed himself to be an expert in fatherly manipulation but disclosed his beliefs about insanity. Otis’s condition, he implied, came because his son succumbed to inner weaknesses that could be shunned by exercising a stronger will and self-control. “Loeving Son,” he wrote, “what a dreadful example you are.” He insisted that if Otis would only “reform your manners [and] curb that unruly passion which you indulge too much,” and pray sincerely to God, all could be well. If Otis would simply “seek to him [God]
sincerely and heartily
for his Grace” a “Reformation of Life and Manners” would result. Considering the “pains and costs I have been at to educate my first born,” the father went on, and considering all of the “good prayers you have been the subject of and especially from your good Mother now in
Heaven,
” Otis needed to “sett down and seriously consider the way you are now in.” Otis Sr. signed the letter, “Afflicted Father.” 5
    Otis’s colleague and fellow patriot Patrick Henry also lived with psychological disability, but that of his wife. After the 1771 birth of her sixth and last child, Sarah Shelton Henry’s behavior became so unmanageable to her family that “she was confined in a cellar room, bound in a straitjacket, and attended by a servant [slave].” (Family memoirs called it “one of the airy, sunny rooms in the half basement” of Scotchtown, the Henry estate in Hanover County, Virginia.) Her family and friends believed