“To live without work”: How Two Deaf Brothers Reimagined Their Lives in Eighteenth-Century Connecticut
This woodcut of a rudimentary signed alphabet was published in the Philadelphia Magazine, January 1776. The anonymous article that accompanied it makes no mention of the potential uses for deaf or nonverbal people, despite the title referring to impairment. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library.
In May 1792, two men put down their tools. They did not intend to pick them up again. Peter and Squier Brown, brothers who together owned a “considerable Estate” in Stamford, Connecticut, informed their family that they intended to sell their land, live off the proceeds, and never work again. Their decision was sufficiently radical to cause frustration and concern among their family and the state authorities. However, permission to sell the land, unusually, resided with their brother, Joseph, and the General Assembly of Connecticut. Why was this? Joseph was the conservator to Peter and Squier, who had been “deaf and dumb from their birth.”
People in the 2020s may be unusually familiar with conservatorship. Britney Spears’ well-publicized conservatorship means the outline is well-known: a legal arrangement where a person is judged incapable of managing their own affairs, has their estate taken out of their control, and both are placed under the authority of a legal guardian. In its basic form, conservatorship has not changed since it first entered colonial statute books in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Historians of early American disability have devoted little attention to conservatorship. The records I have explored, from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, indicate conservatorship was used to ensure the productivity of land, rather than the care of individuals. Among these documents, the cases of two sets of deaf and nonverbal brothers particularly stood out to me. They show why historians should think creatively about disability in the eighteenth century, the potential pitfalls of “integration” within communities and workplaces for disabled people, and the revolutionary imagination of disabled people in the past.
In his petition requesting permission to purchase the estate, Peter and Squier’s brother Joseph explained that “his said Brethren have for a number of years laboured with him & supported themselves till within about one year last past when they considered themselves as having Estate sufficient to be Supported without Work & have from that time refused to do any labour & their lands must be in a great measure useless.” Peter and Squier’s estate was judged to be worth around £1200, making it one of the most valuable land sales found in New England’s conservatorship records.
This decision caused the General Assembly some anxiety. Why would two landowners, capable of work, sell their most important possession, their land? In 1749, another pair of deaf and nonverbal brothers, David and Isaac Smith, had arranged for their conservators to petition to sell some of their land too. But they had not refused to work, or suggested they would stop working after the land was sold. In their case, conservatorship was a protective measure to ensure that the brothers, who could only communicate with a small number of people who knew their “signs and motions,” were not misled or exploited. Otherwise, the Smith brothers were treated as productive landowners, in a unique conservatorship arrangement.
David and Isaac never had their cognitive capabilities questioned. Conversely, after Peter and Squier’s brother Jonathan explained that he could “convey ideas distinctly to my brothers,” the Assembly asked him to confirm that the brothers understood Joseph’s petition and basic concepts such as “the value of money” and “property.” Enos, another brother, and Seth, their brother-in-law, told the Assembly the sale would be “much to the advantage of said Peter & Squier as they refuse to improve their lands supposing they are rich enough already to live without work.” Their tone conveys no small amount of contempt: the refusal to work seems to have irritated the Brown clan, and Peter and Squier were treated skeptically for “supposing they are rich enough.” Despite their disabilities and the authority’s misgivings, Peter and Squier were recognized as mentally competent and allowed to sell their land.
Why did the General Assembly place Peter and Squier under a higher degree of scrutiny? Not out of concern that they were vulnerable to exploitation because only a few “certain Persons… have learned their Mode of conversation,” but because their actions did not fit the expected behavior of white male landowners in the early republic. Scholars of masculinity have shown that men in this time could “fail” to meet many expectations without denigration, but Peter and Squier went beyond what was acceptable, or even imaginable. Leasing or selling land and living off rent or a fixed sum was not unknown at the time, but was only done by those who could not work their land themselves, such as childless widows or the elderly. Their brother was gaining their land, but losing their labor, which Joseph desperately needed to make it useful. Laws against idleness, New England’s Protestant work ethic, and economic anxieties concerning “waste” land, were all factors that encouraged industry among the able-bodied, and dispossession of those who could not make the land productive.
Historians have argued that before institutions for disabled people were created in the nineteenth century; before the category of “disabled” was even formalized, people with impairments were integrated into their communities. Productivity, rather than variation from any physical or mental norm, was the basis upon which individuals were valued. Peter and Squier’s decision suggests, however, that people with impairments nonetheless felt their difference. That no one else imagined a different role for them in their community did not mean they did not imagine one for themselves. Peter and Squier evidently had keen imaginations; no cultural touchstones lay ready at hand to suggest ceasing their work, or “retiring early” as we might say today.
The brothers’ decision subtly indicates how integration within the community, generally thought of positively, may have failed. What did integration offer them? The expectation to perform back-breaking agricultural labor, with no recognition of their unique situation. Excluded from the usual “bargain” of white manhood, which demanded service as laborers, leaders, and soldiers in return for authority, respect, and autonomy, Peter and Squier instead wanted to strike a new one. They were offered “Employment First,” with not much second. Peter and Squier looked at the expectations and opportunities they were presented with, and decided to forge their own path.
As historians of early American disability, we should explore the experiences of disabled people on their own terms, without glancing towards the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Assuming that integration must have been positive, when compared with the horrors of institutionalization, is ahistorical and prevents us from appreciating the subtle and unique experiences of people with impairments before institutionalization. At a time when the number of disabled Americans living within their communities and with their families is rising, it is worth reflecting on the opportunities and challenges faced by early Americans who also lived this way. Though contemporaries thought Peter and Squier to be foolish, and perhaps we might even think them to be ambitiously utopian, what they imagined for themselves was what all people desire: liberty.
Further Reading
Cornelia Hughes Dayton, “‘The Oddest Man that I Ever Saw’: Assessing Cognitive Disability on Eighteenth-Century Cape Cod,” Journal of Social History (49:1, 2015).
Carl I. Hammer, “‘Being Old and Dayly Finding the Symptoms of Mortality’: The Troubled Last Years of Hannah Beamon of Deerfield and the Law of 1726,” Early American Studies (17:2, 2019).
Meg Roberts “Inspiration Porn and Depictions of Impairment in Early America,” Public Disability History (6, 2021).
John Gilbert McCurdy, “‘Your Affectionate Brother’: Complementary Manhoods in the Letters of John and Timothy Pickering,” Early American Studies, (4:2, 2006).
Wulfstan Scouller is a PhD student at Yale University. He studies early American history, with a focus on conservatorships, disability, and social history. He is from Monmouth, Wales.
This article is part of a series on Disability Justice in Early America.