1840 Census “proved” Black disability—then rights suffered

1840 census – A new book by Northeastern University professor Sari Altschuler traces how disability was used to shape U.S. citizenship—especially through the federal census of 1840, when officials turned claims about Black Americans’ “body and mind” into a weapon against fr

For a long stretch of American history, the relationship between disability and citizenship didn’t sit quietly in the background. It was pulled to the center of national arguments over who counted as fully human—and who could be denied rights with a straight face.

Sari Altschuler. a Northeastern University professor who studies American literature and culture. argues in her new book. Before Disability. that disability helped shape U.S. citizenship—and that the formation of citizenship, in turn, reshaped what disability meant in America. The story begins long before modern disability civil rights movements. stretching to the American Revolution. whose “new ideas” promised some disabled white Americans a kind of inclusion that was largely unavailable to others.

In the decades after, Altschuler says, the idea that some people had inherent deficits became increasingly racially coded. That shift set up struggles over eugenics and full American citizenship—struggles that continue to this day.

The flashpoint is the federal census of 1840. Altschuler points to it as “the most infamous case,” where the census appeared to show that freedom disabled Black Americans. While disability-related categories had first appeared on the U.S. Census in 1830—partly to fund schools for Deaf students—the 1840 results were framed in ways that made the stakes feel immediate and absolute: Black Americans. in census descriptions. were portrayed as more deaf. insane. and cognitively impaired by “orders of magnitude” in the North than in the South.

Slavery’s advocates seized on those claims as proof that Black Americans were unprepared for the rights and responsibilities of freedom and citizenship. And they repeated the statistics “triumphantly,” turning a bureaucratic document into a moral argument.

But Altschuler also describes something more chilling: even at the time, many people knew the numbers were wrong. The census, she says, identified pockets of Deaf Black people in towns that had no Black people at all.

Politicians, physicians, and abolitionists cried foul—pointing to irregularities and falsehoods—but attempts to correct the official record ultimately failed. The official “bunk” became the kind of fact that could be recited to justify denying rights, regardless of how flimsy the foundation was.

The larger transformation, Altschuler argues, wasn’t just about one bad dataset. She says that after 1840, body and mind differences were increasingly understood as fixed, biological, and difficult to integrate. That framing helped disability become central evidence in national debates over race, slavery, and citizenship.

A major driver of the shift, she explains, was the collaboration between Southern medicine and slave law. As doctors gained a stronger role in courts as “objective observers. ” differences were treated less as results of environment. religious belief. divine visitation. or other flexible explanations—and more as something biologically locked in.

Another driver came from how white Americans with body-and-mind differences moved through institutions and practices meant to bring distinct groups into citizenship. Altschuler says those institutions created community for some people with disabilities. and instead of assimilating into white America. they began to identify and advocate in ways that separated them more sharply from the broader nation.

Deaf education is one example she returns to. She describes how Deaf education was successful enough at creating Deaf culture and community that it threatened those who wanted a more homogenous national community. Alexander Graham Bell. she notes. would later warn against sign language as a “foreign language. ” contributing to “the formation of a deaf variety of the human race in America.”.

Altschuler’s emphasis is that this turn toward biologized race and disability was not inevitable. The history could have gone differently—because it was made through specific historical developments rather than destiny.

That framing matters when Altschuler turns to how legal fights for inclusion were shaped by exclusion itself.

One figure she highlights is John Jacobus Flournoy, a Deaf graduate of the first school for Deaf Americans. In 1855, Flournoy declared that Deaf Americans could never be full citizens in any existing state. He pushed for a new state in the West called Gallaudet. which he described as the “manifest destiny of our people”—meaning. in Altschuler’s telling. “white. Deaf Americans.”.

Only in a state of their own, Flournoy argued, could Deaf Americans be full citizens. But no Black residents—whether enslaved or free—would be allowed.

Altschuler also describes a direct contradiction: Flournoy’s alma mater educated both white and Black students every year between 1825 and 1870. except for seven years when Connecticut banned Black students from out of state. Flournoy’s example, she says, shows that even within disability advocacy, there were sharp disagreements about who belonged.

The limits of activism, Altschuler argues, aren’t only a modern problem; they were built into parts of 18th- and 19th-century organizing too.

Veterans are a different category in her account—not because their disability stories were any less real. but because she describes the group as something the government imagined before it existed. Just one month after the Declaration of Independence, the Continental Congress passed a law providing pensions for disabled veterans. For Altschuler. that matters because if you expect people to enlist. you have to tell them you’ll take care of them afterward.

She also argues that veteran disability was symbolically central to citizenship. It represented patriotic sacrifice for the country.

But the story is not clean. Altschuler points to the 1818 Veteran Pension Act. which was framed as a way to celebrate and support citizens who had risked “body and mind for nation. ” especially aging. disabled. and poor Revolutionary War veterans. As costs ballooned to more than ten times the estimated expense, broad speculation followed about pensioner swindling.

And then, two decades later, when veterans receiving a pension first appeared on the federal Census in 1840, the purpose wasn’t celebration or expanded services. Altschuler says it was to root out fraud.

She also stresses a stark divide in who received benefits. The disabled veterans who received pensions were largely white men, and they were symbolically, demographically, and situationally different from the blind, Deaf, mad, and cognitively impaired Americans who received far fewer supports.

By the end of the book’s argument, Altschuler is trying to pull the reader back to a fact that’s easy to miss: in the early decades of U.S. nationhood, mental and physical differences were imagined as accommodable into citizenship, even if the promise never matched daily reality.

The year 1840 stands at the center of that unevenness. Altschuler describes it as revealing in two directions at once. On one hand. medicine and law were creating disability as a racialized. biological category—she points to that census as a clear example of the destructive shift. On the other hand. the civic capacities of disabled Americans had never been so central to public culture. so financially supported. and so broadly known.

She offers one striking example: in 1840, more blind Americans could read and write than ever before.

The thread running through all of it is the same: disability wasn’t just a label applied after the fact. It helped shape citizenship from the beginning. And battles over disability rights and justice were waged—sometimes with victories even when the future looked bleak.

Altschuler ends with a reminder that the history isn’t only about denial and exclusion. It’s also about organizing. insisting on belonging. and remembering that many disabled and non-disabled Americans before today did too—pushing back with the tools they had. even as the nation kept changing what “citizenship” was allowed to mean.

United States politics disability citizenship 14th Amendment 1840 census slavery eugenics Deaf education Alexander Graham Bell John Jacobus Flournoy disabled veterans Veteran Pension Act of 1818 Continental Congress Revolutionary War pensions civil war era