A Disability History of the United States by Kim E. Nielsen Read Free Book Online

comparison, achieved significant professional success. The grandchild of slaves, born free in Massillon, Ohio, he had, in his words, “experienced all the disadvantages peculiar to my proscribed race. Being born to labor, I was not permitted to enjoy the blessings of a common school education.” He and four siblings helped his parents to farm. He had been “very eager to become a soldier, in order to prove by my feeble efforts the black man rights to untrammeled manhood.” At first denied a chance to serve, he joined Company I of the Fifth US Colored Troops immediately upon its creation in June 1863. In September 1864, he lost his arm due to a battle wound, and for his valor under fire he earned the Congressional Medal of Honor. After the war he returned to Ohio, and despite his lack of formal schooling he entered Oberlin College, trained as an attorney, and was admitted to the Ohio bar in 1879. At some point during this time he married, had a daughter, and raised her as well as a niece. The disabled veteran was the first African American attorney in his hometown of Massillon. 5 Labor based on intellectual work rather than physical work, made possible by access to one of the few racially integrated institutions of higher education at the time, and undoubtedly by his own personal skills, served Pinn well.
    Attempting to solve the employment needs of disabled veterans, while also resolving staffing problems in the federal government and Union military, in 1863 President Lincoln and the War Department had established the Invalid Corps. Eventually including nearly twenty thousand men scattered across the country, the Invalid Corps was designed to release able-bodied men for fighting while using disabled veterans for other labor. The disabled soldiers guarded military prisoners, protected warehouses and railways, squelched antiwar uprisings in both Vermont and Pennsylvania, and enforced the unpopular draft in the face of fierce opposition, including during a series of draft riots in New York City in 1863. Nearly every man in the Invalid Corps, despite the unit’s original intentions, encountered violence while in its service.
    Charles Johnson, whose wartime injuries, as he’d written to his wife, Mary, had left him sexually “played out,” led Invalid Corps troops in major combat with Confederate forces in June 1864 when Confederate general Wade Hampton attempted to raid Union supplies stockpiled at White House Landing, in Virginia. In the midst of battle, Colonel Johnson’s commander sought reassurance from Johnson that his men would not retreat: “Will your invalids stand?” the general asked via a messenger. “Tell the general,” Johnson replied with deadpan humor, “that my men are cripples, and they can’t run.” His troops’ successes delighted Johnson—especially as their success ran counter to stereotypes about disability. Military officials, he wrote to his wife, “appear to be tickled at the idea that 2000 men
under an ‘Invalid’
should repulse between 5 and 6000 picked troops under such leaders as [General Wade] Hampton and [General] Fitz Hugh Lee.” 6
    Despite Johnson’s pleasure at his troop’s performance, the Invalid Corps and its members were frequently ridiculed as cowardly slackers who habitually tried to avoid service. It did not help that “IC” was also the military designation for “Inspected, Condemned”—a label applied to rotten meat, faulty rifles, and rotting ammunition. Their detractors called them the “Condemned Yanks,” the “Inspecteds,” as well as the “Cripple Brigade.” 7 In the Invalid Corps, in pension programs, and on the streets, people with disabilities, even when disabled as a result of military service, were often looked at suspiciously.
    How many of the Invalid Corps members eventually filed for veterans’ disability pensions is unclear. African American disabled veterans had less of a chance of being awarded pensions than did their white colleagues.