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Indeed, while intellectual disabilities had long been stigmatized in the American colonies, in the context of the new republic such incapacities were viewed as especially threatening. According to Kim E. Nielsen in A Disability History of the United States, in the colonial period, “physical disability was largely routine and unremarked on,” but those “we would categorize [today] as having psychological or cognitive disabilities attracted substantial policy and legislative attention” as officials sought to protect communities from the perceived costs of their support. After the Revolution, fears about the dependency of intellectually disabled people heightened. The United States was founded on the premise that rational citizens were capable of voting and making reasoned political decisions. Intellectual disability seemed to threaten the national experiment. Employment incapacities arising from mental ailment also seemed to compromise the nation’s economic robustness. As a result, citizens with cognitive impairments faced intensified legal and political exclusions, including from suffrage, as well as the threat of institutionalization toward the mid-19th century.

Veterans with intellectual disabilities felt the brunt of these developments; however, not all servicemen’s stories were as harrowing as Woodworth’s. Some veterans with intellectual difficulties benefited from networks of family and community care. After Richard Watrous, a private in the Sixth Connecticut Regiment, was wounded in the Battle of Norwalk in 1779, he received intensive and prolonged support from fellow soldiers, doctors, family members and townspeople. Watrous was injured in his arms and torso by musket balls and bayonets, causing fractures and wounds, as well as disturbances to his mental state. As neighbors explained, he “appears to be lost & bewildered” much of the time, perhaps owing to “some radical injury to his constitution.” Watrous was first cared for by servicemen and former neighbors, then by physicians and military officers, and finally by family and community members at home. As one neighbor recalled, an officer “assured me [that Watrous] Should have all Possible Care taken of him,” a support that eased the veteran’s mental and corporeal struggles until his death in 1799.

Despite such networks of care, men with intellectual impairments often struggled to remain employed and maintain financial security. Certainly, the waves of economic depression and recession following the Revolution, together with the federal government’s payment of military salaries and pensions in depreciating Continental dollars, created hardships for all veterans, disabled or not. Yet those with intellectual ailments seemed to face special challenges in their efforts to work and gain a livelihood. Cornelius Hamlin, a Connecticut corporal who experienced “fits” and “fatigue,” wrote in his pension application about his struggle to continue his carpentry business — hiring workers, pushing his own body to the limit and ultimately reducing his business to a fraction of its previous worth. Toney Turney, one of the few African American veterans who received a federal invalid pension, also described employment hardships, which were perhaps especially pronounced for the formerly enslaved man. According to a neighbor, Turney’s complications from his head wound rendered him “often Laid by” and “unable to support himself.”

In some cases, men’s descriptions of their cognitive ailments seem to mirror what psychologists would now describe as post-traumatic stress disorder. Scholars are rightly wary of diagnosing people in the past with modern medical conditions. Historical people experienced and perceived bodily and intellectual impairments differently from people today, making retrospective diagnoses not only unhelpful and misleading, but also potentially damaging. And yet some Revolutionary War pension claims do document men, such as Watrous, who were “lost & bewildered” as well as those whom judges described as having “derangement of mind,” “impaired” sense, memory difficulties and violent outbursts. Take one illustrative case: In 1794, a New Hampshire judge appended the following note to Amos Pierce’s pension application: “Soon after his return from service, he was taken speechless, which has ever since, in a great measure continued.” Pierce is nearly always “in a state of delirium,” the judge went on, although he noted that doctors were unclear whether these symptoms stemmed from his physical wounds. Accounts such as Pierce’s suggest the significant effects of the war on veterans’ mental states.

Many Revolutionary War veterans with intellectual impairments struggled to labor in their households and communities and reenter civilian life. Such challenges were likely partly due to the realities of their injuries; they were also a product of a society deeply prejudiced against people with intellectual disabilities, whom many Americans without a disability viewed as dependent, unfit for civic responsibilities, and increasingly, proper subjects for institutions. When Azel Woodworth wrote about his challenges to find work and support his family over the course of his life, he commented that he had finally “retired in confusion & despair from all I held dear on earth.” Such sorrowful sentiments testify to the significant difficulties that Revolutionary War veterans with intellectual ailments, including what might now be termed post-traumatic stress disorder, faced. Their stories, today nearly 250 years old, urge us to push for greater recognition and support of veterans experiencing such conditions in the present. In addition, stigma against mental illness and intellectual disability has persisted, imploring us to work to dismantle ableism today.