"Crazy Brained": Mental Illness in Colonial America

In 1937 Albert Deutsch painted a dismal picture of how the mentally ill were viewed and treated in colonial America:

Regarded as sub-human beings, they were chained in specially devised kennels and cages like wild beasts, and thrown into prisons, bridewells and jails like criminals. They were incarcerated in workhouse dungeons, or made to slave as able-bodied paupers, unclassified from the rest. They were left to wander about stark naked, driven from place to place like mad dogs, subjected to whippings as vagrants and rogues. ¹

Since then, scholars have challenged that gloomy portrait, citing Deutsch’s tendentious approach to the subject and his lack of evidence to support such a sweeping and desolate conclusion. Their work has centered largely on the eighteenth century, leaving the seventeenth for the most part still a dark and uncertain time. This study explores those earlier years. What was the nature of mental illness in early colonial America? How did colonists understand and interpret it? How did they respond to it? And what do those understandings and responses reveal about colonial society? Focusing on the American colonies during the 1607–1700 period, I address these questions.

Addressing them is no easy business. Evidence regarding the mentally ill in the early colonies is scattered and elusive. It comes not from meticulous records and scientific observations, but from the odd comment in a colonist’s personal papers, the occasional battle over control of an estate, the rare prosecution of a mentally disturbed person for some infraction, or the infrequent official effort to provide for an isolated “idiot.” Such examples can be found only by sifting through hundreds of mostly unindexed volumes of colonial records. The eighty-two cases that form the foundation of this study are drawn from the official records of the mainland and Caribbean British-American colonies; from contemporary correspondence, diaries, and journals; and in some instances from secondary sources. ²

Colonists’ descriptions of the mentally ill came in a wide variety. Some were uncommon, but readily identifiable, as when people were said to be “out of their wits” or “deluded.” ³ A Pennsylvania man said of Edward Lawrence in 1698 that he was “not in his right mind.” ⁴ An Andover, Massachusetts, man was said to be “one part off the moon,” harking back to an ancient notion that mental illness had lunar causes; that, of course, is the source of the word “lunatic,” which was also used to describe mentally disturbed persons. ⁵

Other expressions were more common, including variants of the word “mad,” which colonists often used as a metaphor for anger, frustration, and extreme behavior, as we do today. In 1671 John Forman testified regarding a provocation he had witnessed in Newtown, New York: the instigator had “clap[ped] his hand upon his arse a purpose to make George Wood mad.” ⁶ In 1659 a Maryland witness reported that Captain Bradnox “swore like a madman.” ⁷ In 1689, after a group of commissioners replaced Matthew Plowman as customs collector of the Port of New York, he, “like a madman, gave them an account of the money there.” ⁸ When the English Caribbean colony of St. Kitts (St. Christopher) fell to French forces in 1671, the resident settlers refused to take an oath of fidelity to the French king. The new commander roundly criticized them in a letter “for such a medley of madness and loyalty.” ⁹ Sometimes the word was even incorporated into colonists’ names, as when a New York court ordered in 1695 that “Mad James” be kept at community expense in King’s County. ¹⁰

Colonists employed other synonyms for mental illness as well. Among the most common were variants of the words “crazy,” “distempered,” and “distracted.” The Massachusetts General Court once described Sarah Thorne as “crazy brained.” ¹¹ In 1685, New York colonists asked officials to remove one man from an Albany neighborhood “because of the danger of houses taking fire because of his craziness.” ¹² Some years later, Virginia authorities said of one woman that she was “craised and not in her right senses...