“Capacity for Labor,” Work, and Disability in the Early Republic, 1791–1833

Abstract: In the northeastern cities of the early United States, healthy, physically versatile workers were few and far between. Even as employers and welfare administrators experimented with the emerging bureaucratic categories “disabled” and “able-bodied” to delineate workers and non-workers, the unpredictability and fluidity of the population’s health resisted simple classification. This article argues that, between the 1790s and 1830s, the architects of the early national political economy were keenly aware of workers’ varied capacity for labor. Early advocates even argued that manufacturing work would prove more accessible to groups they believed had not been “usefully” employed in the colonial economy—namely, women, children, the elderly, and those with illnesses and impairments. When this did not prove to be the case, welfare administrators retained a commitment to flexible labor in their organization of poor-relief structures and institutions. Bringing disability into the narrative complicates scholars’ long-held assumptions about the rationale directing early manufacturing, poor relief, and institutional practices. The early republican period is crucial both to the emergence of disability as an (albeit unstable) social category and the formation of the antebellum American labor force and welfare system.