INTRODUCTION

“I need not tell you that a mighty change has taken place within the last half century, a change for the better,” Alphonso Johnson, the president of the Empire State Association of Deaf-Mutes, signed to hundreds of assembled deaf people in 1869.1 Johnson pointed to an important truth: the first half of the nineteenth century was a period of transformation for deaf Americans, a time that saw the rise of deaf education and the coalescence of the nation’s deaf community. In 1816, no schools for deaf students existed in the United States, and people commonly perceived “the deaf and dumb” as ineducable. Many deaf individuals lived scattered, largely isolated from each other, and illiterate. Fifty years later, the nation had more than twenty-five schools for the deaf. These schools enabled deaf people to come together, gain an education, develop American Sign Language (ASL), and find their own collective identity: after their establishment, deaf organizations and publications gradually began to appear. Deaf people also became more visible in society, making an impression upon the nation’s consciousness and challenging traditional stereotypes. When, in 1850, over four hundred deaf people assembled in Hartford, Connecticut, the event showed just how strong the deaf communal identity had become. And when, in 1864, Congress authorized the National Deaf-Mute College, the act affirmed just how much society’s views of deaf people had evolved. Now, many Americans recognized deaf people as full human beings with talent and intellectual potential.

This volume contains original writing by deaf people that both directed and reflected this remarkable period of change. It begins with works by Laurent Clerc, a deaf Frenchman who came to the United States in 1816 to help found the first permanent school for deaf students in the nation. Through his writing, Clerc impressed hearing Americans—most of whom had never met an educated deaf person before—with his intelligence and humanity. Other deaf writers soon followed, sharing their views with society through the democratic power of print. Included here are selections by James Nack, a deaf poet who surprised readers with his mellifluous verse; John Burnet, who published a book of original essays, fiction, and poetry; Edmund Booth, a frontiersman and journalist; John Carlin, who galvanized the drive for a national college for deaf people; Adele Jewel, a homeless deaf woman living in Michigan; and Laura Redden Searing, a high-achieving student who would go on to become an accomplished reporter. The final sections contain documents related to deaf events and issues at mid-century: the grand reunion of alumni of the American Asylum for the Deaf in 1850; the dedication of the Gallaudet monument; the debate over the idea of a deaf state; and the triumphant inauguration of the National Deaf-Mute College (now Gallaudet University) in 1864, which in many ways climaxed this period of change. Taken together, these disparate texts provide a record of cultural transformation. They give us a direct glimpse of the experiences, attitudes, and rhetoric of deaf Americans during this time.

The selections also demonstrate the complicated role that the written word played in the emergence of the American deaf community. Writing served as a bridge between deaf and hearing people, giving deaf Americans a means to demonstrate their reason and humanity to the hearing majority. It also enabled deaf Americans separated by distance or time to communicate, and aided collective memory by preserving deaf experience in print. Yet writing also had limitations. Since English cannot truly convey ASL, which was often referred to as the “natural language” of deaf Americans, in a sense it misses one of the most essential components of the deaf community. Deaf writers sought to express their views in the language of hearing people. To say they did so despite great challenges does not begin to convey the heroic proportions of their accomplishment.

The Deaf American Creation Story

Most deaf Americans know the tale of the beginning of deaf education in the United States. The story has been (literally) handed down from generation to generation; it is also well-documented in written records. The narrative tells how Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, a hearing minister from Connecticut, and Laurent Clerc, a deaf teacher from France, came together to establish the first permanent school for deaf students in the country.2 It goes like this:

In the spring of 1814, a young minister named Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet was home in Hartford, Connecticut, recuperating from an illness. One day, he observed his younger brother playing with the neighbor’s children, including the eight-year-old Alice Cogswell. She had become deaf at age two due to German measles, and had not heard or spoken since then. Gallaudet went over to her. He showed her his hat and wrote the letters H-A-T on the ground. He pointed from the hat to the written word. Alice responded eagerly, seeming to understand that the letters represented the hat.3

The young Alice could represent many deaf Americans before the advent of deaf education. Although full of life and curiosity, she is uneducated and in some ways cut off from the people around her. Since she does not hear or speak, she cannot readily communicate with hearing people. We might also note that she lives apart from deaf people and does not know sign language. Through writing, Gallaudet attempts to bridge the deaf–hearing chasm. He realizes that speech will be of little use, but writing, which is silent and visual, offers a way for the two to interact. The letters on the ground reveal the possibility of deaf intellectual potential; through them, Alice shows that she can learn and understand.

Alice’s first brush with literacy epitomizes a common theme in nineteenth-century literature. It has all the drama and potential of the young slave Frederick Douglass learning to read, or even the wild boy Tarzan crouching over a book, puzzling over its contents. Through literacy, Alice, like Douglass and Tarzan, begins to move from ignorance to knowledge, from isolation to social engagement, and from dependency to self-empowerment. She can become less of an Other and more a part of mainstream society.

Alice’s intellectual promise provokes a sequence of events that will eventually lead to the rise of American deaf education. The story continues:

Over time, Gallaudet taught Alice other words and simple sentences. Alice’s father, Mason Cogswell, was thrilled at Gallaudet’s success. He assembled a group to establish a school for deaf children. They chose Gallaudet to go to England to learn the methods of deaf education used there. In 1815, Gallaudet sailed across the ocean. In England, he visited the Braidwoods, who had pioneered a technique of teaching deaf children orally. However, they were reluctant to share their highly profitable methods. Frustrated, Gallaudet went to a London exhibition by the famed Abbé Sicard, director of the National Institute for the Deaf in Paris, and two of his former students, Jean Massieu and Laurent Clerc. Sicard invited the audience to ask questions of Massieu and Clerc. He translated the queries into sign language, and Massieu and Clerc wrote answers in French on a blackboard. Gallaudet was impressed. In 1816, at Sicard’s invitation, Gallaudet visited the school in Paris, where he spent several months attending classes.

Once again, through writing, deaf people demonstrate their intellectual potential. While Alice was a new reader, getting her initial glimmer of literacy as she gazed from Gallaudet’s hat to the letters scratched on the ground, Massieu and Clerc are polished writers, confidently responding to the questions from the audience. Their written answers show their acumen and help to spur Gallaudet’s interest in the manual approach to deaf education. The oralists come off as greedy and selfish; they appear more concerned with their own profit line than with deaf people’s welfare. The manualists, however, are generous and warm; they welcome Gallaudet and share their sign language and teaching methods with him. That turn of events helps to determine the future of American deaf education, fostering the rise of sign language and deaf culture in America. The tale concludes:

Running low on funds and impatient to return home, Gallaudet invited Clerc to accompany him back to America. Clerc agreed. Their voyage across the ocean took fifty-two days. During the trip, Clerc taught Gallaudet French Sign Language, while Gallaudet taught Clerc written English. Once they arrived in the United States, Gallaudet and Clerc traveled around New England to raise funds. They collected $5,000, which was matched by the Connecticut Legislature. In April 1817, the new school opened in Hartford. The first class had seven students, including Alice Cogswell. That number rapidly increased. Thanks to Gallaudet and Clerc for bringing deaf education to America!

The new school is established through a unique deaf–hearing partnership. Gallaudet and Clerc work together as equals, each with something crucial to contribute to the enterprise. Without Clerc, Gallaudet not only would have had difficulty learning sign language and how to teach deaf students, but he also would have had trouble convincing the public that deaf people could be educated. And without Gallaudet, Clerc may never have come to the United States at all, or navigated American society and the English language so effectively. The tale concludes with their joint efforts allowing Alice and other deaf people to begin to realize their potential.

The narrative became a creation story for the signing deaf community, taking on a mythic aura. Embedded in the tale, we can discern values that many deaf Americans share: sign language over oralism, community over isolation, education over ignorance, generosity over selfishness, mutual respect and collaboration between deaf and hearing people, and so forth. The heroes of the story are Gallaudet and Clerc. Even during their own lifetimes, they were revered as benefactors who brought sign language, education, and community to the American deaf population. They became something like founding fathers, the George Washington and Thomas Jefferson of the deaf community. In 1850, hundreds of deaf people gathered in Hartford to honor and thank the pair. Fisher Ames Spofford, a former student and teacher at the American Asylum, gave an eloquent address in sign language. “We all feel the most ardent love to these gentlemen who founded this Asylum,” he signed. “This gratitude will be a chain to bind all future pupils together.”4 The gratitude and respect have continued unabated through the years, helping to unite deaf Americans. Today, students at schools for the deaf often perform the story of Gallaudet and Clerc each December on Gallaudet’s birthday.5

Impact of the Schools

The opening of the new American Asylum for the Deaf in 1817 soon stimulated the establishment of other schools for deaf students: the New York school in 1818, the Pennsylvania school in 1820, the Kentucky school in 1823, and so on.6 These residential institutions quickly made an impact. First, they helped deaf people to come together. Because the United States was primarily an agrarian nation in the early nineteenth century, and because the majority of deaf children were born to hearing families, deaf individuals often lived far apart. The schools enabled them to come into contact. In 1818, Clerc wrote that of forty-two students at the American Asylum, only “four or six” had met other deaf people before coming to Hartford.7 Prior to attending school, such children sometimes did not even realize that there were others like themselves. As a student wrote in 1847, “When at home, I thought that I was the only deaf and dumb girl in the world, before I had seen any other one.”8 The schools helped deaf young people to learn that they were not strange or alone, but members of a larger community of similar individuals.

The schools not only brought deaf people together, but also enabled them to develop their own language. Before 1817, some signed languages existed in the United States. On Martha’s Vineyard, a high rate of hereditary deafness led to a vibrant community in which both deaf and hearing people used a sign language.9 Other deaf people, especially those from deaf families, also signed. When the American Asylum opened, some students brought their sign languages to the school. There, they encountered Clerc’s elegant French Sign Language, which he had learned in Paris, a city with a large deaf community and an established deaf school. American Sign Language evolved out of this mixture of French and indigenous sign languages.10 Students graduated from the American Asylum and became teachers at other schools, spreading the language to states across the nation. In the process, ASL became a force that united deaf Americans, making them akin to a linguistic minority.

As deaf students spent years living together, they frequently developed a strong communal bond. They shared not only their own language, but also social rules, group norms, values, and ASL poetry and storytelling traditions—in other words, the components of a distinct culture. Edwin Mann, a graduate of the American Asylum, wrote, “To the teachers and pupils … I was bound by the strongest ties of affection, ties ever dear, but doubly so to the lonely mute, who first learns, in their society and by their aid, to communicate all his thoughts and feelings.”11 Not surprisingly, deaf people began to seek ways to come together after they had graduated, forming deaf associations, churches, and clubs. In 1869, Alphonso Johnson welcomed hundreds of deaf people to a convention by pointing out the ties they shared: “Most of us were educated in the same Institution, where we spent from five to fifteen years,” he signed. “Like members of the same family, which have been scattered abroad, we have a desire to see each other again. … here we meet and our language of signs is brought into full play. … we feel elated, so much so, indeed, as to forget our misfortune.”12 As Johnson indicates, for many deaf people the deaf community functioned as a second family, a group where one was understood and accepted, where one felt happy, normal, and at home. Most deaf people chose to marry other deaf individuals who shared the same language and cultural identity. In the 1850s, such feelings of solidarity even prompted one activist to propose establishing a separate state where deaf people could live apart from the hearing world. Although the idea was ultimately rejected, the seriousness with which deaf people discussed it shows how much they came to view themselves as a distinct group.

As we can see, one great change effected by the schools was to nourish the development of ASL and a deaf communal identity. A second transformation wrought by the schools was to make deaf Americans more visible. Hearing citizens began to see deaf people signing for the first time, and what they saw often challenged their assumptions about deafness. For example, instead of encountering lonely, isolated individuals, they sometimes found a flourishing community. When the American Asylum had its first alumni reunion in 1850, one teacher noted: “A more happy assemblage it was never our good fortune to behold. It was most pleasant to see the joy that beamed from all their faces, and gave new vigor and animation to their expressive language of signs.”13 Such deaf people did not fit the public’s construction of deafness. They did not look like victims of social isolation, and their cheerfulness probably caught many hearing observers off guard.

For hearing Americans, the sight of deaf people interacting frequently upended another traditional meaning of deafness: the absence of language. Hearing observers often reacted with fascination, even awe, when they saw deaf signers eloquently communicating with each other. After watching a deaf minister preach in ASL, a hearing correspondent wrote: “He is so expert, so facile, so swift, so fleet, he fills us with ever increasing wonder; and forces us to think it is we who are imperfect, and not he, who leaves us so deeply impressed.”14 Through their sign language, deaf Americans came to be seen (and to see themselves) as possessing something unique and beautiful that most others did not have. Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet articulated this view in 1847, when he wrote: “[This] novel, highly poetical, and singular descriptive language, adapted as well to spiritual as to material objects, and bringing kindred souls into a much more close and conscious communion than that of speech can possibly do—is to be regarded rather in the light of a blessing than of a misfortune.”15 In this way, ASL complicated the traditional formulation of deaf people as lacking and inferior; through their language and close-knit culture, they subtly began to challenge the whole notion of what constitutes a disability.

Deaf people’s sign language also provided tangible proof of their intelligence. Since the time of Aristotle, who was credited with saying that people born deaf were incapable of reason, hearing individuals had linked deafness with ignorance, confusion, and even insanity.16 But the sight of deaf people signing contradicted such assumptions. F. A. P. Barnard, who lost his hearing while an undergraduate at Yale and became a teacher at the New York Institution, wrote that “this beautiful language is [deaf people’s] own creation, and is a visible testimony to the activity of their intellect.”17 In 1834, the American Annals of Education agreed, noting the change in how deaf Americans were perceived:

The instruction of deaf mutes has now become so general, that it has almost ceased to excite the amazement which was at first felt, on seeing those who were deemed beyond the pale of intellectual beings, addressing themselves to others, in intelligible language, often in signs and gestures far more expressive than words. The prejudice … is vanishing before the demonstrative evidence … that they possess minds not less susceptible of cultivation than those of other men, and often far above the ordinary level.18

By allowing deaf Americans to emerge in society, the schools enabled them to contest traditional, patronizing stereotypes hearing people had about them.

A final way that deaf people challenged conventional thinking was through their ability to read and write. While the schools began to change deaf Americans’ lives by nurturing deaf culture and making deaf people more visible, the schools also made large numbers of deaf citizens literate for the first time. Writing became the synapse through which deaf people communicated directly with hearing people who did not know sign language. Thus when Clerc visited the White House, he and President James Monroe conversed by writing back and forth; when a deaf man named Mestapher Chase was robbed in the 1830s, he gave testimony in court by writing; and at her wedding, a deaf woman named Mary Rose made her vow by reading the marriage covenant and signing her name on it. The written text gave deaf and hearing people a place where they could interact; after all, one does not need to hear to read and write. Such writing, together with deaf people’s signing, exploded the notion that deaf people existed outside the realm of language. It helped deaf Americans to show that they thought and felt much as hearing people did. When, in 1816, Clerc was asked how he knew he had the same mental capacities as hearing people, he wrote, “I can express my own ideas by writing, and as what I write is what you speak, I can judge that I possess the same faculties of mind as you do.”19 Writing proved that deaf people could reason, helping to humanize them in society’s eyes.

Writing not only allowed deaf people to prove themselves to mainstream society, but also helped to link deaf Americans separated by space or time. Deaf people such as Edmund Booth and his wife commonly wrote letters to each other when they were living in different states. In the 1830s, Levi Backus, a graduate of the American Asylum, wrote a column in his weekly newspaper that often addressed the interests of deaf readers. In 1849, the North Carolina Institution began publishing The Deaf Mute, the first of many periodicals put out by schools for the deaf. Such publications helped deaf people to share news and keep in contact with other members of the community. Even though it was not the native language of deaf Americans, written English played an important role in the maintenance of a national deaf community.

During the first half of the nineteenth century, then, the schools empowered deaf Americans in a variety of ways. They fostered a deaf cultural identity, made deaf people more visible in society, and enabled many more deaf citizens to become literate. These shifts led to an interesting paradox: while in some respects the schools separated deaf people from their hearing counterparts, nurturing a distinct language and culture, they also broke down barriers by enabling more deaf Americans to read and write. In effect, the schools simultaneously made deaf students more and less of an Other. During public exhibitions, instructors usually displayed both students’ differences from and similarities to the hearing majority. For example, at an examination at the New York Institution, there were “1st, exhibitions of the graphic power and eloquence of the language of pantomime, which excited great interest, and elicited much laughter and applause, and 2d, written exercises by some selected pupils, to show to what elevation of thought and correctness, even eloquence of language, deaf-mutes are capable of attaining.”20 The students’ visual performance provoked wonder and fascination; they were seen as possessing a beautiful language and skills that most hearing people did not have. Through the written demonstration, the students showed their mastery of logocentric forms, proving that, despite their ostensible difference, they were also sensible, intelligent human beings. By moving back and forth between the two languages, deaf people displayed what W. E. B. Du Bois termed “doubleconsciousness,” that sense of experiencing “two-ness … two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings.”21 Like other American minorities, deaf people had to learn the precarious art of navigating between their own culture and the culture of the majority among whom they lived.

Writing Deafness

Although we unfortunately cannot see nineteenth-century deaf Americans sign, we can read their writing in English. Yet for modern readers to appreciate such texts fairly and accurately, we must remember the obstacles deaf Americans faced when they sought to express themselves in the written form of a spoken language. Especially for those who were congenitally deaf, learning English was often a daunting task. The process could be compared to a hearing American trying to master Chinese without ever hearing it spoken. Since deaf students in antebellum America typically did not go to school until they were eight, nine, or even older, they often did not begin to study English until well after the critical peak years for language acquisition had passed. In 1854, Collins Stone, the superintendent of the Ohio Institution, lamented that “the results of education which are attained in our Institutions, are to so great an extent incomplete and partial; that the grand end at which we aim, the free and accurate use of language, is so seldom reached.”22 The schools did give masses of deaf people the ability to use written English, but we should be careful not to overstate their ease with the language. ASL remained the surest and most comfortable language for deaf Americans, as Searing noted in 1858:

Signs are the natural language of the mute. Writing may be used in his intercourse with others, but when conversing with those who are, like himself, deprived of hearing and speech, you will always find that he prefers signs to every other mode of intercourse; and every other established means of communicating his thoughts, no matter what facility he may have acquired in it, is no more nor less than what a foreign language is to those who hear and speak.23

English, for all its value, resembled a foreign language to congenitally deaf people, one that came only through years of sustained study.

Deaf authors also had to grapple with the fact that written English cannot truly represent their cherished language of signs. As Burnet pointed out in 1835, “To attempt to describe a language of signs by words, or to learn such a language from books, is alike to attempt impossibilities.”24 Since American Sign Language was often such an integral part of deaf identity, and the wellspring of positive constructions of deafness, its absence in written materials leaves a conspicuous gap. At times we can obtain a glimmer of the beauty of ASL through written accounts, such as when Burnet describes the conversation of two educated deaf signers as a “thousand changing motions through which every thought of the mind flashes and disappears.”25 More often, though, the original nature of the signing is lost. We cannot directly experience the awe that hearing observers felt on seeing deaf people animatedly signing. We can read the lectures that Clerc and Carlin wrote in English, but their actual delivery of these presentations in ASL, their signs and the flavor of their interaction with the audience, are forever gone.26 We are left with the somewhat odd sense that we cannot now experience the natural language of most of these writers, the language they used when they interacted with each other in person. The culture that such deaf writers experienced remains elusive, peeking out from behind English words, existing in a mood, a spirit that is hinted at, even described, but never quite directly conveyed.

Along the same lines, deaf writers had to struggle to preserve their identity in a language freighted with negative assumptions about deafness. In English, deaf not only means “does not hear,” but also has been associated with callousness, insensitivity, evil, insanity, isolation, difference, inferiority, impairment, and so forth. Even the word “deaf” contains negative connotations; it has its roots in the Indo-European base dheubh, which denotes confusion, stupefaction, and dizziness. If we subscribe to the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, which contends that the categories of language one uses shape the lens through which one sees the world, it follows that deaf people writing in English must almost necessarily recycle some negative interpretations of deafness.27 Such meanings are inscribed in the language, in its idioms (from “turn a deaf ear” to “dialogue of the deaf”), its metaphors, and its very etymology.

We can discern adverse views of deafness throughout the selections in this volume. The writers here routinely refer to themselves as “unfortunates” and look forward to going to heaven, where, in Searing’s words, “the deaf ear will be unsealed, and the mute voice gush out in glorious melody.”28 Such depictions are perhaps not surprising in a society that gave relatively few opportunities to deaf people. Searing, Jewel, and many of the other writers here undoubtedly had harder lives because they were deaf. No surprise, then, that they anticipate having such obstacles removed. As Jewel says, “What a comfort it is for me to believe thus!”29 Yet deaf writers probably produced these statements partially because existing models in written English, such as the Bible, sermons, and prayer books, frequently make use of such rhetoric. Students at the schools attended chapel quite often; at the American Asylum, they went to both morning and evening devotion, as well as to worship on Sunday.30 They must have frequently encountered biblical language that equated deafness with humanity’s fallen condition.

In the same way, the authors follow hearing precedents in the exaggerated manner that they often describe deaf people before education. For example, in 1816, Clerc wrote to an audience in Boston that “Mr. Gallaudet and I are in the design of raising those unfortunates from their nothingness.”31 Clerc may have shrewdly used such language to add drama to his appeal for funds to open a new school. Yet even so, he was imitating his hearing teacher in Paris, the Abbé Sicard, who in public lectures often compared uneducated deaf people to blocks of unchiseled marble or statues not yet animated with life.32 Such rhetoric added to the processing of history into myth; it made deaf people before education seem lifeless and inhuman. Similarly, when Nack, Burnet, and John Carlin call uneducated deaf people “heathens,” they echo Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, who in a well-known 1824 sermon called uneducated deaf people “long-neglected heathen” because they could not read or understand the Gospel.33 Their language encouraged a view of uneducated deaf people as uncivilized barbarians. F. A. P. Barnard, one of the few people to protest such discourse, pointed out in 1834 that “To be deaf from birth … is to be ignorant, not weak, stupid, or savage.”34 Yet the theatrical rhetoric persisted for most of the nineteenth century. Although deaf people produced the writing in this collection, we can nevertheless detect hearing people’s influence and voices.

Perhaps Carlin’s 1847 poem, “The Mute’s Lament,” best epitomizes such negative attitudes. It begins:

I move—a silent exile on this earth;

As in his dreary cell one doomed for life,

My tongue is mute, and closed ear heedeth not;

No gleam of hope this darken’d mind assures

That the blest power of speech shall e’er be known.35

The poem is graceful, harmonious, an impressive achievement for a person born deaf. Part of its power lies in the fact that a “mute,” someone who cannot speak and who was usually seen as outside of language, can produce English verse of such merit. However, Carlin appears to have internalized traditional negative attitudes so completely that his work overflows with sentimental self-pity and woe. Again, such dejection is perhaps understandable, given the barriers that Carlin, a gifted deaf man, must have encountered in antebellum America. At any rate, by reinforcing negative assumptions that deaf people are lonely and miserable, Carlin buttresses the view that hearing people are superior. He assigns primary value to speech and hearing, while sign language and the deaf community are nowhere to be found.

Yet while deaf writers sometimes reify traditional constructions of deafness, they also challenge such interpretations. In the following pages, they regularly bring their own culture and worldviews to English, imbuing established words with new meanings. To begin with a seemingly trivial example: when Clerc writes, “Why are we Deaf and Dumb,” he subtly alters the traditional English meaning of “deaf” as other, different.36 Instead, he equates “deaf” with “we,” converting the word into a signifier of group identity. Subsequent authors also write about deafness in the first person, making it appear more of a normal human variation than a mark of almost unfathomable deviance. When Clerc also suggests that being deaf could actually be an advantage, he implicitly questions centuries of received wisdom that routinely assumed deaf people were inferior, lesser beings. Similarly, when Burnet insists that isolated deaf children are neglected, not obtuse, and when Carlin urges that a college be established for deaf Americans, they associate “deaf” with capability and potential.

Perhaps we can see this positive treatment of deafness most clearly in the writing about deaf people interacting with each other. In his 1835 poem “Emma,” about a deaf girl, Burnet offers an almost jubilant account of deaf signers at school:

Here, from the speaking limbs, and face divine,

At nature’s bidding, thoughts and feelings shine,

That in thin air no more her sense elude—

Each understands—by each is understood.

Here can each feeling gush forth, unrepressed,

To mix with feelings of a kindred breast.37

Burnet skillfully evokes the headiness of ASL and deaf culture. Along the same lines, in writing from the 1850 tribute to Gallaudet and Clerc, we can sense some of the pride and “elation,” as Alphonso Johnson put it, of being among deaf peers. By insisting on giving their own tribute to Gallaudet and Clerc, and, later, on raising their own monument to Gallaudet, deaf Americans showed just how self-respecting and independent they were. In texts like these, the confident deaf “we” is apparent, whereas in poetry by Nack and Carlin, readers encounter a lonely, cut-off deaf “I.” Such affirmative treatments of deafness almost invariably stem from a strong sense of community, of belonging to a group of vibrant, talented people.

Positive depictions of deafness also stem from American Sign Language. By using “deaf” in an affirmative manner, authors assign the word a meaning that more closely resembles the sign DEAF than traditional English. In American Sign Language, DEAF not only means “does not hear,” but also connotes us, uses sign language, behaves in expected ways, shares deaf values, and so on.38 The sign DEAF has more positive colorings than the traditional English “deaf.” While ASL cannot be directly written, it still shapes some of the meanings and messages that deaf authors produce in these texts. We can perceive what Mikhail Bakhtin calls doublevoiced words, that is, English words that are appropriated for deaf purposes “by inserting a new semantic orientation into a word which already has—and retains—its own orientation.”39 Doublevoiced is not the best term for the dynamic here, since of course ASL is not voiced at all; but nonetheless, double-voiced helps to elucidate how deaf writing in English is influenced by ASL discourse.

As we can see, the authors in this volume are immersed in two separate languages and ways of living. They move back and forth between seemingly contradictory views of deafness and themselves. Clerc assures a hearing shipmate on the way to America that he would never marry a deaf woman; yet just two years later, he did exactly that. Carlin advocates using fingerspelling in schools and states he prefers the company of hearing people, but he gave eloquent speeches in ASL, married a deaf woman, and associated with the deaf community throughout his life. The whole debate over the idea of a separate deaf state can be seen as a confrontation of these issues; in a sense, John J. Flournoy’s radical proposal was an attempt to escape from feelings of two-ness, to escape to a place where sign language and deaf culture would be the dominant modes of being.

Such double-consciousness is never quite resolved in these pages. The writers here sometimes struggle to express their experience accurately, searching for ways to free English from its traditional negative associations with deafness. By adding to the meaning of words such as “deaf,” the authors helped to enrich the English language, making it more elastic and democratic, and more of their own. Although the writing here is exclusively by deaf authors, the texts are profoundly hybrid, shaped by traditional meanings of deafness in English, by influential hearing authors such as Gallaudet and Sicard, by religious rhetoric, by American Sign Language, by the emerging community of deaf Americans, and other factors. The result is a fascinating, contradictory, valiant effort to explore what it meant to be deaf in antebellum America.

Notes

1. “Empire State Association of Deaf-Mutes: Proceedings of the Third Biennial Convention,” The Deaf-Mutes’ Friend 1 (Sept. 1869): 258.

2. There was at least one attempt at a school for deaf students before Gallaudet and Clerc opened the American Asylum. In March of 1815, John Braidwood, the grandson of the founder of the Braidwood Academy in Scotland, opened a school on a Virginia plantation owned by William Bolling, the father of two deaf children. Braidwood took on at least five students, and taught using the oral method. However, the school closed after only a year and a half when Braidwood, a habitual drinker and gambler, disappeared. See John Vickrey Van Cleve and Barry A. Crouch, A Place of Their Own: Creating the Deaf Community in America (Washington, D.C.: Gallaudet University Press, 1989), 26–27.

3. I have culled this version of the Alice–Gallaudet–Clerc story from many sources: the various renditions I have seen by deaf people in American Sign Language (see note 5); a display in the museum of American School for the Deaf in Hartford; the written testimonials in this anthology; and the accounts in Jack R. Gannon’s Deaf Heritage: A Narrative History of Deaf America and the other reference sources listed in the selected bibliography (see pp. xxxii–xxxiii).

4. Spofford’s speech was included in Luzerne Rae, “Testimonial of the Deaf Mutes of New England to Messrs. Gallaudet and Clerc,” reprinted in Tribute to Gallaudet: A Discourse in Commemoration of the Life, Character, and Services, of the Rev. Thomas H. Gallaudet, with an Appendix, 2nd ed. (Hartford, Conn.: Hutchinson and Bullard, 1859), 194.

5. In the early 1990s, I saw the Gallaudet–Clerc story performed during assemblies at three schools for deaf students. At the Texas School for the Deaf, a high school senior gave a one-man show in which he played all the parts. At the Florida School for the Deaf and the Blind, students presented a full enactment, complete with period costumes. And at the Virginia School for the Deaf and the Blind in Staunton, a teacher signed the story.

6. Initially called the Connecticut Asylum for the Education and Instruction of Deaf and Dumb Persons, the school was soon renamed as the American Asylum in recognition of its national character. It took on its current name, the American School for the Deaf, in the 1890s. For a history of deaf schools in the United States and the chronology in which they were founded, see Jack Gannon, Deaf Heritage: A Narrative History of Deaf America (Silver Spring, Md.: The National Association of the Deaf, 1981), 16–58.

7. Laurent Clerc, An Address Written by Mr. Clerc: And Read by His Request at a Public Examination of the Pupils in the Connecticut Asylum, before the Governour and Both Houses of the Legislature, 28th May, 1818 (Hartford, Conn.: Hudson and Co., printers, 1818), 12.

8. H. K., “My Thoughts Before I Was Educated,” in The Thirty-First Annual Report of the Directors of the American Asylum, at Hartford, for the Education and Instruction of the Deaf and Dumb (Hartford, Conn.: Case, Tiffany, and Burnham, 1847), 29.

9. Nora Ellen Groce, Everyone Here Spoke Sign Language: Hereditary Deafness on Martha’s Vineyard (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985).

10. Although they have diverged considerably over the years, ASL still resembles French Sign Language more closely than any other signed language. See James Woodward, “Historical Bases of American Sign Language,” in Understanding Language through Sign Language Research, ed. Patricia Siple (New York: Academic Press, 1978), 338–48; Clayton Valli and Ceil Lucas, The Linguistics of American Sign Language (Washington, D.C.: Gallaudet University Press, 1992), 15.

11. Edwin Mann, “Preface,” The Deaf and Dumb, or, a Collection of Articles Relating to the Condition of Deaf Mutes (Boston: D. K. Hitchcock, 1836), viii.

12. “Empire State Association of Deaf-Mutes: Proceedings of the Third Biennial Convention,” The Deaf-Mutes’ Friend 1 (Sept. 1869): 258.

13. Rae, “Testimonial of the Deaf Mutes of New England,” 201.

14. Anonymous, “The Sign Language: Graphic Description of a Church Service among the Deaf and Dumb,” The Deaf-Mutes’ Friend 1 (July 1869): 199.

15. Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, “On the Natural Language of Signs; And Its Value and Uses in the Instruction of the Deaf and Dumb,” American Annals of the Deaf and Dumb 1 (Oct. 1847): 56.

16. For a helpful examination of Aristotle’s supposed comment on deafness, see Harlan Lane, When the Mind Hears: A History of the Deaf (New York: Vintage, 1984), 427 n. 88.

17. F. A. P. Barnard, Observations on the Education of the Deaf and Dumb (Boston: J. H. Low, 1834), 19.

18. Anonymous, “Education of the Deaf and Dumb,” American Annals of Education 4 (1834): 53–58, reprinted in Mann, ed., The Deaf and Dumb (Boston: D. K. Hitchcock, 1836), 2.

19. Laurent Clerc Papers no. 69, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library.

20. John R. Burnet, “Annual Examination at the New York Institution,” The Deaf-Mutes’ Friend 1 (Aug. 1869): 233.

21. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (Chicago: McClurg, 1903), 3.

22. Collins Stone, On the Difficulties Encountered by the Deaf and Dumb in Learning Language (Columbus: Statesman Steam Book and Job Press, 1854), 4. The persistent concern about teaching English to deaf students continues today, when an eighteen-year-old congenitally deaf person typically does not read above the fifth-grade level. See Ronnie Wilbur, “Reading and Writing,” in Gallaudet Encyclopedia of Deaf People and Deafness, vol. 3, ed. John V. Van Cleve (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1987), 146.

23. Laura Redden, “A Few Words about the Deaf and Dumb,” American Annals of the Deaf and Dumb 10 (1858): 178.

24. John R. Burnet, Tales of the Deaf and Dumb, with Miscellaneous Poems (Newark, N.J.: Benjamin Olds, 1835), 24. Despite the development of glosses and other systems for representing ASL through writing, Burnet’s observation still holds largely true today.

25. Ibid, 18.

26. It was not until the advent of motion picture technology in the early twentieth century that ASL lectures and performances began to be recorded and preserved.

27. Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897–1941), a student of the linguistic anthropologist Edward Sapir, came up with the theory of “linguistic relativity,” which is sometimes also called the “Sapir–Whorf hypothesis” or the “Whorf hypothesis.” For an interesting selection of Whorf’s work, see John B. Carroll, ed., Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1956). For a more recent assessment of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, see John J. Gumperz and Stephen C. Levinson, eds., Rethinking Linguistic Relativity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

28. Redden, “A Few Words about the Deaf and Dumb,” 180.

29. Adele M. Jewel, A Brief Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Adele M. Jewel (Being Deaf and Dumb) (Jackson, Mich.: Daily Citizen Steam Printing House, circa 1860), 15.

30. As Douglas Baynton has shown, religion played an influential role in the rise of American deaf education; for the Reverend Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet and others, the desire to bring the Gospel to deaf Americans was a primary motivator for educating deaf people. See Douglas Baynton, Forbidden Signs: American Culture and the Campaign Against Sign Language (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 15–22.

31. Laurent Clerc, “Laurent Clerc,” in Tribute to Gallaudet: A Discourse in Commemoration of the Life, Character, and Services, of the Rev. Thomas H. Gallaudet, with an Appendix, 2nd ed. (New York: F. C. Brownell, 1859), 109.

32. Anonymous, “An Account of the Institution in Paris for the Education of the Deaf and Dumb,” reprinted in Mann, ed., The Deaf and Dumb (Boston: D. K. Hitchcock, 1836), 234.

33. Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, “The Duty and Advantages of Affording Instruction to the Deaf and Dumb,” reprinted in Mann, ed., The Deaf and Dumb (Boston: D. K. Hitchcock, 1836), 217.

34. Barnard, Observations, 6.

35. John Carlin, “The Mute’s Lament,” American Annals of the Deaf and Dumb 1 (1847): 15–16.

36. Clerc, An Address Written by Mr. Clerc, 12.

37. Burnet, “Emma,” in Tales of the Deaf and Dumb (Newark, N.J.: Benjamin Olds, 1835), 196.

38. For an insightful discussion of the meanings of DEAF, see Carol Padden and Tom Humphries, Deaf in America: Voices from a Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988): 13–17, 49–50.

39. Quoted in Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 50.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Baynton, Douglas C. Forbidden Signs: American Culture and the Campaign Against Sign Language. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.

Booth, Edmund. Edmund Booth, Forty-Niner: The Life Story of a Deaf Pioneer. Stockton, Calif.: San Joaquin Pioneer and Historical Society, 1953.

Gannon, Jack R. Deaf Heritage: A Narrative History of Deaf America. Silver Spring, Md.: National Association of the Deaf, 1981.

Lane, Harlan. When the Mind Hears: A History of the Deaf. New York: Vintage, 1984.

Lang, Harry G., and Bonnie Meath-Lang. Deaf Persons in the Arts and Sciences: A Biographical Dictionary. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1995.

Padden, Carol, and Tom Humphries. Deaf in America: Voices from a Culture. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988.

Van Cleve, John Vickrey, and Barry A. Crouch. A Place of Their Own: Creating the Deaf Community in America. Washington, D.C.: Gallaudet University Press, 1989.

Van Cleve, John Vickrey, ed. Gallaudet Encyclopedia of Deaf People and Deafness. 3 vols. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1987.