Incapable of Managing His Estate: Habitual Drunkards and the Expansion of Guardianship in the Nineteenth-Century United States
Keywords:
guardianship, civil rights, citizenship, compulsionAbstract
During the first half of the nineteenth century, Mid-Atlantic States expanded guardianship to include habitual drunkards. Legislators in Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey empowered courts to put habitual drunkards under guardianship, a legal status that stripped them of their rights to own property, enter into contracts, make wills, and, in some states, even vote. Amid the dramatic nineteenth-century expansion of male suffrage, the habitual drunkard signified a masculine failure of self-government that disqualified propertied men from the privileges of full citizenship. The struggle to define habitual drunkenness, detect the habitual drunkard, and put him under guardianship transformed the courtroom into an arena for contesting the thresholds of compulsion, policing respectable manhood, and drawing the borders of full citizenship in the nineteenth-century United States.
References
1
Edward R. (1878), Appearance Papers, Court of Common Pleas, Prothonotary, Chester County Archives, West Chester, PA. Although historical guardianship information is public record in Pennsylvania and New York, I abbreviate the names of individuals found in all archival case files according to New Jersey State Archives’ Conditions of Use under New Jersey Revised Statutes §30:4-24.3. I chose abbreviation instead of anonymization to protect the privacy of historical individuals and their descendants while also honoring their identity as real human beings who encountered disciplinary medicolegal intervention. Middle initials, which are often included in dockets and case files, are omitted. Names appearing in newspapers and published case law are unaltered.
2
Kay Schriner and Lisa Oches, “Creating the Disabled Citizen: How Massachusetts Disenfranchised People Under Guardianship,” Ohio State Law Journal 62, no. 1 (2002): 481–533; Lawrence M. Friedman, Joanna L. Grossman, and Chris Guthrie, “Guardians: A Research Note,” The American Journal of Legal History 40, no. 2 (1996): 146–66; John Gabriel Woerner, A Treatise on the American Law of Guardianship of Minors and Persons of Unsound Mind (Boston, 1897).
3
I analyzed 280 mid-Atlantic habitual drunkenness guardianship case files: 32 cases (1817–1862), Lunacy Case Files, 1796–1912, Chancery Court (CC), SCH00020, New Jersey State Archives (NJSA), Trenton, NJ; 177 cases (1821–1847), In Re Papers, 1800–1847, CC, J0057-82, New York State Archives (NYSA), Albany, NY; 71 cases (1819–1899), Lunatics & Habitual Drunkards, 1790–1899, Court of Common Pleas (CCP), Prothonotary, Chester County Archives (CCA), West Chester, PA; Appearance Papers, 1728–1902, CCP, Prothonotary, CCA. The indices (J0062-15 and J0062-82, CC, NYSA) to the unprocessed collection Enrolled Decrees, In Re Papers, and other Case Files, 1823–1847, CC, J0061-82, NYSA, revealed respondents’ gender information for an additional 437 habitual drunkenness cases. See also Continuance and Appearance Dockets, CCP, Delaware County Archives (DCA), Lima, PA; Lunatics, Drunkards, Divorces Docket (1883 to 1925), CCP, DCA; Miscellaneous Dockets, CCP, DCA; Miscellaneous Quarter Sessions Dockets, Book D (1909–1919), CCP, DCA. See also Lunacy Docket, (Sept. 1781-Dec. 1824), Common Pleas (CP), Philadelphia City Archives (PCA), Philadelphia, PA; Lunacy Inquisitions, Book 1, CP, PCA; Proceedings in Lunacy (1857–1874), CP, PCA.
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Woerner, A Treatise on the American Law of Guardianship, v.
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Friedman, Grossman, and Guthrie, “Guardians,” 146.
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Susanna L. Blumenthal, “The Default Legal Person,” UCLA Law Review 54, no. 5 (2007): 1180. See also Janet Weston, Looking After Miss Alexander: Care, Mental Capacity, and the Court of Protection in Mid-Twentieth-Century England (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2023); James Moran, Madness on Trial: A Transatlantic History of English Civil Law and Lunacy (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019); Kim E. Nielsen, “Property, Disability, and the Making of the Incompetent Citizen in the United States, 1860s–1940s,” in Disability Histories, ed. Susan Burch and Michael Rembis (Champaign-Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2014), 308–20.
12
J0058-82, J0062-15, J0062-82, NYSA (614 cases, n = 1,505, 1823–1847); Lunatics & Habitual Drunkards, Appearance Papers, CCA (71 cases, n = 450, 1819–1902). Approximately twenty percent of adult guardianship cases in Dane County, Wisconsin involved habitual drunkards, Nielsen, “Property, Disability, and the Making of the Incompetent Citizen in the United States, 1860s–1940s,” 312.
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Michael Grossberg, Governing the Hearth: Law and the Family in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 291, 290–307.
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Friedman, Grossman, and Guthrie, “Guardians,” 146–47.
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Moran, Madness on Trial (2019); Carl I. Hammer, “‘Being Old and Dayly Finding the Symptoms of Mortality’: The Troubled Last Years of Hannah Beamon of Deerfield and the Law of 1726,” Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 17, no. 2 (2019): 151–82; Cornelia H. Dayton, “‘The Oddest Man That I Ever Saw:’ Assessing Cognitive Disability on Eighteenth-Century Cape Cod,” Journal of Social History 49, no. 1 (2015): 77–99; Wendy Jo Turner, Care and Custody of the Mentally Ill, Incompetent, and Disabled in Medieval England (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2013); Irina Metzler, “Disability in the Middle Ages: Impairment at the Intersection of Historical Inquiry and Disability Studies,” History Compass 9, no. 1 (2011): 45–60; Akihito Suzuki, Madness at Home: The Psychiatrist, the Patient, and the Family in England, 1820–1860 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); Joel Peter Eigen, Witnessing Insanity: Madness and Mad-Doctors in the English Court (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995).
18
John Brydall, Non Compos Mentis, or, The Law Relating to Natural Fools, Mad-Folks, and Lunatick Persons (London, 1700), 23; Darling v. Bennet, 1811, 8 Mass. 129.
19
Moran, Madness on Trial, 117–139; Kellen Funk, “Equity without Chancery: The Fusion of Law and Equity in the Field Code of Civil Procedure, New York 1846–76,” The Journal of Legal History 36, no. 2 (2015): 152–91.
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Edward Slingerland, Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization (Boston: Little, Brown, 2021).
