Disability, Early Liberalism, and The Confession and Dying Words of Samuel Frost (1793)

Greta LaFleur considers how late eighteenth-century broadsides negotiated mental illness through the 1793 case of Samuel Frost who beat Elisha Allen’s brains out in a cabbage patch. Acquitted of his father’s murder by... [ view full abstract ]

Greta LaFleur considers how late eighteenth-century broadsides negotiated mental illness through the 1793 case of Samuel Frost who beat Elisha Allen’s brains out in a cabbage patch. Acquitted of his father’s murder by reason of insanity a year earlier, Frost received much attention. The public encountered Frost’s narrative primarily through broadsides like The Confessions and Dying Words of Samuel Frost, produced by three different printers and designed to be sold at his execution. While each is slightly different, all tarry at length on the status of Frost’s “rational faculties,” raising questions about what we now term neurodiversity. As Erin Forbes has argued, Frost’s narrative brings tensions between Frost’s unusual understanding and justifiable behavior into relief—the “Account” writer reports “[Frost’s] mind was evidently not formed like those of other persons”—and increasingly prevalent expectations surrounding “rational” behavior and liberal civic participation. Yet Frost’s first-person account offers a set of logical, if socially unacceptable justifications, perceived as increasingly atavistic in a world structured by expectations of liberal personhood. This paper uses Frost’s execution narrative as a point of departure for considering changing understandings of disability around 1800, exploring what new frameworks for understanding competence or incompetence might have attended early national cultures of liberal personhood and personal sovereignty, particularly as they were debated through public forms like the broadside.