The Moral Treatment of Washington Willits

Mental health care in the 1800s wasn't always a hellscape of overcrowded asylums filled with patients chained to floors and beds. In the 1840s and 1850s, a new treatment paradigm called "the moral treatment movement" offered patients dignity, respect, individualized treatment plans and creative outlets. One Birmingham man, Washington Willits, was described as coming home from the premier moral treatment facility, the Utica Insane Asylum in New York, when he tragically died. Who was Washington and what might have his life and treatment at Utica looked like?
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Special thanks to the Birmingham Area Cable Board for PEG grant funding that made this podcast possible. Also thanks to past and present staff of the Birmingham Museum, and our amazing volunteers.

Transcript

                When I say the phrase “mental health care in the 1800s” you, like a lot of folks, might think of patients in straight jackets chained to beds or walls, forced lobotomies, electro shock therapy, overcrowded conditions and spooky hallways echoing with the screams of the unwell. And while parts of that mental image are correct (perhaps with a slight bit of color added by asylum themed haunted houses and ghost hunting shows), there was a bright spot in the 1800s where the mentally ill were treated kindly and with dignity. Washington Willits, a son of one of Birmingham’s first four landowners, experienced this sort of care himself during his tragically short life and through him, we can glimpse how mental illness was thought of and treated both within Birmingham and Nationally in the 1840s and ‘50s.

                This is Birmingham Uncovered, a podcast by the Birmingham Museum, where we are exploring the diverse and compelling lives that built Birmingham Michigan into the community that it is today. First, some background on Birmingham: we are a city of approx. 20,000 people over 4.73 square miles, approximately halfway between Detroit and Pontiac in Oakland County. This area was occupied by members of the Three Fires Confederacy of Indigenous People before white settlement in the area started in the late 1810s. Birmingham became a city in 1933 and today is known as a prosperous and multi-faceted community with a thriving cultural scene.

                Just a note at the top of this episode: when talking about mental illness and its treatment in the mid-1800s, doctors and the general public used terminology that is not currently used in the field and that many regard as discriminatory and defamatory. There will also be mentions of some of the reasons why patients like Washington Willits found themselves at mental health hospitals like self harm, sexual abuse and assault. The historical record often contains potentially objectionable content that reflects outdated, biased, offensive, or graphic language, attitudes and opinions that are included here for historical context and accuracy.

                We talked in a previous episode about how we here at the museum don’t use the word “founder” to describe Birmingham’s first four landowners anymore. One of those four didn’t even live here and the other three arrived with family-including wives and children who are never called “founders”. We instead use “first landowners” or “first families.” In our search to unearth more info on these first four landowners and their families we came across an article in the Detroit Free Press from April 22, 1851 with the headline “Shocking Cruelty”.

                “A few days since Mr E Willitts, who resides in Birmingham, Oakland County, who was on his way from the Utica Insane Asylum, having charge of his son, a lad of 18 years, who had lately been discharged from that Institution as incurable, stepped out at a station on the Central Rail Line of Railroad through New York, to obtain some refreshments for the lad, leaving him sitting quietly on his seat.

“On returning, Mr Willitts found the train in motion, and got into the car behind the one which he left; here he found an acquaintance, with whom he conversed for a minute or two, and then passed to the car in which he left his son. On reaching it he found the seat vacant and the poor boy gone.

“Upon making inquiry, the conductor told him that he had put a young man off the train, some distance back, who would not pay his fare nor give an account of himself. 

“The anxious father stopped at the next station, returned and found the mangled body of his son, lying on the track.

“He had paid his own fare, and that of his son, to Buffalo!”

                There’s a ton we can unpack just from this short article, not the least of which is how many run-on sentences were in that article. The first is, just who are the folks mentioned in the article? In 1851 in Birmingham there was only one E Willits, Elijah Willits. Elijah purchased a parcel of land in what would become Birmingham on December 1, 1818. John Hamilton also purchased his parcel on that same day in the Detroit land office, making him and Elijah Willits the first two to buy land in what would become Birmingham. John West Hunter bought his parcel the very next day. Benjamin Pierce, the guy who didn’t even go here, followed and bought his land one month later.

                Elijah Willits was, like many of the early male settlers in Oakland County, a veteran of the War of 1812. Elijah, along with his brother Isaac, was in Captain Antoine Dequindre’s company of the Detroit militia when Territorial Governor Hull surrendered Detroit to British and Native American forces on August 16, 1812 in the beginning of the war. The Willits brothers were captured, but keeping a lot of prisoners of war is hard work and costly, so they and many of their fellow soldiers were paroled by the British under the agreement that they not participate any further in the war. But, as any elementary-aged child knows, as long as you cross your fingers behind your back, any promises you make don’t count. But the Willits borthers, as far as we know, kept their word. 

                After the war Elijah met his first wife, Catherine Bailey in Detroit. Catherine was a widow who co-owned a tavern in town with her brother. Elijah was Catherine’s third husband, both previous husbands died only a few years into each marriage. Catherine holds the distinction of being the first person to be fined in Detroit for selling liquor on a Sunday and Elijah paid the fine. Why? Was he the employee who had sold the liquor and his boss was making him pay for it? Was this a gallant and chivalrous gesture? We don’t know but Elijah and Catherine married shortly after in 1817. 

                There are many ways to get a potential romantic partner to notice you and agree to marry you. I don’t think paying their legal fines is necessarily the best way, but it is an option I suppose. The Willites remained in Detroit until at least 1819 when Elijah scouted out his land purchase. At that time, it was a full day’s journey from Detroit to what would become Birmingham through very swampy conditions, so it is possible that Catherine stayed behind and ran the tavern while Elijah built the family’s log cabin.

                We don’t know much about Catherine’s personality, but we do know that she liked alliteration and historical generals, she and Elijah had two children together-sons Wellington and Washington Willits. Unfortunately, Catherine died within a few months of Washington’s birth, around 1822. We don’t have any detail about her death or what she died from, but complications arising during or after childbirth is a solid guess. She remains a bit of a mystery, but her husband is all over Birmingham’s history and is easy to keep track of.

                So, now that we’ve nailed down who “E Willits” was, we can talk about how we figured out that the individual in the article was his son, Washington, because the article doesn’t actually name the son that Elijah was taking back from the Utica Asylum. We are 99% sure this person was Washington though, using historical research methods and cross referencing. The 1850 census, which lists the Willits family including a son, “W” who was born in about 1822 or 1824 (which would make him older than the age in the article, in his mid to late 20s as opposed to 18) and who is listed as “deranged”. 

                Birth certificates didn’t really exist at this time, so oftentimes guesstimates as to the year they were born, based on the report of the head of the household or the age that the census taker thought they were. In this census, as in the one for 1840, census takers (the official job description is “enumerator” but that really doesn’t roll off my tongue easily)  were asked to identify if those in each household were  “whether deaf and dumb, blind, insane, idiotic, pauper or convict”. And while there were detailed instructions given to these census takers about how to record things like occupation, there were no instructions as to what differentiated insane and idiotic… and you see some census takers, like the one that visited the Willit’s household, just freestyling it with their own interpretation or what was reported to them.

                The difference between insane, idiotic and deranged wasn’t clearly spelled out in the medical literature at the time, so it makes some sense then that the census wouldn’t have spelled it out either. Psychology and psychiatry were very young scientific fields and the ability to diagnose and treat the illnesses of the mind was limited. The line between insane and idiotic was subjective and largely seemed to come down to the question of “is what this person has curable?” Insanity was considered curable and looking through some of the literature of the time (and more on this later) you see descriptions of conditions like what we would probably today categorize as anxiety, PTSD, depression, post-partum depression, bipolar disorders, etc. While “idiotic” appears to refer to things like permanent learning disabilities. “Deranged” was sometimes a catch-all or used in place of insanity at some institutions. And I really want to stress that this line was incredibly subjective and varied from medical practitioner to practitioner. It was very possible for one individual to see two doctors and to be labeled as idiotic at one and insane at another.

                So, case closed on where Washington Willits was in 1850 and his condition, right? Wrong! We have a second census record for him in 1850, this one from Pontiac. In it he is listed as a 26 year old male, his occupation was farming and his condition is listed as “assault”. Remember, census takers were asked if the person was insane, idiotic, deaf, dumb, blind, pauper or convict. The men listed as sharing the same residence as Washington in Pontiac are listed with larceny, arson and perjury. We’ll include both census records on our website for you to view, check out our shownotes. 

                The plot thickens even more! A letter from the July 6, 1850 Oakland Gazette reads:

“To the editor of the Oakland Gazette- Sir: permit me through the columns of your paper, to unquire of the Prosecuting Attorney, or sheriff, presuming they know, why it is, and on what grounds, a man by the name of Willet from Birmingham is kept in jail at a public charge to the county. I have been informed that Willet has spells of being insane, and that for some threat made by him, during one of those aberrations of mind, his parents or some one of his family who reside at Birmingham and are reported to be well-off in pecuniary matters made a complaint against him, and by some process got him into jail. If the said Willet has committed any offense against the public peace of society and for which he stands indicted, and for which his state of mind would not protect him from a fair trial in one of the courts of the county, it is very well, but on the other hand, if by trick of legerdemain he is thrust into jail designedly to have him supported at the public defense it is quite another and a different thing.”

So, by July and when the census was taken that year at the county jail in Pontiac, Washington was in jail and there was at least one person in the community asking questions about it. Unfortunately, we did not find any published response to this letter nor did Washington’s name appear in the Oakland Gazette again.

What’s going on here? Why is Washington in the 1850 census twice? It could be as simple as Washington was released back to his family after the census enumerator had been at the jail in Pontiac but before the enumerator had reached his family’s home in Birmingham. Or, maybe a bit more shadily, Washington’s family was embarrassed or ashamed at having a son at the county jail and lied about where he was.

So, even though the question of the two census records and why exactly Washington was jailed in Pontiac is confusing and a bit unclear, we now have a clear sense of just when he might have been at the Utica Insane Asylum- sometime between July 1850 when he was in Pontiac and April 1851 when he died.

And here you might be thinking, “this story is about to get dark, isn’t it?” Remember I said that this period of time was a relative bright spot in the history of psychology! So, let’s explore just what the Utica Insane Asylum was and the new healthcare movement it represented at the time.

[break]

The Moral Treatment movement, of which the Utica Insane Asylum in New York was the premier institution in the United States, was founded by French physician Phillipe Pinel. Pinel developed an interest in mental illness after a friend developed “nervous melancholy” which lead to them taking their own life in the 1780s. Pinel considered this a tragedy that developed from gross mismanagement under the current system and sought work in pre and post revolutionary French Sanitariums and hospitals in an effort to develop a better system of care.

 His treatments were considered “moral” because he considered that even these patients with mental illness were still fully human actors and wrote that he treated each patient with dignity and respect and he often sought to appeal to a patient’s ability to reason in order to empower them to affect their own cure. Instead of a one size fits all approach, Pinel advocated for individualized treatments based on detailed case studies of the patient.

This was a big step forward in a society that understood mental illness as a punishment from god, and a sign of criminality and out of fear and ignorance treated those with mental illnesses and disabilities as though they were dangerous wild animals that needed to be chained up instead of human beings. 

Another tenet of the moral treatment movement was that mental illness was curable with kindness and sympathy. This optimism made it to the United States in the 1830s, and asylums where these principles could be put to use started to be built. Locations in the country were preferred, away from the chaos of cities where patients could breathe clean air, work and take recreation outside and enjoy some quiet.

The Utica Insane Asylum, later called the Utica Psychiatric Center (the building is still in use as an administrative center for the New York Office of Mental Health) was one of the first such asylums built in the United States. Built in 1843 at a cost of $637,065, it had a capacity for 600 patients to not only be housed but also pursue occupational therapy in the attached tailor, print and wood shops as well as gardens and farms.

The first superintendent of the facility, Dr Amariah Brigham thought that insanity could be overcome by “diversion of the mind from morbid trains of thought” and “arousing and calling into exercise the dormant faculties of the mind.” His assumption was that patients were capable of leaving behind their deliria, their hallucinations, their fixations, and their demons; lying “dormant” within them was a capacity for rational, orderly, polite expression, which needed to be coaxed out and encouraged by trained professionals.

Just to physically take their son to Utica New York in 1850, Elijah and Rachel Harmon Willits (Elijah’s second wife and Washington’s stepmother), would have had to undertake a fairly major journey. I haven’t yet been able to find out exactly how much it cost to be treated there, but the trip alone would be a stretch in both time and money. Of course, no direct flights between Birmingham and Utica existed in 1851, and the journey by train would have to be completed in legs, taking about a week. So it took two weeks for Elijah to bring Washington there and come back. With Elijah gone for that long, home, childcare and possibly the business fell entirely to Rachel. 

It’s something that probably many parents out there can relate to though. Parents of sick children today may undergo long journeys to get to specialists and may even uproot their entire lives to be closer to the best hospital or facility for their child’s care. And of course, your kids never stop being your kids. Even though Washington was in his mid-to-late 20s, his parents still cared enough to get him the best care available.

So what would Washington’s life be like if he did spend time in Utica? I say “if” because the first article I quoted at the top of the episode notes that he was discharged as incurable, but since it also has errors with Washington’s age, it is possible that he was not admitted in the first place. Recall the definition of “insane” at this time basically meant a condition that the admitting doctor thought was curable. Or he was treated and discharged. Unfortunately, the records of the historic patients at Utica are protected to this day and not available to looky lous like myself. Which I think is great because medical privacy is fantastic but I do also find it frustrating a bit because I want to know everything, you know?

But if he was there, Washington would have found himself placed in one of ten “families” of patients. Each family’s members would have been patients of the same sex who had similar conditions and they would cook, clean and relax together in their own suite of rooms. Each patient worked as well. There was a farm and gardens, sewing and tailoring workshops and even a print shop where the patients published their own periodical, the Opal. The Opal’s writers were anonymous but based on the pen names chosen, were composed of both men and women. Some write in glowing terms about their treatment at Utica, others slyly criticize their experiences. One of those criticisms was from a patient who wrote a poem about looking at pretty women on the street and then going home to the “gloves”- an anti-masturbation device used to stop patients from touching themselves. Yes, we are in a time period where masturbation itself was seen as outside the accepted norms and either a symptom or cause of mental illness.

Excessive masturbation was listed as some of the reasons that staff believed caused insanity. But, celibacy was listed in the Utica 1851 director’s report as a cause of insanity as well. It’s an interesting look at the cultural norms regarding what was considered the correct amount of sex to be having and what context was deemed appropriate. But, other conditions we can identify today as issues that many of us struggle with like addiction, drug use, complications or physiological depression arising from childbirth, suicide attempts, excessive grief, etc are also described within the director’s report. One of the saddest causes noted for insanity were three cases of what was called “seduction” among the female population of Utica. “Seduction” was a euphemism which may have been employed in cases of rape and sexual assault during this time.

But, of course, there are those head scratcher “causes” of insanity where it appears as though the staff was grasping at straws for whatever they could in the case of some patients. During this point in the study of mental illness, the idea that mental illness could be passed down hereditarily or arise through genetic or biological processes was not considered. Mental Illness, for the doctors of the time, always had an external cause. So when a more obvious cause couldn’t be found for a patient’s mental illness there was going into cold water; preaching for 16 days and nights straight; the firing of a cannon; the study of phrenology and converting to Mormonism. All of these are noted as causes of mental illness in the 1851 Director’s Report for Utica Asylum. 

And unlike in later decades, where patients could spend whole lifetimes in asylums, most patients during the 1850s were discharged from Utica in under two years as “cured”. The majority of patients, as might be expected, were from the state of New York but, intriguingly, the 1851 director’s report states that two patients were from Michigan. Was Washington one of them?

[break]

The Moral Treatment movement in western medicine attempted to do away with the inhumane treatments of the mentally ill of the previous centuries, which saw patients chained to floors and walls, with shoddy clothing and not enough food. At Utica, patients were afforded the dignity as humans that they deserved, had individualized treatment plans and were allowed recreation, work and creative outlets. Of course, what was considered “humane” at the time can look like tortures to us today. Straight jackets were employed at Utica for patients considered a danger to themselves or others. Patients who needed to calm down might be placed in a “Utica Crib” a contraption that is just large enough to allow an average sized adult to lay down in before the lid is lowered and keeps the patient in a laying position. It looks like a large crib with a lid or a long cage. Hey, I never said it was perfect, just a relatively bright spot in the history of mental health treatment.

So, Washington may have found himself in much greater comfort than another early Birminghamster who dealt with mental illness. Our very first podcast episode was about Imri Fish and the murder of Polly and Cynthia Utter in 1825. Even though that crime had taken place over 25 years before Washington went to Utica, it would have been fresh on the minds of his father and stepmother and the whole community. Elijah and Washington’s mother, Catherine Bailey, were living in Birmingham with had two young children to care for. Rachel Harmon, Elijah’s second wife, was a teenager in the area at the time. People in the area, many of whom were a part of the events and Imri’s trial are not likely to have forgotten the terror they felt and the horrific nature of the crime. Imri died after several years of imprisonment in the county jail in Pontiac because there were no mental health facilities to send folks to at the time. 

Is that why Washington spent some time in jail? Did his parents or community see troubling signs in him that reminded them of the horrible crime Imri committed? Did they seek treatment so that Washington didn’t end up like Imri? What mental illness Imri suffered eludes us even today, although we lay out several theories in his episode. We also have almost no clues as to what mental health disorder Washington may have had. Our only clue might be that the conductor claimed that he “couldn’t give an account of himself”. It might be tempting to see that as he was non-verbal or perhaps overstimulated and shut down. Or, he could have spoken but not been understood. Or, it could be an excuse the conductor had for having a bad day and being a jerk as well. We simply don’t have enough evidence to say anything for certain.

Unfortunately, we don’t have a fully fleshed out view of Washington Willits as a person, but we can use his life as a way to glimpse what life may have been like for a person with mental health struggles in the 1850s. And that view is, surprisingly, humane. In some regards, this is the prevailing attitude today (after dispensing a variety of psychotropic medications to help bring symptoms under control), offering wellness retreats to those struggling with some forms of mental illness with group support and individualized approaches.

In the decades after Washington’s death, we start to see the over-crowding and underfunding of asylums that lead to them being the institutions of terror that we see exaggerated in the ghost tours and haunted asylums of today. In the latter 19th and early 20th century, patients were isolated from society in such places, sometimes for most of their lives instead of being treated and released as cured. By the 1900 census, census takers were no longer noting whether individual members of households were “insane” or “idiotic” because those folks were typically housed elsewhere.  

Join us next time as we return to an interesting thread we dropped in our episode about Fenton Watkins. Remember when Florence, in her oral history, mentioned that her brother was shot and the interviewer, frustratingly, just jumped right to the next question instead of asking for more details? We haven’t stopped thinking about it and we uncovered a crime that put a lot of folks in Birmingham and the whole Metro Detroit area on edge because of its perceived connection to a wave of crime targeting the Italian community in the early 1900s. So join us next week as we dive into the tragic death of Edward Crawford and the Black Hand, a criminal organization that terrorized the Italian-American community by demanding large ransoms in exchange for not kidnapping or murdering their families or destroying their property or businesses. It’s a story of extortion, fears over increasing immigration and how innocent bystanders often bear the brunt of crime.

I’m Caitlin Donnelly and thank you for joining us for this episode of Birmingham Uncovered. To see photos, newsclippings and other documents, including the 1851 Director’s report for the Utica Insane Asylum, related to Washington Willits and his family check out the link in our shownotes. For questions, comments and episode suggestions, feel free to reach us at museum@bhamgov.org. Special thanks to the Birmingham Area Cable Board for PEG grant funding that made this podcast possible. Also thanks to past and present staff of the Birmingham Museum, and our amazing volunteers.