Dr. Louis Burgess became superintendent of the Louisiana State Insane Asylum in 1870 at a time when doctors conceived of “madness” as rooted in race and heredity. In fact, insanity had been a whites-only affliction until emancipation, after which racial scientists began to remake race within the asylum walls. They targeted African Americans and migrants as having innately unsound minds and prescribed a “treatment” of forced manual labor.
White supremacist agitators understood the racial implications of the asylum and forced Burgess from office in 1874 in scandal for violating medical ethics by working with the asylum’s Black president, T.M.J. Clark. This association between Burgess and Clark led the doctor to issue an apology letter as the white supremacist press to term him a “brute,” a term associated with slavery and insanity.[1] The scandal also shows that white moderates like Burgess supported early eugenics and how these moderates betrayed their Black political allies by prioritizing their commitment to racial hierarchy.
Rear view of the Louisiana State Insane Asylum taken at roughly the time Burgess and Clark served as its superintendent and president. Andrew David Lytle, “East Louisiana Hospital for the Insane, Jackson, La.,” c. 1870. Courtesy Louisiana Digital Library.
The key medical ideology at play here—what would eventually become crystallized in the eugenics movement of the late-nineteenth century—held that African Americans had some mental incapacity that justified white surveillance and coercion under slavery. Enslavement, according to the latest in enslaver science, meant that enslaved people must be exempt from insanity because they labored under white supervision without having the burden of thought. According to these medicalized practitioners of slavery, those institutionalized in the state’s asylum—almost exclusively white—might be treated for madness by forced manual labor, benefitting in the same way that Black workers benefitted from enslavement.
At this point, no one disputed that money had gone missing or that the patients were on the brink of starvation. Several even died. Although supplies had been pilfered, kickbacks paid, and money embezzled, the real scandal in the eyes of the racist press was that the asylum had a Black president. Clark and Burgess resigned in disgrace, betrayed by the white legislators who had appointed them. These moderate politicians hoped to signal their commitment to racial hierarchy to retain power. Because they faced a conservative movement organized around overt white supremacy, they were unable to peel off opposition supporters and undermined the coalition of Black, Northern white, and foreign-born voters that brought the interracial government to power.