Considering Jonathan Plummer, Jr.

Last year Alex Cain shared a detailed profile of Jonathan Plummer, Jr., a Revolutionary War veteran celebrated as “poet laureate to Lord Timothy Dexter.”

Alex wrote:

Jonathan Plummer Jr. was born in 1761 Newbury, Massachusetts and was the oldest of eight children. According to historian Roger W. Higgins, Plummer was “sickly through infancy and early childhood was mentally weak and easily imposed upon.” As a teenager, he acquired a “reputation records from for being a strange and wayward boy with a flair for revival meetings.”

Even Plummer himself noted “my reading, traveling, and thirst for knowledge, too … began to operate to my disadvantage . . . to make me what they called an odd fellow — that is, different from the young fellows who were not readers . . . I was already so insufferably unfashionable as to begin to talk in young company of religion, virtue, poets, philosophers, lords, generals, statesmen, kings, battles, sieges, &c. &c. . . . this made the young people think that I thought myself better than them, and made them resolve to make me feel the torturing effects of their vindictive vengeance.”

This description makes me wonder if Plummer would today be diagnosed as on the autism spectrum. He was clearly intelligent, with a particularly good memory, but socially awkward throughout his life. Historians shy away from applying modern psychiatric diagnoses to people of the past, in large part because those diagnoses are themselves often culturally shaped. At the same time, recognizing that some conditions may have been part of being human all along might be helpful.