Representative Richard, Jr. Sprigg

Richard Sprigg Steuart (November 1797 – July 14, 1876) was an American physician and an early pioneer in the treatment of mental illness, whose career was closely associated with the development of institutional care for the mentally ill in Maryland. He was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in November 1797, a younger son of physician Dr. James Steuart and his wife Rebecca. One of eight children, he was the fourth of the siblings, two of whom died in infancy of scarlet fever. Steuart was raised at the family mansion at Maryland Square in Baltimore, an environment that combined professional medical influence from his father with the social standing of an established Maryland family. He was educated at St. Mary’s College in Baltimore. Through his sister, Elizabeth Sprigg Steuart (1803–1896), he was the uncle of Charles William Kinsey (1829–1883), a Major in the Confederate Army, a friend of General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson who was present at Jackson’s death, and who later served as a Virginia Congressman from 1882 to 1883.

As a youth, Steuart’s early experience of public life came during the War of 1812. At the age of seventeen he volunteered as aide-de-camp to the Washington Blues, a company of Maryland militia raised and commanded by his older brother, Captain (later Major General) George H. Steuart (1790–1867). He served at the Battle of North Point on September 12, 1814, where the Maryland militia helped delay a British advance long enough to strengthen the defenses of Baltimore. In later recollections he described how his limited surgical knowledge proved useful on the battlefield, recounting how he improvised a tourniquet to arrest hemorrhage from a wounded soldier’s femoral artery and transported him to the Maryland Hospital, where surgeon Gibson later amputated the man’s leg. This formative experience combined military service, emergency surgery, and institutional care, foreshadowing his later professional focus.

After the war, Steuart initially pursued legal studies under Brigadier General William H. Winder, who had commanded United States forces at the Battle of Bladensburg and was subsequently court-martialed. Steuart soon abandoned the law in favor of medicine, beginning medical study under Dr. William Donaldson in 1818 at Maryland Medical University. He received his M.D. in 1822, publishing in the same year a treatise titled On the Action of Arteries. Following graduation, he entered into partnership with Donaldson in a general medical practice in Baltimore, a collaboration that lasted seventeen years. Upon Donaldson’s death, Steuart succeeded to the practice. Over the course of what he later described as “23 years of hard professional life,” he developed a reputation as a skilled clinician, and by 1853 the American Journal of the Medical Sciences described him as “well known as one of the most eminent physicians of this city [of Baltimore].”

From an early stage in his medical career, Steuart gravitated toward the then relatively neglected field of mental illness. In 1834 he became President of the Board of Visitors of the Maryland Hospital for the Insane, an institution founded in 1797 and one of the earliest of its kind in the United States. His responsibilities expanded over time until he served as both President of the Board and Medical Superintendent, making the hospital’s operations and improvement his principal professional endeavor. In 1843 he was elected to the Professorship of the Theory and Practice of Physic at the University of Maryland, reflecting his standing in the broader medical community. He also served as president of the Medical and Chirurgical Faculty of the State of Maryland in 1848–49 and again in 1850–51, positions that placed him at the center of organized medicine in the state. His growing interest in mental disease was likely influenced in part by family experience; two sons of his brother, Major General George H. Steuart, suffered from mental illness, a circumstance that may have deepened his commitment to psychiatric care and institutional reform.

Steuart’s most notable contribution to the treatment of mental illness was his leadership in the expansion and modernization of the Maryland Hospital for the Insane, later known as the Spring Grove Hospital Center. By the mid-nineteenth century, the hospital’s facilities and bed capacity were no longer adequate for the needs of the state. Steuart worked to secure authorization and funding from the Maryland General Assembly for a new, larger facility. In cooperation with the prominent social reformer Dorothea Dix, who in 1852 delivered an impassioned address to the Maryland legislature urging improved care for the mentally ill, he chaired the Commissioners for Erecting a Hospital for the Insane. This body selected the hospital’s present site at Spring Grove in Catonsville. In 1853 the commissioners completed the purchase of 136 acres of land for $14,000, of which $12,340 was raised through private contributions; Steuart personally contributed $1,000, a very substantial sum at the time. He regarded the expansion of the hospital as his life’s work. Although the Maryland legislature authorized the project in the 1850s, construction of the new buildings was delayed by the onset of the Civil War and was not completed until 1872, when the institution was described by contemporaries as “one of the largest and best appointed Insane Asylums in the United States.” Spring Grove continues to treat mental illness in the twenty-first century and is the second-oldest institution of its kind in the United States.

Steuart’s professional life was intertwined with his role as a substantial landowner and slaveholder. In 1842 he inherited from his uncle William Steuart four large farms near the South River in Anne Arundel County, Maryland—Dodon, Obligation, Bridge Hill, and Fingall—comprising around 1,600 acres of land and about 150 enslaved people. (Other accounts place the total acreage of his inheritance at approximately 1,900 acres.) His grandfather, George H. Steuart, had purchased and developed Dodon in 1747, and the estate had long been associated with the family. This inheritance made Richard Sprigg Steuart a wealthy planter and one of the more significant slaveholders in the state. As a result, he gave up his general medical practice in Baltimore to concentrate on managing his plantations. Like many Southern slaveholders, he expressed ambivalent views about slavery. He acknowledged slavery as a “curse” on Maryland and believed it could not continue indefinitely, yet he opposed abolitionist efforts to mandate its immediate end and defended the interests of slaveholding society.

Steuart’s views on slavery and race found expression in his work with the colonization movement. From 1828 he served on the Board of Managers of the Maryland State Colonization Society (MSCS), a state branch of the American Colonization Society, which sought to “return” free Black Americans to Africa and establish a colony for their resettlement, a project that developed into the colony and later nation of Liberia. The MSCS’s leadership included prominent Marylanders: Charles Carroll of Carrollton, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, served as president; Steuart’s father, James Steuart, was vice president; and his brother George H. Steuart also sat on the board. By this period, however, most African Americans were native-born in the United States and many opposed colonization, preferring to struggle for civil rights at home. In an 1845 open letter to editor John L. Carey of the Commercial Daily Advertiser in Baltimore, printed by John Murphy, Steuart described slavery as a burden on Maryland’s “beautiful land” and lamented the state’s relative economic and demographic stagnation compared with Pennsylvania and Ohio. He argued that slavery discouraged white laborers from settling where enslaved people worked the soil and fostered a disdain for manual labor among whites. Yet he rejected what he saw as the radicalism of abolitionists, instead advocating voluntary emancipation by slaveholders and the “repatriation” of free Black people to Africa, asserting that “the colored man [must] look to Africa, as his only hope of preservation and of happiness.” Despite legislative efforts in Maryland to restrict manumissions and bar the entry of free Blacks, by 1860 free Blacks—many of them free people of color—constituted 49 percent of the state’s Black population.

The outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861 brought Steuart’s political loyalties into sharp conflict with his public responsibilities. Although Maryland was a slave state, it did not secede from the Union, and federal troops entered the state to ensure its continued allegiance. Pre-war loyalties in Maryland were deeply divided, and in April 1861 Baltimore was the scene of the Baltimore riot, in which Union soldiers traveling by rail through the city were attacked. Steuart and his family were sympathetic to the Southern cause, and he was known as a Confederate sympathizer. At the start of the war he was relieved of his position as superintendent of the Maryland Hospital for the Insane because he refused to sign an oath of loyalty to the Union. For much of the conflict he lived as a fugitive, evading federal authorities while reportedly smuggling medical supplies to the Confederacy. His removal from office interrupted his direct oversight of the hospital and delayed aspects of the Spring Grove project, but he remained committed to the institution’s eventual completion.

With the end of the Civil War and the restoration of civil order in Maryland, Steuart was reinstated as superintendent of the Maryland Hospital for the Insane. He resumed his efforts to bring the new Spring Grove facility into operation, overseeing the final stages of construction and organization. In 1872 the new building at Spring Grove was finally opened, realizing the plans first authorized by the Maryland legislature in the 1850s and long championed by Steuart. He continued to serve as superintendent almost until his death, maintaining active involvement in the administration and clinical direction of the hospital. Richard Sprigg Steuart died on July 14, 1876. His career spanned general medical practice, academic medicine, plantation management, and institutional reform in mental health, and his life reflected many of the central tensions of nineteenth-century Maryland—between slavery and emancipation, Union and Confederacy, and traditional custodial care and emerging medical approaches to mental illness.