With the company all assembled, the judge, Charles Starr, swiftly began proceedings. First on the agenda was Theophilus’s written response to the writ, pulled together only that morning.
The thirty-nine-year-old judge bent his head to read. A handsome man, he had a full head of salt-and-pepper hair, a curly beard, and thoughtful eyes. Starr was known to be conscientious, with a well-grounded knowledge of the law, his judgments “distinguished by the utmost fairness and impartiality.”25 He was entering his seventh year in the job, but he’d never encountered a case like this before.
Judge Charles R. Starr
Theophilus’s lawyers were vocal in protesting the “very short time”26 their client had had to prepare his defense. But Starr honestly wouldn’t have known it from the thick file before him. Thanks to Theophilus’s preparations for committing Elizabeth to Northampton, he was immediately able to supply the judge with McFarland’s certificate and many other supportive documents. He absolutely denied the imprisonment or unlawful restraint of his wife, claiming she was insane, incurably so, and had been in the asylum for the past three years for that very reason.
Starr read carefully through the documentation. He questioned Theophilus. Under the judge’s steady gaze, a slight change in the pastor’s account came through.
“I…denied the charge of imprisonment,” Theophilus later wrote, “but admitted the exercise of a slight necessary restraint over her on account of her insanity.”27
The judge looked over at Elizabeth Packard. She sat at her counsel’s table, occasionally speaking with her lawyers about their management of her case. According to an eyewitness, she behaved “as one who is not only not insane, but as one possessing intellectual endowments of a high order, and an equipoise and control of mind far above the majority of humankind.”28
The judge may well have scratched his salt-and-pepper head.
Starr was not only a lawyerly but literary man, renowned in the town for his “genuine imaginative powers.”29 As he pondered the perplexing evidence before him, he decided to draw on them to resolve this thorny case.
Theophilus had testified he’d restrained his wife because she was insane.
Starr now had just two words for the man.
“Prove it!”30
CHAPTER 42
It had taken four years, but Elizabeth Packard had finally been given the insanity trial she had always wanted. Never had it been more important. In short, the trial was her only hope for any kind of future outside an asylum’s walls.
Nor were the stakes high solely for herself. After all, if the court ruled for her, what did that say about the unjust law by which married women could be committed “without the evidence of insanity…required in other cases”？1
The judge moved at once to empanel a jury of twelve men to adjudicate on whether Elizabeth was mad. Bonfield immediately objected. It was a highly unusual course for the judge to have taken. Not only were married women not supposed to be allowed insanity trials at all, but this had originally been a habeas corpus case, in which the judge alone was supposed to rule. But the objection was dismissed.
Theophilus was spitting mad. “It was illegal,”2 he alleged of the judge’s decision. He thought the angry crowd, with its “impudent, violent mob spirit,”3 had influenced Starr to make a corrupt, self-motivated call. “The direct votes of the people choose periodically the Judge,” Theophilus hissed, “and the time for an election will at length arrive.”4
Though the mass of people who’d turned out to support Elizabeth were religiously diverse, Theophilus noted only that they were “of a different persuasion”5 to him. He’d always had a them-versus-us mentality when it came to religion; he was quick to charge the spectators were “excited by sectarian prejudice.”6
Therefore Bonfield, having had his first objection overruled, immediately prepared an application for a change of venue, echoing his client in alleging that “a jury could not be obtained that would not…partake”7 of the sectarian feeling. Yet in the end, he decided not to present it.
That was probably because as the jury members began to be selected, that allegation of sectarian prejudice simply could not stand. Of the twelve jurymen, five were Presbyterian: Theophilus’s religion.
As would be expected, the jurymen came from a range of backgrounds. There was a shoemaker, an architect, the owner of a livery stable, and another who ran a local saloon. There was even a major landowner, Lemuel Milk, who seemed a good choice to Elizabeth’s counsel; he was known for being “the reverse of orthodox”8 when it came to religion. That was the kind of juryman Stephen Moore was after.