His testimony continued, focusing on the Bible classes that had caused such trouble, yet the stress was getting to him. As he described how Elizabeth had asked his permission to read her essays aloud, he suddenly cracked. “I was much surprised; I felt so bad, I did not know what to do,” he managed before bursting into tears, perhaps haunted by the pressure the church had been under at that heightened political time.
It was a good while before he regained control of himself. Once he did, he was back on message: “I knew she was crazy.”
When Moore cross-examined, he was perhaps cautious, given the witness’s apparent instability. He probed Dole gently on his religious views.
“Her ideas on religion did not agree with mine, nor with my view of the Bible,” Abijah said.
“Was it an indication of insanity that she wanted to leave the Presbyterian Church?” asked Elizabeth’s lawyer.
“She would not leave the church unless she was insane,” replied Dole as though pointing out a fact. “I am a member of the church,” he added emphatically. “I believe the church is right. I believe everything the church does is right. I believe everything in the Bible.”
“Do you believe Mrs. Packard was insane, and is insane?”
“I do,” he said firmly. “I do not deem it proper for persons to investigate new doctrines or systems of theology.”
Yet Dole had earlier testified that he and Theophilus had become Presbyterians only eight years before. Previously, they’d been Congregationalists, following the New School creed.
Moore attacked, the easy question already on his lips: “Was it dangerous for you to examine the doctrines or theology embraced in the Presbyterian Church, when you left the Congregational Church, and joined it?”
Dole bristled. “I will not answer so foolish a question.”
At that, the witness was discharged.
Theophilus’s lawyers consulted one another. There were three of them now: forty-two-year-old Chauncey A. Lake joined the team a day or so into the trial. He was a member of the Illinois House of Representatives as well as a lawyer, and all his skills were now at Theophilus’s disposal.
After Abijah Dole, the second of the church’s deacons, Deacon Smith, took the stand to testify that Elizabeth was mad. He had a high forehead, low beard, and unforgiving eyes. The fifty-year-old deacon was halfway through his evidence when he suddenly stopped. All eyes turned as one as forty-nine-year-old Sybil Dole unexpectedly entered the courtroom. She strode toward the tables at the front, leading Libby, who walked obediently behind.
Sybil strolled straight past her sister-in-law, not giving Elizabeth a single glance, but as she whirled past in a snooty swish of skirts, she lost her shadow. Libby stopped. She stopped beside her mother. As Stephen Moore reported it, she suddenly went straight up to Elizabeth and threw her arms around her, “clinging to her with all child-like fervor.”6
It was perhaps the first real affection she’d shown her mother since her homecoming, but maybe the hope that the trial afforded was affecting Libby too. Her brother Isaac reported that after her mother had been sent to the asylum, Libby learned “to keep her feelings to herself.”7 She’d squashed them all down: her love for her mother, grief at her absence, guilt at being unable to help. Perhaps that box of feelings was now bursting, emotion finally rising to the fore.
But she was not allowed to seek comfort with her mother. As soon as Sybil realized what had happened, she doubled back to collect her niece. She “snatched the child up.”8
“Come away from that woman,” she hissed. “She is not fit to take care of you.”9
She pulled Libby roughly away.
The spectators erupted with emotion, to such a degree that it stopped proceedings. “Not a mother’s heart there but what was touched,” said Stephen Moore, “and scarce a dry eye was seen. Quite a stir was made.”10 But it was nothing compared to the roiling emotions within Elizabeth.
She had to win her case. She had to be with her children again—and properly, not this strange half-life they’d been living for the past few months. She had to be declared sane, to be made safe from committal, so she could become their mother again, in every way a woman should. They clearly needed her. She had to do this as much for them as for herself.
She took a deep breath and focused again on the momentous task before her. This trial was her only hope for her future.
Eventually, the courtroom settled again as the sheriff restored order. Moore rose to cross-examine Deacon Smith, though there wasn’t much he wanted to elicit.