Theophilus and his lawyers may have exchanged glances. What was this? The paper in question was passed across the courtroom for the pastor to examine.
He likely could not believe his eyes. It was one of Elizabeth’s Bible class essays. Those essays she had been so desperate, all fall, to get her hands on.
This was the reason why. This was the reason she’d given Theophilus her signature on those deeds in exchange for them. With the habeas corpus plot tucked in the back of her mind, she’d known a trial would soon be forthcoming, and she’d needed those essays back. Because she’d always thought they’d provide compelling evidence that she had never been insane, and Elizabeth knew, in light of the three years she’d spent in the asylum, just how critical that now was. Because she could look as sane as she liked at her counsel’s table, day in and day out of this ongoing trial, but the stigma of insanity still trailed her like smoke. Those twelve jurymen might well be thinking she seems sane now, true, but what about those three years in an asylum? Surely a woman could not be committed for nothing?
There is no smoke without fire.
But Elizabeth had always believed her Bible class essays could confirm the truth: she’d never been mad at all.
Now was her moment to use them.
Reluctantly, Theophilus admitted it was the same paper that his own witnesses had cited as evidence of Elizabeth’s madness. He handed the essay back, resigned to hearing its eloquent arguments being pronounced aloud in her counsel’s articulate voice.
But he was in for another shock.
“[We request] permission of the court,” said Elizabeth’s lawyer, “for Mrs. Packard to read it to the jury.”
It was the worst idea Theophilus could imagine. His charismatic, brilliant wife, allowed to speak for herself? His lawyers “most strenuously opposed” the motion.
But Starr overruled them, perhaps interested himself to hear from the woman at the center of the case.
Elizabeth took a very deep breath. Never had a more important moment nor a more important speech been before her. She pressed her hands into the table and pushed herself upward, her hoop skirts unfolding around her in a swell of support, like a Greek chorus made of cloth. She picked up the essay she’d written long ago, before she’d known that a woman could be imprisoned for her views. In “a distinct tone of voice” in which “every word was heard all over the courtroom,” she began to read her own writing aloud.
Every person in the courtroom listened intently. The crowd fell silent in astonished awe. It was not just the sight of Elizabeth Packard, so small and yet so powerful, standing up for herself that was arresting; it was the audio of a woman’s voice speaking in that male-dominated court. In 1864, female public speaking was still relatively rare. It was, in fact, a risky strategy to let her have a voice. Back in 1837, when the Grimké sisters, early female advocates of abolition, went on a public speaking tour, they were condemned, ridiculed, and threatened. The Congregational Church had been so disturbed by their powerful eloquence it had issued a pastoral letter, warning the faithful against “unnatural”15 preaching women, whose actions would see them “fall in shame and dishonor into the dust.”16 Some people’s views had not advanced much further in the intervening years.
But Moore believed in his client. He thought her “a lady of fine mental endowments”;17 he even paid her the compliment of calling her a “masculine thinker.”18
And he’d made the right call. Elizabeth was simply mesmerizing. “She drew all eyes, all ears, in every circle,” 19 people wrote of her, as they fell “under the spell of her marvellous power.”20
She read her essay entitled “How Godliness is Profitable.” In it, she’d answered the question of whether a Christian farmer might expect more success in his labors than a sinner, a question to which Theophilus’s church had resolutely answered yes.
Yet the evidence in their own farming community had belied that stance. “I think we have no intelligent reason for believing that the motives with which we prosecute our secular business, have any influence in the pecuniary results,”21 Elizabeth therefore argued. In her essay, she espoused that man’s physical, intellectual, and spiritual realms operated independently. “For instance,” she said aloud in the courtroom, “a very immoral man may be a very healthy, long-lived man.”
But that did not mean she thought godliness unprofitable. “The profits of godliness cannot mean, simply, pecuniary profits, because this would limit the gain of godliness to this world, alone,” Elizabeth explained, “whereas, it is profitable not only for this life, but also for the life to come…