“Happiness and misery are coins which are current in both worlds. Therefore, it appears to me, that happiness is the profit attendant upon godliness.”
Her “common sense reasons” resonated in the courtroom in a way they never had in the Bible class. As she reached the essay’s conclusion and modestly retook her seat, “a murmur of applause arose from every part of the room.”22 Though promptly suppressed by the sheriff, the sound still rang in Elizabeth’s ears: confirmation of her mini victory. She’d always thought that writing down her thoughts would save her.
She only hoped, when the jury gave its verdict, that she’d be proved right.
After her showstopping performance, the witnesses who followed seemed almost anticlimactic. She was supported by the former Manteno town supervisor, Daniel Beedy, and by Mr. and Mrs. Blessing.
“I never thought her insane,”23 testified Mr. Blessing, while Rebecca sketched for the court the cruelty of Elizabeth’s husband: the lack of fire in the midst of winter, the locked doors, banned friends, the threatened fist if she did not leave his house.
As the evidence stacked up, the reaction in the courtroom was visceral. “The popular verdict is decidedly against [Theophilus],”24 Elizabeth realized.
And the public were not afraid to make their feelings known. The Doles were fearful of “the disorderly demonstrations by the furious populace filling the Court House,”25 while Theophilus condemned the “vulgar hisses issued from the females in the crowd.”26 In particular, he resented being “surrounded by bawdy women,”27 who would point their fingers at him in open court, exclaiming about his actions. He criticized Starr’s “feeble attempt…to express his sense of the impropriety of…such demonstrations.”28
Yet the crowd settled down to hear what was probably the final testimony of the trial’s first week as Sarah Haslett took the stand.
“I never saw any signs of insanity with her,” Sarah said firmly. “I called often before she was kidnapped and carried to Jacksonville, and since her return.”29 She testified that she’d been banned from seeing Elizabeth, so the women had been forced to converse through the window. She described in detail how that window was nailed shut.
Unusually, Sarah was cross-examined. But Theophilus perhaps detested this intermeddler above all others, because of what he knew she’d said to his wife. With that insider insight tucked into his pocket, Bonfield rose to quiz the pregnant housewife.
He asked what she’d talked about with the pastor’s wife at the window.
“She talked about getting released from her imprisonment,” Sarah said pointedly.
But that was not what the lawyer meant.
“She asked if filing a bill of complaint would lead to a divorce,” Sarah admitted. The d-word was likely why she’d been cross-examined; Elizabeth’s mere discussion of the subject could cast her character in a poor light. Yet knowing all too well how the topic might play with the all-male jury, Sarah added quickly, “She said she did not want a divorce; she only wanted protection from Mr. Packard’s cruelty.”
Sarah seemingly didn’t care, however, what the jurymen thought of her. She perhaps fixed her friend’s husband with a glare as she added, “I advised her to not stand it quietly, but get a divorce.”
The spectators in the courtroom seemed to share Sarah’s feelings as she stepped down from the stand. There was a new “rabid, ferocious savageness”30 to their hisses and their boos. Theophilus witnessed it with alarm, later writing, “It was unmistakably evident what the verdict of the infatuated assembly was.”31 He did not attribute his own behavior to their animosity but identified it as “the bitter spirit of sectarianism.”32
His lawyers could not help but observe it too. As the court closed for business on Saturday, January 16, they agreed that if these angry outbursts happened again, they’d withdraw their client from the courthouse.
But all that was for the next week. That Saturday, everyone began filing out of the courthouse into the darkness of the night. The air was aflame with outraged exclamations from the spectators at the evidence they’d heard.
And those exclamations took on a different timbre that snowy Saturday night. Anger boiled over and bled into enmity. Concern transformed to collusion. Plots and plans began to be hatched like gremlins, which soon circulated among the spectators, tugging them toward trouble. What began as mere rumors of “lawless violence”33 coalesced into details and designs. Urgent whispers were shared, ideas jumping from one group to another like hungry fleas. And then the scheme sauntered through the night with feigned innocence—the better to entrap its target.