At the train station in the city, mobs began to gather, “ready to sacrifice their victim.”34 The shadowy figures paced along the platform, breaths puffing out into icy air, those clouds of steam concealing their intent.
They were not waiting for the cars…but for Theophilus Packard.
CHAPTER 45
Elizabeth arrived at court on Monday, January 18, in good time for the day’s proceedings. To her surprise, she noticed that Theophilus was not there. But Stephen Moore was, and probably in even higher spirits than normal, because he’d found that expert witness he’d long sought for his client, and today, he would take the stand.
But as Judge Starr swept into the courtroom and all rose, ready for that witness to be called, there was still no sign of Theophilus.
What, Elizabeth wondered, could have kept him from the court?
Yet she couldn’t worry overlong about it. She had to focus. Her team called Dr. Duncanson.
Alexander A. Duncanson was a Scotsman, likely with the accent to match, as he’d only been living in America since 1852. Now in his forties, he’d been a practicing physician for over two decades, having gained his diploma from the University of Glasgow. He’d also worked as a clergyman—and not just any clergyman. He’d been a dissenting minister: a pastor who’d formally broken from the Presbyterian Church of Scotland. Upon learning of his expertise, Moore had scrambled to get him an interview with Elizabeth, and Duncanson, who currently lived in Kankakee, had managed to conduct his examination even while the trial was going on. Given his theological background, it must have been a true meeting of minds.
“I live here,” Duncanson said on the stand soon after being sworn, “am a physician; have been a clergyman; have been a practicing physician twenty-one years. Have known Mrs. Packard since this trial commenced. Have known her by general report for three years and upwards.”1
Because the case of Elizabeth Packard, the clergyman’s wife who was sent to an asylum for thinking her own thoughts, had become notorious in her local area over the past few years.
“I visited her at Mr. Orr’s,” Duncanson continued. “I was requested to go there and have a conversation with her and determine if she was sane or insane. Talked three hours with her, on political, religious and scientific subjects.”
Moore asked for his professional opinion on her state of mind. Duncanson was forthright. “I think not only that she is sane,” he said, “but the most intelligent lady I have talked with in many years.”
It was a compelling endorsement, yet the doctor was only just getting started.
“We talked religion very thoroughly,” he continued. “I find her an expert in both departments, Old School and New School theology… Many of her ideas and doctrines are embraced in Swedenborgianism, and many are found only in the New School theology. The best and most learned men of both Europe and this country, are advocates of these doctrines.”
Moore quizzed him about Elizabeth’s most infamous belief regarding the female Holy Ghost.
“[It] is a very ancient theological dogma,” Duncanson confirmed, “and entertained by many of our most eminent men.”
Yet Duncanson wanted to move on from the Holy Ghost, because he could not stop enthusing about Elizabeth. “On every topic I introduced,” he said, almost in awe at her intellect, “she was perfectly familiar, and discussed them with an intelligence that at once showed she was possessed of a good education, and a strong and vigorous mind. I did not agree with her in sentiment on many things,” he conceded, “but I do not call people insane because they differ from me, nor from a majority, even, of people.”
He warmed to his subject. “Many persons called Swedenborg insane,” he said. “That is true; but he had the largest brain of any person during the age in which he lived; and no one now dares call him insane. You might with as much propriety call Christ insane, because he taught the people many new and strange things; or Galileo; or Newton; or Luther; or Robert Fulton; or Morse, who electrified the world; or Watts or a thousand others I might name. Morse’s best friends for a long time thought him mad; yet there was a magnificent mind, the embodiment of health and vigor.”
Elizabeth wanted to slap the table in agreement; this was a point she’d long made in her own defense, to which no one had listened. “It has always been my fortune…or rather misfortune…to be a pioneer, just about twenty-five years in advance of my cotemporaries,” she’d written in the asylum. “Therefore, I am called crazy, or insane, by those so far in my rear, that they cannot see the reasonableness of the positions and opinions I assume to advocate and defend.”2