She did not plan solely to publish the reproof; that alone would make a flimsy work. She also wanted to include her letter to the Tribune, which they’d refused to publish, as well as her account of the hospital abuse, written under the Coes’ name, “Appeal in behalf of the insane.”
In addition, she reached out to her old friend Mrs. Hosmer, the former asylum sewing room directress, who’d once been as concerned as Elizabeth at what she’d witnessed in the asylum. Priscilla Hosmer had taken a new husband on January 11, 1863, and was now Mrs. Graff. She replied enthusiastically to Elizabeth on March 5, 1864, fully supporting her ideas for publication and enclosing the letters she’d written to the trustees and Dorothea Dix to try to stop the abuse. Elizabeth added these letters to her pamphlet. She knew only too well that her own voice—despite the recent verdict—would still be shadowed by the stigma of insanity. Mrs. Graff’s account provided independent corroboration that what she said was true.
While Elizabeth busied herself in Manteno preparing her pamphlet for the press, the Packards’ media war continued apace. By this time, Theophilus had submitted his thick file of documents to the Chicago Tribune. Though the paper ultimately declined to publish them—it was an “immense mass of evidence…for which it is impossible for us to find room”42—on March 12, 1864, they nevertheless printed their own damning verdict.
Elizabeth Packard, so they said, was afflicted “with a well-defined species of monomania.”43 It was indisputable, despite the way she displayed an “almost supernatural strength of mind” （the subtext of witch was almost shouted）。 The paper concluded with a sense of finality: “The public should give this painful subject no further thought.”
But Elizabeth had an altogether different plan in mind.
CHAPTER 47
On March 17, 1864, the iron horse rode into Chicago amid a cacophony of screeches and squeals. Yet it sounded to Elizabeth almost like a trumpeted chorus heralding her arrival. It certainly made for a “dazzling entrance into the great, splendid Chicago depot.”1 Having borrowed $10 （about $160） from the Hanfords, promising to pay them back once she’d made her fortune, Elizabeth had set out for the big city, determined to succeed.
She disembarked and wended her way through the city, her spirits enervated from Chicago’s own vigor. The city was buzzing. On every street, new buildings seemed to be going up: “the unmistakable signs of active, thriving trade are everywhere manifest.”2 Everywhere, there seemed to be people—its population was 171,356 and growing—as well as hens, cows, and billy goats, because it was legal to keep livestock in the city at that time. Perhaps as a result, it smelled, badly, with the sewage-rich river adding to the stink: “a combination of sulphurated hydrogen, the odor of decaying rodents, and the stench of rotting brassica.”3 And it was noisy, its urban orchestra scored by the shriek of the two hundred locomotives that arrived each day, the cries of newspaper boys and shopkeepers, and the clip-clop of hooves from the horsecars.
Elizabeth had never lived in a city before. Theophilus did not like them, finding “more ostentation, pride and vice in cities than in country towns.”4 But Chicago had a worldwide reputation for energy and enterprise, so it was exactly where she needed to be.
She wasted no time. Within days, she’d made arrangements with the Times Steam Job Printing House on Randolph Street to print two thousand copies of her thirty-two-page pamphlet. Perhaps to her surprise, she did not find it hard to establish business relationships, for the positive publicity she’d received preceded her. “The facts of the case were so well known there,” she wrote, “I needed no other passport to the confidence of the public.”5 With more women entering the workforce in wartime, too, she was not alone in breaking new business boundaries.
What an achievement it was to hold the finished pamphlet in her hand. It was a slim, almost weightless publication, its cover printed on the same pale paper as the inside pages. She’d asked for a decorative border around the title, and it looked very smart indeed; she planned to sell them for 25 cents each （$4.11）。
With the reproof published, she felt herself feeling weightless too. “My skirts are now washed of the guilt of hiding the truth,” she wrote, “for I have told the truth.”6 She’d told the world McFarland was not “fit for [his] place”7 and hoped that her countrymen would now take action as they felt was necessary.
Elizabeth’s reproof, published in 1864