He could not find her. He could not reach her.
Elizabeth was lost to all her children now.
CHAPTER 5
It was a day’s journey to Jacksonville, some two hundred miles to traverse. With the townspeople no threat, Burgess disembarked at Kankakee; Deacon Dole took his leave of them too. Only the Packards went all the way to the asylum.
By the time the train pulled in, it was well past 8:00 p.m. The sun had already dipped below the horizon, leaving a murky gray twilight in its place.
The Illinois State Hospital at Jacksonville, Illinois, in the early 1860s
The hospital was situated a mile from the town center—this repository of human souls kept distant from society. Elizabeth surveyed its shadowy walls with suspicion, her eyes having to squint to see in the indistinct dark. Five and a half stories high, it was three hundred feet wide: a central building and two generous wings, plus a lopsided extension that ran only to the west. As Elizabeth gazed at it, its endless rows of barred windows seemed to stare sightlessly back. It was the kind of place that inspired “awe both deep and lasting”1 as well as a “chilling sense”2 of the life within.
Elizabeth was quiet now, after all her words before. This was no time for essays or speeches or even prayer. As the Packards walked wearily along the brick pavement that led to the entrance, the steps of her buttoned boots spoke for her, each click of her heels saying no no no.
But there was no one left to listen.
Husband and wife reached the end of the path. The asylum loomed above them like Theophilus’s God: tyrannical, secretive, its mercy out of reach. It had a grand, four-columned portico—the fluted pillars more in keeping with a stately home than a hospital—but the impression was still not welcoming. It spoke more of power, of a place that one entered unwillingly and always under force.
Elizabeth could see the front door clearly, wrapped within its white arched frame. She could see the glow of gaslights. And whether from night blindness or fear or even a fluttering breath of last-ditch hope, she chose to take her husband’s arm. Gently, he guided her up the wide bank of stone steps that led them to the door.
Elizabeth tried to let her thoughts fall silent, but their voices were too loud for her simply to ignore. And among all the thoughts racing through her mind that night, there was perhaps one that rose a little higher than the others.
It slipped up like a secret, driftwood twisting on a tide of memory.
Not again. Not again.
How can this be happening to me again?
Because this was not Elizabeth’s first time in an asylum.
History favors reruns.
She’d been nineteen the last time she was committed. On February 6, 1836, Elizabeth had entered the State Lunatic Hospital in Worcester, Massachusetts, on the legal orders of her father, Samuel Ware. She’d been right in the midst of her high-flying teaching career. At the time, Elizabeth was the principal of Randolph College in Massachusetts, a first-class school that employed “only the best classical educators.”3 The cause of her insanity was reportedly “mental labor.”4
She was far from the first woman brought down by her use of her mind. In fact, people expected such outcomes. A visitor to an all-female school in 1858 remarked that its teachers were “training your girls for the lunatic asylum.”5 While women had proven that they could study on an intellectual level, doctors lamented that the choice made them highly susceptible to “derangements of the nervous system.”6 The problem was that when “minds of limited capacity to comprehend subjects”7 tried to do so, it ultimately led to mental breakdown. That was what had supposedly happened to Elizabeth.
In reality, doctors were policing women who stepped outside society’s strictly defined gender spheres—work and intellect for men, home and children for women—in what could be described as a “medicalization of female behavior.”8
For similar reasons, one common cause of committal to an asylum in Elizabeth’s time was “novel reading.”9 Doctors believed that those who indulged in this “pernicious habit”10 lived “a dreamy kind of existence, so nearly allied to insanity that the slightest exciting cause is sufficient to derange.”11 No wonder Theophilus and his co-pastor had tried to shut down the first public library that opened in Shelburne, Massachusetts. It was introducing “improper literature,”12 and the preachers did not believe that churchgoers should risk their souls—or indeed their minds.
Chart showing the supposed causes of insanity in those admitted to the Jacksonville asylum—including three patients admitted for “novel reading”