Patience was perhaps the other thing she’d been forced to learn over the past few years. After Boston, her campaigning had taken her to Connecticut. （She’d intended to return to Illinois, but as its general assembly was not sitting in 1866, a change of plan had been required.） There, she’d launched an ambitious campaign to overturn coverture, proposing a bill in which “any woman entering the marriage relation shall retain the same legal existence…and shall receive the same legal protection of her rights as…does…a man.”18 In many ways, it was a trial run for what she hoped one day to replicate in the states where her children resided, because such radical reforms would allow her at last to sue for custody.
As things stood, Theophilus refused even to let her see her children.
Drawing on that personal injustice, in Connecticut she’d managed to win the support of hundreds of men. Ultimately, however, her proposed law proved too much, too soon. The committee that considered it informed her that it was “inexpedient to make such radical changes at the present time.”19
Despite the disappointment, Elizabeth had dusted herself off. “No such thing as failure,”20 she’d told herself sternly. She’d reminded herself, “My work ain’t done, yet. And I ain’t any of your half sort of folks.”21
And this was where her unfinished work had led her next: to the lobby of the Governor’s Mansion in Illinois. As she waited for the man himself to appear, she could not help but be struck by the building’s handsome fluted pillars and its grand interior staircase, the latter winding like an unfurling ribbon through the full height of the residence. Yet such imposing surroundings did not cow her courage. If she’d learned anything over the past couple of years, it was the importance of being single-minded.
Her latest campaign in Illinois was her most focused yet. Because Elizabeth had never forgotten the women she’d left behind in the asylum, and she’d now returned to rescue them. In fact, for almost four years Elizabeth had been appealing to various lawyers to assist her sisters while she’d been busy in other states battling for legal reforms. But none had taken up her cause. By January 1867, Elizabeth had come to the only conclusion that she could.
If no one else was going to help these women, she would.
In many ways, theirs was a battle she’d never stopped fighting. When she’d first hit the road in Illinois to sell her book, she’d made a point of visiting the hometowns of her friends in order to stir up support for them. In Sarah Minard’s hometown of St. Charles, for example, she’d found the townspeople gave “one uniform testimony that her confinement…was unnecessary.”22 Yet she’d also discovered that not one citizen was prepared to champion Sarah personally, “lest their own pecuniary interests should be…imperilled, by a conflict with their townsman and banker,”23 because Sarah’s husband was a wealthy and very influential man.
Once, Elizabeth had even returned to the asylum. She’d been permitted to visit her friends, but McFarland had insisted he chaperone. With the doctor openly eavesdropping, Elizabeth had explained to Sarah all she’d done to try to secure her freedom, including writing to the trustees and Sarah’s husband in June 1863. Yet she’d had to confess she’d received no reply to those letters and did not know what had become of them.
McFarland had interrupted, “These letters came to me, and are in my hands.”24
“Ah!” Elizabeth exclaimed knowingly. “That is the reason I have never heard from them.”25
Even now, nearly four years after Elizabeth’s own release, Sarah Minard and many other women Elizabeth believed were sane were still shut up in the asylum. All were held there on the strength of the superintendent’s word.
And that superintendent was still McFarland. It had mattered not that, as Elizabeth put it, “the verdict of the jury [in my trial] virtually impeached Dr. McFarland as an accomplice in this foul drama, and as one who had prostituted his high public trust.”26 The court verdict, combined with Elizabeth’s bestselling books, had at first provoked “severe comment”27 in Illinois, but all the allegations, serious as they were, had ultimately left McFarland untouched. Despite what Elizabeth had hoped for when she’d first published her pamphlets, no one in authority had held him to account.
Instead, his career had gone from strength to strength. Back in June 1864, he’d been unanimously reappointed by the board of trustees—given another ten-year tenure at the hospital and a substantial pay raise to boot. In 1865, he’d received an honorary degree.