She rose from her seat, walked shakily down the curving staircase, and stood at the door of the senate chamber. As each man left, she grasped him firmly by the hand, uttering thanks that seemed so small in relation to the scale of what he’d done.
After all the machinations to prevent the bill from being passed, Elizabeth did not trust to tradition alone to see it through. Instead, she personally walked it from the house speaker to the senate speaker to the governor himself, securing their formal signatures that would actually make it law. Oglesby signed it on March 5, 1867.
He came out of his office and handed it back to her, saying, “Mrs. Packard, your bill is signed!”27
Elizabeth held the bill with one hand and took the governor’s with her other.
“In the name of the married women of Illinois,” she said gravely, “I thank you for this act.”28
The politicians gave her a certified copy as a memento. She kept it for years afterward, “a record of my first attempt to serve the State of Illinois.”29 History records that she was “the prime motivator in originating it and securing its passage.”30 It was a legacy indeed.
On August 4, 1863, the summer she’d been released from the asylum, Elizabeth had written to her daughter, “There is not a girl in America who has so capable a mother as you have, and the world will know it soon.”31
Finally, the world was starting to.
CHAPTER 52
From the moment Oglesby’s signature was scrawled upon the bill, the clock began ticking. The asylum trustees now had just sixty days to organize jury trials for those patients who’d been admitted without one.
Elizabeth was perhaps most excited for Sarah Minard. She had no doubt that after nine years in the asylum, Sarah would be declared sane in a trial, along with many other women from Seventh Ward.
It seemed the trustees feared the same. Their stated view on the juries who’d be making the judgments were that they were “imperfectly prepared to perceive the nice distinctions of mental derangement.”1 They protested that many patients were convalescing and therefore “past the stage of their disease where the commonly discoverable evidences of insanity are manifest.”2 Other patients were those who had what McFarland would describe as Elizabeth’s type of madness: “dangerous”3 patients who “possess extreme delusions…perceptible only to skilled observers.”4
The trustees seemed to fear the consequences if any patients were found sane—perhaps expensive court cases claiming damages for improper detainment. In the wake of Elizabeth’s trial three years earlier, these had become commonplace, with the AMSAII blasting these “infernal prosecutions.”5 Echoing McFarland’s arrogance about the verdict in Elizabeth’s trial, the AMSAII criticized the “loose and flawy ways and decisions of judicial officers”6 because the judgments often went against them. Previously, the doctors had had things almost entirely their own way, but slowly, as Elizabeth put it, “this innovation of recognizing inmates of insane asylums as beings possessing human rights”7 was beginning to take root.
As such, despite the trustees’ antipathic views, the new law was the law, and they had to follow it. On May 2, 1867, insanity trials for current patients began, held in the reception room of the hospital and conducted under the direction of two of its trustees, with Judge Whitlock presiding.
Elizabeth was justifiably apprehensive. After all, many of her friends had spent years, if not decades, in the asylum. Could anyone experience such a thing, being sane, and not become insane themselves? She only hoped the salvation of her legal reforms had not come too late to save her sisters.
McFarland was frequently present at proceedings, often called as a witness. Perhaps understandably, his presence did not always inspire positive reactions in his patients. At one man’s trial, the patient had been so calm the judge later admitted he’d thought him sane, but as soon as McFarland gave evidence against him, the man became excited, and the judge changed his mind.
Yet he was not the only patient to remain incarcerated.
In trial after trial, verdict after verdict, every single patient tried was found to be insane.
Elizabeth couldn’t believe it. Not one patient sane? That was not the reality of the wards she’d lived in. Yet she trusted in the independence of the juries. She could therefore reach only one conclusion: her law had come too late. It was devastating. The asylum had driven her friends mad, and there was nothing she could do, now, to rescue them.
The AMSAII, on the other hand, was delighted by the verdicts. “The conduct of the jury that investigated…was most creditable,”8 the professional body declared. Though they’d previously been aggressively against jury trials, they pronounced the verdicts “confirmatory of the position we have so often assumed, that…our juries may be depended on as safe and humane men, who rarely go grievously wrong.”9