“Mrs. Packard,” he said kindly, seeing her distress, which she was desperately trying to keep private, “you need not speak a word on this subject, on this occasion.” He perhaps consulted briefly with his fellow committee members. He fixed his dark, hooded eyes on her. “You may give us your explanation, in writing, tomorrow morning at 10 o’clock in this room.”
Elizabeth let out a sigh, trying not to cry at his clemency. “Thank you, General Fuller,” she managed. “I esteem it a great privilege you have granted me.”
So at close to 8:00 p.m., nearly seven hours after she first took the stand, she was at last allowed to step down. At once, Tirzah came to her side and the women left together, a buzz of scandalized gossip rising behind them like angry bees.
Elizabeth kept it together. She kept it together in the room and in the corridor. Though words and phrases from the past and future were already haunting her, she stuck one foot in front of the other and walked out proudly with her friend. Already she could imagine the kind of comment that would follow her: “The letter is such as no sane virtuous woman could have written…”33 Those comments felt like cages, trapping her all over again—and this time not with physical locks, which might eventually be opened, but with even more unbreakable bolts: the unforgiving opinions of others.
She made it to the steps of the Dunlap House. But as she and Tirzah walked down them, she felt she was literally descending to her doom. She could keep it together no longer.
“I am ruined!” she cried out despairingly to her friend. “I am ruined!”34
She burst into tears, hot and salty. They would have stung, had her wounds been as simple as sores. But Elizabeth was injured in an altogether different way: struck down by the bullets of her very own words, the blood pouring out reputation.
CHAPTER 54
She woke the next morning at 4:00 a.m. It was still dark, but a new day would soon dawn. The hard reality roused her; in six short hours, her defense must be ready. She crept quietly out of bed—being careful not to wake Tirzah, with whom she was sharing a room—and sat before an open window, dressed in a loose wrapper. “In the quietude and stillness of the early hour,”1 she picked up her pen and wrote words to save herself.
Six hours later, she was back on the stand, the stenographer poised to capture every syllable. General Fuller seemed nervous, perhaps for her. Rather than taking his usual seat, he paced the room, every now and again making fruitless attempts to light his fat cigar.
Elizabeth waited for him to sit, but when it became clear he was not going to, she simply had to press on.
“Gentlemen of the Committee,” she began. “Truth is my only apology for writing that letter… Since my father…and my husband…had both cast me entirely and solely upon [McFarland] as my only protector of soul and body both, I felt myself driven to seek in him the protection I wanted.”2
She paused. Fuller was still pacing the room, barely listening. She found his rapid walking both a distraction and annoyance but put him out of her mind. She reminded the committee of why they were really all there.
“I tested [McFarland]; I found him wanting,” she said. She explained how she’d confronted him about his cruel treatment of patients, “but by so doing I lost all the comforts I had left, and secured only abuse and persecution.” When, in 1862, she’d felt he was finally showing some signs of repentance, she “applied myself most assiduously to carry out the instincts of a true woman—which is to forgive man on the ground of repentance… I concentrated all my womanly powers [and] he became my manly protector… [This] instinctively developed in my womanly nature, first the feeling of gratitude, then of reverence, then of love.”
She took a deep breath and continued with her story.
Dr. McFarland had promised to publish my book, and on this hung all and every hope of my personal liberty. This bright hope seemed about to be extinguished in utter darkness by his refusal to publish it as he had promised; leaving naught for me to expect but blasted reputation and a lifelong imprisonment. As my dying hope sought in vain for anything to trust in now almost in a state of desperation I ventured to make one more final appeal…which you find contained in this letter.
[But McFarland had] only assumed the mask of manliness for the malign purpose of betraying my innocence…and the use he is now making of this letter demonstrated that I did not then misjudge him… And the man who is false to a true, pure, virtuous woman…will be sure to be false to others.