Every bleak and horrid word they wrote had cut Elizabeth deeply, red ribbons oozing out. Each one was intended to tie her tongue, to stop her from speaking, to bind her from stepping outside her sphere. It seemed to matter not that, as the committee said, “the charges [against the asylum]…might stand or fall…without reference to [Mrs. Packard’s] testimony.”8 McFarland’s supporters blithely dismissed that wealth of witness evidence, which ran to over eight hundred pages. Even Fuller himself, the man who’d once deputized for the governor, was derisively dubbed the “renowned follower of Grandmother Packard,”9 who’d become “afflicted with the malady [of madness] himself.”10
But Elizabeth—and those attacking her—had reckoned without something rather special: public opinion. “The verdict of public sentiment everywhere condemned [McFarland’s] conduct as mean, in trying to shield himself under such an ugly mask,”11 Elizabeth wrote, almost in wonder. Readers had flocked to buy her next book, Mrs. Packard’s Prison Life, which had proved her most successful yet. Her tribute to her asylum sisterhood, containing six women’s stories of what had happened to them, was snapped up by a hungry public, to Elizabeth’s relief and delight.
McFarland had been shocked. He’d had little fear of Fuller’s report at first, deducing correctly that “the trustees and the Governor do not seem to be much disturbed.”12 But with the public’s devouring of the report, everything had changed.
“The humiliating feature in the whole business is this,” he wrote to a friend. “Here comes in a crazy woman, whose influence, compared with yours, you, at first sight, think as nothing; but when the balance comes to be struck between your reputation and her industrious efforts…you find yourself so much at a discount that your pride, your conceptions of public reputation, and your self love are all scattered at a blow. A whole legislative body is at the feet of a crazy woman, and you are nowhere!”13
There was certainly nowhere for McFarland to hide when that legislative body finally reviewed Fuller’s report. Though Oglesby kept his promise to McFarland, sitting on it until January 1869—the same month the governor stepped down from his post—by February 20, McFarland’s time was up. On that date, the relevant joint committee announced, “From an examination of [the] evidence, we are satisfied that the [committee’s] investigation was thorough and impartial [and we] adopt the conclusions.”14
In short: they supported the firing of McFarland.
As the doctor put it, “I have drunk at the very deepest wells of humiliation and am humiliated.”15
With McFarland at last held to account, Elizabeth had turned her attention to the matter closest to her heart. She wrote that it was her “grand purpose”16 to regain custody of her children, the one true “desire of her heart.”17 If she could win her children back, she intended “most cheerfully”18 to lay aside her public duties, “except the sale of books.”19 And that was why she was en route to Boston, hoping justice might finally be on her side.
Her eldest sons certainly were. “It is my opinion,” Isaac swore in a public statement that she carried with her at that very moment, “[my siblings] would be better brought up under her care than under the care of anyone else.”20 Toffy added, “It is my earnest and sincere desire that she may obtain [custody].”21
Recently, Elizabeth had even added a third name to her list of supporters: that of her third-born son, Samuel Packard. Why or how he came to reconcile with his mother, when he’d always supported his father before, is not exactly known. Since he’d moved to Chicago in the wake of her trial, the twenty-one-year-old had become a top-notch lawyer. Perhaps he changed his mind about her because so many of his esteemed colleagues, such as James Bradwell, were on his mother’s side. Maybe the committee’s endorsement of her had given him pause for thought. However it had come about, they’d recently reunited, with Samuel even utilizing his professional skills to draft her latest bill. Mother and son had won a victory when the Illinois legislature passed a watered-down version in March 1869, giving married women the right to their own earnings. It was one more step on Elizabeth’s long journey toward freedom from her husband’s power.
Samuel clearly enjoyed the process. Later, he wrote to his mother that he wanted to dedicate himself “to carrying on some great & noble reformation—as you do.”22 Far from her being a bad influence as his father had always feared, Elizabeth had in fact become a shining inspiration.