Elizabeth drank in the sight of her sleeping child. She could not help but smile at her “mother-boy”;1 George was at that adorable age where he had “an all-absorbing love for his mother.”2 He was a restless child, for whom the hardest work in the world was sitting still, so it made a change to see him so at peace. His dark hair lay wild against his pillow, pink lips pursing with a child’s innocent dreams.
He and her five other children—Arthur, Libby, Samuel, Isaac, and Theophilus III, who ranged in age from eighteen months to eighteen years—were truly “the sun, moon and stars”3 to Elizabeth: priceless “jewels,”4 her “train of stars.”5 She spent her days making their world as wondrous as she could, whether enjoying bath times in the bake-pan or gathering her children about her to tell them tales of her Massachusetts childhood. To see their “happy faces and laughing eyes”6 offered such blessed light. It was particularly welcome in a world that was becoming, by the day, increasingly black.
Such melancholy thoughts were uncharacteristic for Elizabeth. In normal times, the forty-three-year-old was “always rejoicing.”7 But the splits that were even now threatening her country—with some forecasting an all-out civil war—were mirrored in her small domestic sphere, within her neat two-story home. Over the past four months, she and her husband had retreated behind those enemy lines, prompting much “anxious foreboding”8 from Elizabeth.
Last night, that ominous sense of foreboding had plagued her until she could not sleep. Around midnight, she’d given up and crept out of bed. She wanted to know what Theophilus was planning.
She decided to find out.
Quietly, she moved about the house, a ghostly figure in her nightdress, footsteps as muffled as a woman’s gagged voice. To her surprise, her husband was not in his bed. Instead, she spied him “noiselessly searching through all my trunks.”9
Elizabeth’s heart quickened, wondering what he was up to. He’d long been in the habit of trying to control her. “When I was a young lady, I didn’t mind it so much,” Elizabeth confided, “for then I supposed my husband…knew more than I did, and his will was a better guide for me than my own.”10 She’d grown up in an era when the superiority of men was almost unquestioned, so at first, she’d swallowed that sentiment, believing “woman’s chief office is to bear children”11 and that it was “natural for the moon [woman] to shine with light reflected from the sun.”12
But over the years, as Theophilus had at various times confiscated her mail, refused her access to her own money, and even removed her from what he deemed the bad influence of her friends, doubts had surfaced. The net he cast about her felt more like a cage than the protection marriage had promised. Once, he’d even threatened to sue a male acquaintance for writing to her without his permission, demanding $3,000 （about $94,000 today） for the affront.
In all their years together, however, he had never before rifled through her things at night. Fortunately, he was so engrossed in his task he did not see her. Elizabeth slipped back to bed, her sharp mind whirring, reviewing the events that had led them to this point.
The Packards had married in 1839 when Elizabeth was a “green”13 twenty-two and Theophilus a “dusty”14 thirty-seven. Theirs had been a clumsy, awkward courtship, throughout which Elizabeth feared her curt fiancé, fifteen years her senior, “did not seem to love me much.”15 But as Theophilus was a long-time colleague of her father and Elizabeth an obedient daughter, she’d married “to please my pa,”16 committing herself to her new husband “with all the trusting confidence of woman.”17
Elizabeth and Theophilus Packard
At first, all had seemed well. Elizabeth had been raised “to be a silent listener”18 and her preacher husband contentedly became the sole mouthpiece in their marriage. “To make him happy was the height of my ambition,”19 Elizabeth wrote. “That’s all I wanted—to make my husband shine inside and out.”20
The problem in their marriage had been he didn’t make her shine in return. Their characters were as opposite as it was possible to get. Where Elizabeth was vibrant, sociable, and curious, Theophilus was gloomy, timorous, and—in his own words—“dull.”21 A typical diary entry of his read: “This Sabbath is the commencement of spring. Rapidly do the seasons revolve. The spring-time of life is fast spending. Soon the period of death will arrive.”22 No wonder Elizabeth described their marriage as “cheerless.”23 She wrote with feeling: “The polar regions are a terrible cold place for me to live in, without any fire outside of me.”24 Her husband seemed “totally indifferent”25 to her. Sadly, she concluded that he did “not know how to treat a woman.”26