Elizabeth determined to write two documents: a defense of her sanity and a reproof of Dr. McFarland for the cruel treatment she’d witnessed happening to the women on Seventh Ward.
She was fearless, seeming entirely to forget the warning Mrs. Hosmer had given. But it was coming up to four months since she’d been committed, and she’d frankly had enough. Not for herself, necessarily, for she’d been granted exceptional license, but for the other women. “I will not suffer humanity to be so abused, as you do here, without lifting my voice against it,” she wrote, “and it will be heard.”33
Her pen scrawled across the page, writing with more fluidity than she’d ever known. Elizabeth soon circulated the documents among her friends, reading aloud her “championship of their cause”34 at their prayer circle. Though all agreed as to the accuracy of her charges, most were alarmed by her audacity.
“[You have] no idea of the Doctor’s power,”35 one told her anxiously.
“Mrs. Packard,” warned another, “you had better not give the Doctor that document, unless you wish to be sent to a dungeon, where you could never see daylight again.”36
But with the reins pulling tight against her throat, Elizabeth doubted what they said. She wrote the reproof mainly for the women, but part of her was also inspired to save the doctor from his sins. In pointing out the error of his ways, she hoped to lead him to his own salvation, after which he truly could become the “manly protector”37 she’d first hoped she’d found in him.
Nevertheless, she’d known her friends long enough by now to take heed. So, carefully, she made a painstaking copy of her documents, then pried off the back of her personal mirror and cautiously hid them between the glass and board back. Whatever happened next, these copies would always be there: proof, in her opinion, both of her sanity and of the true goings-on in the asylum.
She decided to give McFarland the defense first. It was a test. To this point, she’d given him the benefit of the doubt when it came to his retention of patients who to her seemed sane. But in her own case, she knew exactly how she’d behaved throughout the past four months, so she knew exactly what evidence—or lack thereof—the doctor had to draw on in his determination of her insanity.
“I therefore shall take your decision in my case as casting the die in my opinion of your real character,”38 she wrote plainly. If he insisted on keeping her at the asylum after receiving the document, she’d know for certain he admitted patients “on simple hearsay testimony, in defiance of positive, tangible proof.”39
Elizabeth tried to remain confident. She knew her own mind, and she knew she had behaved impeccably, as the doctor’s own trust in her showed. Would an insane woman be permitted the keys to the asylum? The very idea that he thought her mad was laughable when she thought of that.
On October 26, 1860, Elizabeth Packard presented her defense to Dr. McFarland. The headlines that day could not have been more apt. They related to the rumbling war clouds now gathering in the South and not to a courageous woman fighting her own battle in a hospital in Illinois. But whether war was waged with pen or sword, “The Approaching Revolution”40 was finally, undeniably, and quite unstoppably here.
CHAPTER 14
I, your sane patient…do hereby respectfully request that you forthwith give me an honorable discharge from this Asylum… I have a legal and constitutional claim to my liberty as a citizen of the United States, having never said or done anything justly to forfeit it… But should you deny me my petition, will you please to give me your reasons in writing, for regarding and treating me as insane? Or, in other words, what irrational and unreasonable conduct have you observed in me within the four months’ time I have been under your intelligent inspection?1
Elizabeth had never sounded saner.
McFarland may have shifted awkwardly in his chair as he read her defense. Because—just as Elizabeth knew—she’d displayed no irrational conduct at all. McFarland had been carefully looking for that intellectual impairment he believed underlay all potential cases of moral insanity, but there was nothing in Mrs. Packard that fit the bill.
Four months on from her arrival at the asylum, he had nothing.
He continued to read, his concerns layering up with every word she’d written. Because during the course of her time at the asylum, Elizabeth had become even more political than before.
“I am a martyr for the rights of opinion in woman, in the year 1860, in this boasted, free America”2 she wrote passionately.