Theophilus’s beliefs extended to his children, too. He felt their hearts were “wrong by nature, and must be changed by grace.”43 For their own good, he told them so, bluntly describing the hellish fate that awaited them until the children cried. Her heart hurting, Elizabeth would comfort them. She’d counsel, in opposition to Theophilus’s teachings, “Be your own judge of your own nature…don’t be deluded into the lie that you are bad.”44
Her “irreligious influence”45 caused Theophilus “unspeakable grief.”46 He professed himself worried for his children’s souls. When, each Sabbath, Elizabeth and the children would gather in her kitchen for “good talking times”47 after church, Theophilus could not contain his disapproval. He’d grumble as he retired alone to his study that they were “Laughing! On the brink of hell!”48
Elizabeth was not laughing now.
She wondered anxiously what her husband’s actions the night before meant. As she mulled over what she’d witnessed, her suspicions “assumed a tangible form.”49
“I was sure,” she wrote, “arrangements were being made to carry me off somewhere.”
Over the past four months, Theophilus had made it plain he wanted her gone. He could not cope with his newly outspoken wife, with her independent mind and her independent spirit—not least because Elizabeth did not keep her new character confined to their home. She asserted herself in public too, such as in a Bible class run by his church. Although at first she had been reticent—“[I] felt so small somehow,” she confessed, “I didn’t feel that anything I said was hardly worth saying or hearing”50—as the weeks had passed she’d grown more confident until she frequently contributed, voluntarily reading her essays aloud.
But her opinions deviated from her husband’s prescribed position. The classes were staged in part because Theophilus’s Presbyterian church had recently switched from following New School to Old School doctrines—the latter a more conservative creed—and Theophilus needed to persuade his congregation to adopt the change. But to his horror, Elizabeth challenged him theologically and encouraged her classmates to think critically too. Though she’d write in her essays, “I ask you to give my opinions no more credence, than you think truth entitles them to,”51 she was such a naturally persuasive person that, woman or no, her husband feared her influence. Elizabeth possessed “an irresistible magnetism.”52 The pastor, in contrast, felt “unusual timidity”53 when it came to public speaking. Even without trying, she easily eclipsed him.
He asked her to stop attending the class.
“I am willing to say to the class,” Elizabeth offered, “that as…Mr. Packard [has] expressed a wish that I withdraw my discussions…I do so, at [his] request.”54
But that wouldn’t do. That would only draw attention to her divergent views.
“No,” Theophilus responded crossly. “You must tell them it is your choice to give them up.”
Elizabeth exclaimed truthfully, “But, dear, it is not my choice!”
Her recalcitrance was new. Previously, Elizabeth had always been a peace-maker—“I had rather yield than quarrel any time”55—but now that she’d begun to find her voice, she refused to be silenced. For decades, Theophilus’s had been the only voice in the room. Was it too much to ask to share that space, now she’d ventured to speak the odd sentence? And did it really matter so very much that she did not think as he did?
But it did matter. As a preacher, Theophilus was supposed to lead his community, but now his own wife wouldn’t follow him.
Yet Elizabeth refused “to act the hypocrite, by professing to believe what I could not believe.”56 （An example: the new creed was ambivalent about abolition, but Elizabeth was for the freedom of the slaves.） She could not understand why Theophilus could not accept her independence. “I do not say it is wrong for others to do this,” she pointed out, “I only say, it is wrong for me to do it.”57 Yet in the face of her impassioned eloquence, Theophilus felt powerless and furiously impotent.
He conceived a plan. He kept it simple. Just seven words intended to silence her once and for all.
When the Packards next argued, he warned Elizabeth, if she did not conform, “I shall put you into the asylum!”58
It wasn’t quite as crazy an idea as it might at first have seemed. On the national stage, the women’s rights campaigners were openly derided as “fugitive lunatics.”59 Theophilus had simply adopted those same terms to describe his quick-witted wife.