For some parishioners, however, her emotions were irrelevant. Simply her vocal presence in the Bible class, independence from her husband, and divergent religious views were signs enough of sickness.
They therefore supported their pastor in his plan. On May 22, 1860, the parishioners had signed a petition to have Elizabeth “placed in an Insane Asylum, as speedily as it can be conveniently done.”14 Thirty-nine people signed the statement. “Just think!” Elizabeth later exclaimed. “Forty men and women clubbed together to get me imprisoned just because I chose to think my own thoughts, and speak my own words!”15
Was it one of the thirty-nine lurking outside her door?
Elizabeth knew her home offered no sanctuary. Two days prior, on June 16, she’d watched as one parishioner after another had filed into her parlor, summoned by her husband to attend a mock trial of Elizabeth’s sanity. Deacon Spring, of her husband’s church, was the biased moderator.
“Such a pack of wolves around our house as we had,” Elizabeth remarked darkly, “and no gun to shoot them with either.”16
She felt she was “suffocating and choking…in…a meddlesome and gossiping world.”17 Lately, the wolves’ hot breath had come even closer; Theophilus had usurped Elizabeth’s domestic authority and brought another woman into their home. Twenty-three-year-old Sarah Rumsey, one of his most devout parishioners, had moved in, supposedly to help with the household chores. But Sarah was a teacher by trade and came from a wealthy family; Elizabeth knew she was no servant but a spy.
Frequently, Elizabeth had caught Sarah, her husband, and Theophilus’s middle-aged sister, Sybil Dole, in “earnest conversation, which was always carried on in a whisper whenever I was within hearing distance.”18 They would start, guilty, if she came across them suddenly. And Sarah would absent herself after any altercation, as though rushing off to make a record.
Was it perhaps Sarah’s step she heard beyond her bedroom door?
The spy certainly had a lot to witness. Rows between the Packards had become increasingly frequent. Because just as Elizabeth did not stop asserting herself when she stepped outside the home, Theophilus did not stop his campaign against her when he returned to their house. In front of the family, across the dinner table, he told her bluntly she was insane and that she should stop talking.
But when Theophilus tried to silence her, Elizabeth felt her spirits rise. So this was how it felt to dine with the devil. This was not a Bible class; this was not his church. This was her home. These were her children. If she could not be herself here, then where in the world was there left her? Angry, she shouted at him: “[I will] talk what and when [I have] a mind to!”19
The children, at least, had not abandoned her. They said of Theophilus’s publicly known plan to take their mother to an asylum: “They will have to break my arms to get them loose from their grasp upon you, Mother, if they try to steal our dear mamma from us!”20 Elizabeth’s only hope, that morning of June 18, was that one of the children might have risen and come to wish her good morning.
Perhaps her most staunch defender among them was her second-born son, Isaac, who was just six days shy of his sixteenth birthday. A “tender-hearted and devoted son”21 with “a mild and amiable temper,”22 he’d strongly taken his mother’s side in the Packards’ civil war. He’d been greatly disturbed by what he termed the “wholly unfounded”23 rumors about her sanity and stepped up to defend her. He not only sounded the alarm to his big brother—eighteen-year-old Theophilus, nicknamed Toffy, who lived in Mount Pleasant, Iowa and was therefore not witness to the circling wolves—but also secured pledges of help from those Manteno townspeople who were not of his father’s church. They said they’d step in if ever Theophilus tried to send Elizabeth to an asylum. Isaac worked in the local store, run by Mr. Comstock, and it had proved the perfect place from which to enlist support from the community.
Before she’d been locked in her ground-floor nursery, Elizabeth had tried to do the same. The world, after all, was wider than Theophilus’s narrow realm. “She went from house to house everywhere complaining of her husband,”24 Deacon Spring observed disapprovingly, while Theophilus grumbled that she’d “aroused a rabid excitement against me, outside of my own church and congregation.”25
That was true. Sociable Elizabeth had many friends in the small farming village, which had a population of just 861. Her closest were the Blessings, who ran the local hotel, and the Hasletts, who ran Manteno; William Haslett was the town supervisor. They’d all been outraged by Theophilus’s scheme. “That woman endured enough every day of her life for weeks,”26 commented Mr. Blessing.