When the national conflict had first begun, Elizabeth had had no access to the newspapers. She’d felt “entombed alive,”2 desperate to be kept informed “of what is transpiring now in my country, at this eventful crisis”3—a desire that had only intensified when, in autumn 1861, Toffy had visited once more and brought word that Isaac wanted to join the Union army. Her second son had sought his mother’s advice, and Elizabeth, admiring his principled wish to fight for his beliefs, had answered via Toffy, “You may join the army if your father is willing, but if he forbids you, you must not disobey him by going.”4
But whether Theophilus had said yes or no, Elizabeth did not know—just as she no longer knew if her Isaac was alive or dead.
Come July 1862, one month after she’d written the Coes’ appeal, Elizabeth was once again permitted access to the newspapers, some of them snuck to her by sympathetic attendants. She pored over them, searching amid the names of dead soldiers for that of her own dear son. Eyes skating over syllables with desperate speed, her heart darkly gladdened when they formed the name of some other mother’s son and not Isaac’s.
She sought, too, for any sign of the Coes’ appeal, but nothing did she find. Perhaps, with the Civil War dominating the headlines, the newspaper editors had simply decided that now was not the time to protect the mentally ill.
Elizabeth had no choice but to make now the time. In truth, she hoped that the war might prove a watershed for all those suffering, given that in taking the country into conflict, President Lincoln had “dared to espouse the cause of the oppressed.”5 Elizabeth, impassioned, wrote of the president, “God holds him up, amid the crash of worlds.” She was fully supportive of Lincoln’s position. To Elizabeth, slavery was a “giant evil”6 and she endorsed any means of ending it. In her heart, she hoped the end of the oppression of women might be next in line.
Indeed, as she read the war news, she saw a parallel with her own story. “The North may as well give up this civil war,” she thought, “and succumb to the South, and put their necks again under the yoke of the slave oligarchy, as [a woman] yield up her contest for ‘spiritual freedom’ by returning to her husband and establishing the marriage union as it was. It is not union as it was that I am fighting for—but it is union as it ought to be—a union based on ‘equal rights’—on justice.”7 She concluded fiercely, “For as is my fate, so will be that of my country.”8
Like the soldiers on the outside, she fought with everything she had.
But unlike those soldiers, Elizabeth could no longer call for reinforcements. By summer 1862, her allies on the staff such as Mrs. Hosmer and the Coes had left, while her interactions with her fellow patients were deliberately restricted, too, as McFarland followed a self-described policy of separating any women he felt were friends for “mischievous purposes.”9 As he considered all Elizabeth’s alliances to be thus, he took action whenever she forged a new friendship. He believed the enforced separation was necessary to prevent what he now dramatically termed her “evil influences”10 from contaminating others.
As a result, Elizabeth could take comfort only from her writing, from her scraps of handwritten notes that she called “my treasures.”11 They were, quite simply, the only things of value she had left in the world. She kept them safely hidden, the pieces of her ever-expanding journal now secreted within a false lining in her band box, tucked beneath the bottom board of her satchel, and concealed in her trunk. She carefully pinned those pieces inside various items of her wardrobe so it looked as though she was simply making alterations to her clothes. Though McFarland searched her things from time to time, he never found those scraps of journal.
At the time, she had a lot to record, for in July 1862, her attendants were the worst yet. Miss Smith was in charge of Eighth Ward now, a quick-tempered, cruel woman assisted by Mary Bailey, who used “insulting and abusive language”12 with the patients.
Yet Elizabeth was painfully aware that recording abuses alone meant little. What good was deciding to “lift up my voice like a trumpet”13 if her words could not escape the soundproofed walls of the asylum? She could play the most powerful melodies, but they became meaningless if no one heard.
Elizabeth was an independent woman; to “get out of the mire, all alone”14 was her professed strategy for escaping her situation. But in light of the failure of all her efforts to date, she simply could not continue down that path.