The problem was that there was really only one person who had the power to assist her—only one man who held her “temporal destiny entirely at his disposal.”15 Yet as she herself wrote on July 12, 1862, “My reason and judgment, and my most bitter experience assures me there is no hope for me in this quarter.”16
“Still,” she went on, “there is no man left but [one] to turn to.”17
No man but McFarland.
In the outside world, the war raged on without a final, decisive battle to end it. “If something is not done soon,” Abraham Lincoln wrote that year, “the bottom will be out of the whole affair.”18 Just like her president, Elizabeth recognized that she needed to take firm action. “I do hope I shan’t be so slow about my work as [General] McClellan is about his!” she wrote of the hesitant man at the helm of the Union Army. “I think it’s well to be cautious, but I don’t think it is best to be too much afraid of treading on the devil’s heels, lest he get the start of us.”19
Dr. McFarland had truly seemed a devil to date. But Elizabeth’s theology taught her “that in every human being there is a soul to be redeemed. That in every rock there is a well.”20 Despite the doctor’s cruel discounting of the patients’ complaints and his repeated betrayal of her, Elizabeth’s faith nevertheless encouraged her to try to see some good in him. Though she hated his sins, she thought she should not hate the sinner. “Could I not therefore hope,” she mused, “that the drill of long and patient perseverance might yet reach this spring in this Doctor’s flinty heart?”21
An idea began slowly to coalesce in her mind: an idea for a new campaign. Elizabeth wondered, could she possibly “fan this embryo”22 goodness she was sure McFarland must have buried inside him into a burning flame? A flame that would burn down all the barriers in her way.
Up until that point, Elizabeth had tried ignoring the doctor and castigating him, yet neither approach had effected any change in the man. A new tack was needed, one that focused more on accord than animosity. “I intend to be fearless,” she wrote, “in using every possible means that love can devise to save him; for it is to me a far more desirable object to save him than to destroy him.”23 In offering an olive branch of newly fired friendship, she hoped to lead the doctor down the path she wished him to take.
She thought of how she had so easily managed to get the humane staff on her side so they happily broke rules for her benefit. She thought of how, after she’d first arrived on Eighth Ward, the Misses Tenney had so quickly joined her to improve the patients’ conditions, themselves scrubbing away at walls and women. Elizabeth had done it all with just one thing: the power of her tongue. She could be incredibly persuasive when she wanted. She could change people’s minds. McFarland wasn’t the only person with power to “modify [their] thoughts.”24 Two could play at the game of behavior modification, and Elizabeth decided that she had to give it a try.
Because she needed the doctor to change his mind about her. She needed to get out of the asylum. For her children, who were growing up too fast without her. For her sanity, before the daily trauma she was witness to completely shattered her spirit; already that July, despondent after the failure of the Coes’ appeal, she was feeling “exceedingly sorrowful.”25 But perhaps most of all, she needed to get out for her “beloved sisters in bonds,”26 whose abuse she’d been so busy recording all this while but for whom she could do nothing more from behind these thick brick walls.
But McFarland could recommend her release—if he so wished. He could set her free to fulfill her mission—if only she could convince him to “dare to do right”27 and become her “protector, instead of [my] husband’s abettor.”28
If she played this right, could she transform the doctor from an enemy to an ally after all?
Some people later misconstrued her turning back to McFarland in the way she did. They saw it as an act of weakness, perhaps even a kind of syndrome, in which her captor became someone with whom she hoped to forge a positive relationship.
Yet others—including women trapped in similar power dynamics—saw it very differently. “I find it very natural that you would adapt yourself to identify with your kidnapper,” one said. “It’s about empathy, communication… [That] is not a syndrome.
“It is a survival strategy.”29
And Elizabeth, like the Union itself, was determined to survive.