Just imagine, if she was successful… She would board a train to Manteno. She would walk through her own front door. She would sweep her children into her arms, exclaim at the weight of three-year-old Arthur, tousle nine-year-old Georgie’s hair, embrace her twelve-year-old Libby, who might now seem more woman than girl. She could almost feel them in her arms already, smell that special scent of their hair. She tightened her grip on McFarland’s arm, hoping. Yet the September sunshine streaming in through the barred windows seemed only to encourage her. A brighter day was coming. And Elizabeth was determined to do everything in her power to seize it.
The doctor ushered her into the meeting room where the trustees were waiting. They were a party of professional gentlemen, and Elizabeth felt “the sanctimonious gravity of this august body”19 as she entered on the doctor’s arm.
There was another man present too: her husband. Theophilus had been invited to give his own views on his wife’s case; he’d already delivered his presentation.
Elizabeth almost entirely ignored him. Her eyes bright, she focused only on the trustees sitting around the table as McFarland introduced her. The chairman was William Brown.
“Mrs. Packard,” began Mr. Brown as she settled into her seat beside him, “we have heard Mr. Packard’s statement, and the Doctor said you would like to speak for yourself. We will allow you ten minutes for that purpose.”20
Elizabeth took out her gold watch and placed it next to her papers. Then she commenced reading, “in a quiet, calm, clear tone of voice,”21 the document she hoped would secure her freedom. McFarland had reviewed it the day before and given her permission to proceed. She focused at first on the religious differences between herself and her husband, explaining why she preferred not to teach Theophilus’s favored doctrines to her children.
As she spoke, the trustees made an attentive audience, their silence so profound that Elizabeth “could almost hear the joyous pulsations of my own heart.”22 She blasted her husband for not allowing her, “a spiritual woman—a ‘temple of the Holy Ghost,’”23 to follow her own beliefs. She concluded by thanking McFarland for the privilege of speaking.
And then, from beneath the pile of papers that McFarland had approved, she withdrew some torn-out pages from the Bible, which were also covered with her handwriting.
“I now ask you,” she said directly to the board, “if you have any objection to my exposing the sophistry of my husband’s demand upon this institution to perpetuate my imprisonment, on the plea that the good of his children requires it?… It is written upon the leaves of our ward Bible, which some patient tore out and left upon my table; and, as I have no paper, I appropriated them to this use.”24
Unknown to McFarland, Elizabeth had prepared a second appeal—one he hadn’t yet seen.
The whole room seemed to hold its breath. It was “so still,” Elizabeth recalled, “I could have heard a clock tick.”25
Yet the trustees responded affirmatively, even though she’d already overrun her time. Elizabeth took a deep breath and commenced reading her real defense.
“You say, Dr. McFarland,” she began, staring at the doctor sitting opposite her,
that my abuses must be balanced by my children’s abuses… [But] can my husband be justified in his abuse of me, by the plea that the good of the children demands it?… Has he a right to assume that my teachings are ruinous in their tendency? Have I not a right to teach them what I think is God’s revealed will, or must I yield my own convictions of truth and duty to his dictation? Would he be willing that I should assume this authority over him, or, in other words, is he doing by me as he would wish to be done by?
How would you, Dr. McFarland, receive such a demand from me, as you seem bound to respect from him? Suppose I should say to you: Dr. McFarland, I conscientiously believe that the legitimate tendency of [Mr. Packard’s] creed is to make hard, unfeeling, bigoted, cruel, tyrannical characters, like himself; and now, out of regard to these helpless children’s interests, I demand that you take Mr. Packard from his position in society, his family, and from all his constitutional rights as an American citizen, and imprison him in this Insane Asylum, for life, or until I can remove his children out of the reach of his influence. How would you receive such a demand from me, the mother of the children, whose interest in their welfare is as deep, at least, as their father’s? Would you not regard it as an insane request, and would you not employ it as a proof that I was a fit subject for the Insane Asylum?