At times, those memories formed into fantasies, her grief at their actual absence overflowing into ink: “Home! Sweet home! When! Oh, when shall I meet my loved ones there?… Oh, will the welcome tidings ever reach my asylum ears! ‘Mrs. Packard…your loved ones are waiting to give you a welcome home!’”19
But with every page she finished, every chapter she wrote, she felt that welcome home was one step nearer. “Mrs. Packard often sighs,” she wrote, “but it is not the sigh of grief—as when I parted from [Theophilus], because he would be so cruel as to separate me from my children. No, ’tis the sigh of inspiration…invigorating me with new life and hope of getting my book soon done, so I can get to see them once more, this side the grave.”20 She wanted to “see my baby again before he entirely forgets me.”21 By now, she had set her heart “upon keeping the next Christmas festival at home with my children.”22
By September 17, 1862, just a week and a half after she’d started writing, she had completed what would prove to be a quarter of the book. She called it her “great battery”23 and drew phenomenal strength from it. “My book is me,”24 she wrote simply. It was her “pet,”25 her “pride,”26 “a transcript of my own individuality upon paper.”27
That September night, she was awoken at about midnight by the singing of two patients in the lower halls. “They seemed to be in different wards,” she noted, “but answering to each other like an echo.”28 And though Elizabeth could not have known it—though perhaps the spiritualists in the asylum did—America was in mourning that night. That day, the deadliest one-day battle in all U.S. military history had taken place in Antietam. Nearly five thousand men had died, with another twenty thousand wounded.
Elizabeth listened quietly to the mournful song of her fellow prisoners: a requiem that coursed its way along the corridors of the hospital, stealing through the shadows. They sang the same thing, over and over, just “one breath of music in length.”29 They sang for themselves. They sang for the soldiers.
And Elizabeth identified with both.
“I tell you,” she wrote, “women are of some use, too. You have no idea what brave soldiers and generals we women do make.”30
Tomorrow, she would rise again and ride out into battle.
CHAPTER 28
As though Lincoln himself was privy to the writing on the Eighth Ward, on September 22, 1862, he issued a preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. As of January 1, 1863, all slaves in the seceded states “shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.”1 Elizabeth, who had been calling on the president in her manuscript to do this very thing, quickly amended her literary position to push him further. “If you continue to let our husbands oppress us,” she appealed to Lincoln directly in her book, “and free the black slaves as you seem determined to do, I shall call you partial in your element of justice… We [women] do want equal rights at least with a colored man.”2
Her book—which she now named The Great Drama—was overtly political. She called for better rights for women, the mentally ill, African Americans, and Native Americans. And speaking from her own experience, drawing on the horrors she’d witnessed inside the asylum, she appealed for changes in existing legislation.
“The [insane] patient has no protection from inhuman abuse in the practical application of these laws,”3 she explained. She wanted humanity in Illinois to “be allowed to think their own thoughts, and speak their own words, without being imprisoned for it,”4 but such a thing was currently impossible. Building on her original vision for her journal, she wrote, “I intend to do my part to report [asylum life] as it is [for] the patient, for God has qualified me for this purpose, and sent me here to do it.”5
Yet she saved her most impassioned appeals for women’s rights. “Does our government think,” she wrote, “that because it protects the inalienable rights of the men of America, it protects the rights of all?? Are not women citizens? Are not their rights worth protecting?… I want it so fixed that any woman can run—on her own feet—right straight to [the government] for help [via the law] the minute she wants help, to get out of the power of a cruel husband. You must credit her testimony as well as you do his… It isn’t fair for you to credit their lies—and discredit our truths!”6
She called male politicians “mean, and ungenerous, and unmanly”7 not to have already protected women through the law. “We don’t want fragments of liberty anymore,” she asserted, “nor fragments of men to disburse it, neither. We want the full-grown ‘Goddess of Liberty’”8—and if took a revolution to achieve it, so be it. She dismissively called the all-male government a “half affair”9 and instead urged, “Put woman into your ballot-boxes, your legislatures, your senates, your Congress, your president’s chair.”10