That December, truly, was “the saddest month of the year.”25 Winter infiltrated the asylum in all the ways that somber season can touch a woman’s heart. Within its walls, there was a “sense of utter loneliness…utter isolation of spirit.”26 The “daughters of affliction”27 locked within lived a “dim, shadowy, spectral semblance of life,”28 themselves figures who were barely there, rubbed away by the slow “undermining of every tie that bound us to earthly existence.”29 The cutout dolls had become mere shadow puppets.
They would vanish the moment all light was gone.
Outside the asylum, things were not much better as the Civil War marched mercilessly on. On December 13, 1862, thousands of Union soldiers met their ends at the Battle of Fredericksburg: a poorly planned combat that saw nearly three thousand killed or wounded within the first hour alone. The men fell, it was said, like “grass before the scythe.”30
Elizabeth felt all her hope cut down too, each spark of it another fallen soldier dying before that unforgiving blade. “Doubt—suspense—uncertainty,” she wrote, “is all the nourishment my hope is permitted to receive of ever having justice done me.”31
In time, December 31, 1862, arrived. The year’s end—but not the end she had wanted. Because there was no end: her trial continued. The women of Eighth Ward, summoned by the supper bell, solemnly took their seats. Elizabeth, of course, sat separately from Sophia.
But little was said anyway. “The faces of all,” her friend remembered, “silently but eloquently spoke the burning thoughts within.”32
After supper, all were swiftly remanded to their sleeping quarters, despite the supposedly special nature of the night. It was not special to them; it brought only more suffering.
Elizabeth shut the door of her private room quietly, her despair a constant shadow that brought no comfort from its closeness. “Darkness, cold and silence”33 were her only companions.
The minutes passed by until “the bell heavily chimed out its last hour, and another year had departed forever.”34
With it went Elizabeth’s final hope for freedom.
PART FOUR
DEAL WITH THE DEVIL?
“We must have perseverance and above all confidence in ourselves. We must believe that we are gifted for something and that this thing must be attained.”1
—Marie Curie, 1894
“She stood in the storm, and when the wind did not blow her way…she adjusted her sails.”2
—Elizabeth Edwards, c. 2006
CHAPTER 31
January 1, 1863, was a date set in stone in history. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation went into effect and over three million of the nation’s four million slaves were immediately freed.
In the asylum, there was no such salvation. Yet Elizabeth felt a tiny flickering of an idea. Because while she could not be freed, her book could still be released into the world, and through it perhaps some public outrage might be raised, that such an eloquent woman had been condemned to spend her life behind these bars. “On this book,” she concluded, “now hangs all my hopes and prospects for this life.”1 It was her last brainwave—her last “single anchor”2 beneath her “sinking ship.”3
But to her bewilderment, McFarland appeared to be dragging his heels on printing the first volume of The Great Drama as he’d promised, even as he still encouraged her to write more. “He has given me reason,” said Elizabeth darkly, “to think he never intends to [publish it].”4
Naturally, she “argued and discussed this matter with the Doctor, and gently urged him to not thus forsake me utterly.”5 She asked no more of him than this one thing: to put one single volume of her book in print. But as the days passed, there was no sign of him relenting. “Vain my logic, vain my entreaties,”6 Elizabeth sighed. It left her feeling ever more desolate: “Nothing but a rayless midnight gloom enshrouded my present and future…I was plunged into the gulf of black despair. Nothing to hope for! Nothing to live for!”7
Her surroundings did not help. The “reign of terror”8 continued on Eighth Ward, the New Year bringing “only a protraction of…the same revolting scenes [which were] daily and hourly repeated; the same restrictions, the same everlasting espionage, the same threats, and disgusting horrors!”9 The women “all felt ourselves hotly pursued by the enemy.”10
Appeals to both McFarlands were made in vain. There seemed nothing the patients could do.
But Elizabeth had taught them that there is always something. A spirit cannot be killed. And with spirit comes hope. With spirit comes strength. With spirit comes the energy to start the fight for justice.