Should Elizabeth ever be released from Jacksonville, Theophilus intended that this hospital would be her next, and final, destination. Because there she would stay: for life.
Hearing of her husband’s plans from Angeline, Elizabeth felt scared—a fear that only deepened as the next Jacksonville trustee meeting loomed in the diary on March 4. Once again, Elizabeth’s case came up for review. Previously, she’d always anticipated these dates with uncontained excitement, but now she felt frightened. After all, at least here she had McFarland’s support. The Northampton superintendent might not be so accommodating.
Ironically, she now felt safer inside the Jacksonville asylum than out.
Elizabeth did not attend the March meeting. Only McFarland did. The trustees duly made their decision: “Elizabeth P. W. Packard is ordered to be discharged after June 19, 1863.”25
That discharge date was curious. Usually, patients were given only a month to leave the hospital. But likely at Theophilus’s request—to give him time to make arrangements?—that period had been dramatically extended.
Elizabeth protested, vehemently. She did not want to leave now, not now that she knew Theophilus’s plans: that lifelong imprisonment in another asylum awaited.
But when had men ever listened to her?
Three months left.
CHAPTER 33
The news of Elizabeth’s imminent departure spread like wildfire through the hospital, becoming “a theme of animated discussion.”1 But she stayed out of it.
She had another plan in mind.
On March 17, 1863, her eldest son, Toffy, turned twenty-one. And while Elizabeth had long been told she could not possibly take responsibility for herself, with her male child having now reached the age of majority, he could. To his credit, he stepped up.
Had this happened prior to her learning of Theophilus’s plot, Elizabeth would likely have requested a straightforward discharge into Toffy’s care. But things were different now. She was fighting not only to regain her freedom from Jacksonville but to avoid commitment to a second asylum. She knew from bitter experience that she was not entitled to a trial to prove her sanity; therefore, her book was her only chance for self-defense. “I felt that when this was [published],” she explained, “I should be secure from another assault from my husband, but not before.”2
Elizabeth’s priority therefore became “to secure for me a place where I could be unmolested and uninterrupted until I could complete my work of preparing my book for the press.”3
And she knew exactly where that place should be. “I felt,” she wrote, “that the bolts and bars which had for three years held me falsely imprisoned would now be employed as a refuge of safety.”4
The world was out of joint again, but this time, it was a topsy-turvy inversion she embraced. From prison to sanctuary: the asylum became, once again, what it was supposed to be. Theophilus would not be able to touch her in here, especially with McFarland standing guard as her protector.
“I had full faith to believe he would dare to defend me,” she wrote of the doctor.
He, more than any other individual, had proof from his own observation, that I was a truly worthy object of protection, and that I was truly oppressed and persecuted by a most unworthy legal husband. He had seen more, and I had told him more, and he had read more of my book than any other individual in the world, and my confidence in his intelligence as well as manliness, assured me he could not pervert all this knowledge of the truth…and not be true to me… On this most grateful conclusion, I based my purpose to make his house my refuge.5
So she asked to stay at the asylum while she finished her book, and McFarland consented. At this juncture, there is a curious divergence in their accounts. Elizabeth believed the decision made her a boarder rather than a patient at the hospital. Toffy, in keeping with his new responsibility, seemingly paid for Elizabeth to stay, and in this economic transaction, she perceived a change in her status. Though ostensibly still under lock and key—she was not allowed her own pass that might permit her to come and go at her pleasure—because of the trustees’ decision to discharge her, her own subsequent decision to remain, and Toffy’s paying of her way, everything felt different. “I considered myself as responsible alone to myself for my own actions here,” she concluded, “as I should have done at the Mansion House [hotel] in Jacksonville, and just as much my own keeper.”6
Yet the hospital’s records make no note of any such change. It was unknown to Elizabeth, but the hospital’s financial position had altered since she’d been committed. Back in 1860, the state had paid for all patients’ care at the asylum, regardless of pecuniary status. But in February 1861, a new law had been passed that allowed the asylum to charge those patients who were of “sufficient ability.”7 Likely due to Theophilus’s debts and the subsequent loss of his ministry, Elizabeth had to date been kept as a pauper patient: the state paid for her care.