On June 19, only hours after she’d left Jacksonville, Elizabeth could not compute that future; she was simply relieved to have escaped the first. Yet she discovered, on that very first morning, that her fate was still firmly tied to that asylum with steel strings soldered by sisterhood. While others looked at time spent in a mental hospital “as a kind of horrid nightmare, which they wished to banish, as soon as possible, from their recollection,”5 Elizabeth was driven by her memories from day one.
“I cried so hard, the next morning after I got here,” she wrote, “to think that the bliss of freedom, so dear to me, was not yet felt by those I left in bonds… To think of the dear afflicted ones I had left behind…with none to protect them from the most outrageous abuses.”6
But Elizabeth was no longer one of those afflicted ones: she had gotten out. She could protect them. It became her “first and chief business now to deliver those in bonds.”7
Freed at last from the tyranny of McFarland’s censorship, she therefore wrote a “field of letters”8 within days of being released, telling her friends’ families the truth of what was going on behind the barred windows, using her unmuffled voice to speak out. She urged Sophia’s brother to secure his sister’s release immediately. To his credit, though it took six months and “tiresome negotiations”9 with lawyers, he eventually succeeded. Sophia went to live near him in Wheaton, Illinois, becoming an artist who painted maps.
Elizabeth also wrote to the husband of Sarah Minard, whom she’d first met on Seventh Ward, and to the trustees about Mrs. Minard’s case. Sarah had been at the hospital for at least five years, yet Elizabeth assured them she was “in no respect a fit subject for the asylum.”10 Knowing the rules of the game, she added that Sarah “entertained none but the kindest and most charitable feelings towards her husband.”11
But unlike with Sophia’s family, silence was the only response.
Elizabeth wrote, too, to her dear children. Though it seems likely Theophilus would have intercepted any letters, Elizabeth wrote regardless, wanting to cheer Libby. She told her daughter all about her book and its imminent publication and declared, “There is not a girl in America who has so capable a mother as you have, and the world will know it soon.”12
Because Elizabeth was certain that once her manuscript was published, the government would change the laws that discriminated against women. After which she could return to Manteno with impunity, because Theophilus would no longer have the power to keep her from her home.
Unfortunately, the world seemed determined to prevent Elizabeth’s plan. All the publishers she approached rejected it point-blank. “I found the fact of [my book] having been written by a patient in an insane asylum was, of itself, an incubus I could not dispose of to their satisfaction,” Elizabeth wrote, “and they would, therefore, waive all further investigation as to its intrinsic merits.”13
Elizabeth knew nothing at this time of McFarland having issued a certificate to her husband. The simple fact that he’d retained her at the asylum for three years was evidence enough she must be mad.
“I find it very hard for a woman who has lost her reputation…by the cruel defamation of insanity, to do anything alone,” Elizabeth wrote in frustration. “I never realized until now what an unpardonable offense [McFarland] committed against me…in [ever] calling me an insane person.”14
She tried desperately to right the wrong by writing to the doctor—“my treacherous friend”15—on August 10, 1863. Ironically, she requested that he issue her with a certificate of her sanity.
Naturally, believing the opposite, he did not reply. She was outraged. “Mr. Packard is a fool in calling me insane, because he don’t know any better. Dr. McFarland is a villain in calling me insane, because he does.”16
And his villainy was dark indeed. Elizabeth now learned—from a gloating Theophilus?—that McFarland’s permission to write her book had never been the liberal act of generosity she’d always presumed, but “an act of treachery on his part, to draw out my views, as a testimony in support of his opinion, that I am insane.”17 Too late, she realized that McFarland “thought the book ought never to be published.”18
It was the ultimate betrayal. She had offered this man her self, her heart. She had thought she’d found in him “one spring of pure gushing water in this great Sahara desert of my soul.”19 Yet that seeming oasis had been mere illusion. “He is no less a sinner against me than is Mr. Packard,” she wrote numbly in wake of the realization, “and so far as his penitence is concerned, I have no proof of it all.”20 She was angry, wanting to shoot these “rattlesnakes,”21 husband and doctor both, “and then drag their lifeless bodies before the public, for exhibition on the public gallows of the printed page.”22