But that printed page could not be her book, as she’d long hoped. Though no longer resident in the asylum, she found its shadow stitched to her. She was still bound by the ties of her lost reputation, caged by the stigma of her supposedly lost mind. “The very word insane is like a stench in my nostrils,”23 she wrote, but it was a stink that others smelled, too, and shied away from. Defeated, she had to “abandon the project”24 of publishing her book “for the present, as an impossibility.”25
But without the project, what future did she have? The plan had always been to publish—to secure her liberty. Without it, she had no document of self-defense, no hope of saving her sisters, no way to point out to politicians the injustice of the current laws. Without it, Elizabeth could not safely return home and live happily ever after with her children—the thing she desired most intensely of all.
The only light in all this darkness was the reaction of the Granville townspeople to her plight. It had not taken Elizabeth long to make friends with her new neighbors, and once she told them her story, they were up in arms. Elizabeth told the doctor of their support in her August letter. “The stone of truth has commenced rolling,” she warned McFarland, “but where it will roll, my once dear friend…God only knows.”26
Even Elizabeth was surprised to learn its first destination: a public indignation meeting staged by the Granville residents toward the end of the summer. The sheer unfairness of Theophilus’s dictate that she should never see her children again, when she was clearly sane, had riled them. They felt that Elizabeth’s wish to return home should be granted, “even in defiance of Mr. Packard’s most cruel threat.”27
The people put their money where their mouths were. Knowing she had none, they generously raised a purse of $30 （about $612） for her—more than enough to pay her train fare to Manteno. They said any funds left over should go toward her legal costs, “should self-defense require it.”28 Finally, they assured her that they themselves would defend her liberty if Theophilus ever tried to send her to a second asylum, though as Granville lay eighty miles from Manteno, they would not exactly be close at hand. Nevertheless, Elizabeth felt she had a veritable army behind her.
Their kindness was unexpected and most welcome. Hearing of their generosity, Elizabeth gently made a request. Even though she’d had to shelve her plans to publish her book, she still felt passionately that the best way to protect herself—and her friends in the asylum—was through publication. So she asked the residents if they’d help her publish a pamphlet, hoping through it to enlist public sympathy. The townspeople readily agreed.
Elizabeth reached into her trunk and dusted off the “Appeal in behalf of the insane” that she’d written in June 1862 under the name of the Coes: the letter to the newspaper editors that had never been published. Granville duly printed it in their county paper, while Elizabeth spent $10 （about $204）—probably from the Granville fund—to print one thousand copies.
It was her first publication. And it was a resolute success—in more ways than one. “It shall be one of the highest aspirations of my earth-life, to expose these evils,”29 she’d written in the asylum. Having now published her exposé about the abuse at the hospital, Elizabeth could hold her head up high that she had “done what she could.”30 She sold the pamphlets through the post office, for a dime apiece. Slowly, money started trickling into her previously penniless purse.
It proved a summer of turning points. In the Civil War, the Battle of Gettysburg in July 1863 saw the tide start to turn in favor of the Union. In Granville, the same happened for Elizabeth. With the nucleus of a publishing business now under her belt, an iota of income, and the support of firm friends, she finally felt able to face her husband. So she planned to return to Manteno—threat or no threat.
It was dangerous, she knew. But she wanted—needed—to be a mother again. She wrote of missing her children, “The pain is unutterable, unspeakable.”31 Elizabeth could no longer live in this limbo land, where she was free but not free, where her body spoke of children born but her arms had none to hold. Her life seemed one of countless contradictions, but they all coalesced under one constant threat: commitment to a second asylum. But she knew she was not mad. She had to stand up to Theophilus’s dictate, or her life was over anyway. She refused to live a half-life such as this.
Yet she packed her trunk with apprehension. She had no idea what she’d find in Manteno. She had no clue if she even had any friends there anymore. She hadn’t heard from the Hasletts or Blessings since June 1861. She felt forced to conclude that they’d probably abandoned her, thinking her insane after all. She felt Theophilus had “alienated from me every friend I had in the world but Angeline.”32