Elizabeth was possibly hesitant, given his lack of communication over the past few years, but accompanied him nonetheless. Back at the tavern, she found Rebecca Blessing and Caroline Ann Haslett （whom Elizabeth called Sarah） eagerly waiting. There were new faces as well. Rebecca nursed a ten-month-old baby boy, born since Elizabeth had been sent away. She had missed all that, just as she’d missed Georgie’s growth spurt and goodness knew what else.
It must have been an awkward reunion. For years, Elizabeth had had no choice but to doubt her friends. Though she was aware of McFarland’s censorship, it had been so hard to write letter after letter and receive no reply. Trapped in the asylum, knowing nothing of what was happening outside, she’d had to conclude that all had abandoned her. But with her friends finally able to speak freely, she now realized she’d seen “only one side of the picture.”5
“The other side I could not see until I saw my friends,” she said. “Then I found that the many letters I had written had never reached them; for Mr. Packard had instructed Dr. McFarland…that not a single letter should be sent to any of my friends.”6 Both Theophilus and McFarland read all incoming and outgoing letters before deciding whether to share them. “The result,” Elizabeth said angrily, “was scarcely none were delivered to me, nor were mine sent.”7
But the truth was out now. Her friends told her, too, of the many efforts they’d made for her release. They had staged a public indignation meeting on June 30, 1860, mere days after her kidnapping. Theophilus had been outraged by this “injurious interference of mischievous intermeddlers.”8 But having had advance notice, he’d pressed a handful of influential Chicago men into arguing his case. They did so with seemingly more skill than the minister himself could muster. “Their speeches came down on the astonished mob like avalanches from the Alps,” Theophilus wrote in triumph, “and the mob broke up.”9
Undeterred, her friends had then embarked on an extensive letter-writing campaign. But as McFarland had known before them, all their endeavors to secure Elizabeth an insanity trial were fruitless, because she had no legal recourse to freedom. They described their attempts to release her using habeas corpus and revealed how this supposedly catch-all safety net could be applied only to cases of unlawful confinement. Her stay at the asylum had been anything but.
Story after story flowed out over the food they shared, the friends not so much breaking bread as building bridges. The Blessings’ hotel was the perfect setting for this warm reunion. It was a modern inn, decorated with gilt picture frames, looking glasses, and a book rack; it was the choice location, in later years, for regular dances by the Fantastic Club. Finding herself surrounded by these old, true friends for the first time in years, Elizabeth felt pretty fantastic too.
From her point of view, the good news just kept coming. She asked, of course, about her husband’s current position within the community, knowing that he’d left the Manteno ministry almost eighteen months earlier but little more than that.
She was not prepared for what her friends told her.
The church itself had split. Back in 1861, a group of parishioners had begun, in Theophilus’s words, to give “great trouble to the church”10 as they protested against the new doctrines they’d been ordered to follow—exactly as Elizabeth had done the year before. Where one person leads, others may follow… Eventually, there were so many of them they became impossible to ignore; they could not all be locked up in insane asylums like the pastor’s wife. Instead, the church divided, with the resistant members establishing a Congregational church that followed New School doctrines.
The church elders blamed Theophilus for the members’ exodus. There was also a rumor that some parishioners left not because of the doctrines but because of his treatment of his wife. Either way, “he preached until none would come to hear him.”11 Eventually, “in order to save the church from utter extinction,”12 the deacons had requested his resignation.
So Theophilus had lost his job. Despite his desperate efforts in 1860 to retain his position—to the extent of abandoning his principles and silencing the wife who would not—it had all been for nothing.
“We lived without any salary,” Theophilus confided in his diary, “and with a debt of nearly $4,000… Yet through…the kindness of beloved friends…we had a house, food & clothes.”13
Elizabeth’s friends told her that house was one she would no longer recognize. Understandably, Libby had been unable to maintain her mother’s high standards. The Packard home was now “desolate-looking,”14 with an “extra amount of defilement—the accumulations of three years.”15