He searched her person, but though he patted her down this way and that and even stripped her clothes from her, they were not hidden there. He searched her room. Her wardrobe. Her trunk. Elizabeth watched him rifling through her things as he “took an inventory of every article.”3 Silently, she gave thanks that all her precious papers were safely stored with Sarah Haslett. God only knew what Theophilus might have done with them had he found them.
But he not only didn’t find her papers; he did not find the keys.
His search widened. “The entire house and premises were most carefully and diligently searched in every corner, nook, and crevice,” Elizabeth observed. “Even the embers of my stove were examined.”4
Still no keys.
The search headed outdoors, where “every stone, leaf and shrub were upturned to find the missing keys—but all to no purpose.”5
Theophilus was frantic. The bunch of keys that were missing were not only for the linen closet but also for the house. He feared what Elizabeth might do with them—and the freedom they afforded her. He could not let the matter stand. He was convinced she’d taken them and wanted to give her no opportunity of using them at all.
So he locked her in her nursery; he pocketed that key. As he’d done in 1860, he got out his hammer and nails and shut up the windows, blocking her in. He made sure the front and back doors were always securely fastened or guarded so she could not escape. He stopped her from joining the family for meals, intercepted her mail, and, crucially, cut her off from all communication with her friends. The intermeddlers had had it all their own way for far too long. He’d had enough of Elizabeth running off to see them and of them dropping in to visit. They were a bad influence.
He even roped his son Samuel into this imprisonment: a mini jailer who stepped up to the plate. “I…refused a woman admittance,” said Elizabeth’s third-born son, “as she invariably made mother worse every time she came.”6
Ironically, almost concurrent with Elizabeth being confined in this ever-tightening cage, Abraham Lincoln delivered the famous Gettysburg Address. “This nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom,”7 the president promised his country.
But Elizabeth’s freedom had never seemed further away than at that time.
Theophilus was aware his makeshift jail could only be temporary. He therefore wrote to Dr. McFarland to request he readmit Elizabeth, perhaps thinking that the local state asylum would be more convenient than the Massachusetts one. He’d warned his wife: if she ever returned to the children, he would send her away. On this matter at least, the pastor intended to keep his word.
In the meantime, he kept his wife locked up, his temper fraying by the day. Rebecca Blessing remembered calling on Elizabeth with another friend, sixty-nine-year-old Abigail “Nabby” Hanford. But Theophilus, Rebecca said, “would not let us see her; he shook his hand at me, and threatened to put me out.”8 Elizabeth, too, reported physical violence: Theophilus “striking”9 her and “dragging [her] by the hair.”10
It was a miserable existence. Elizabeth’s only entertainment was peering out through her fastened windows, the only highlight a stranger passing by each morning as he collected water from the Packards’ pump. Yet her husband did not care. “His sympathy is as empty of a soul or heart as a crab-apple is of sweetness.”11
Nor did Theophilus listen to the protestations of her friends at his cruelty. On the contrary. He commissioned new certificates from the Doles to combat what his allies called “false and slanderous reports.”12
“Mrs. Packard, the afflicted and deranged member of the family,” wrote Sybil and Abijah Dole, “has not to our knowledge, been treated otherwise than in a kind and suitable manner.”13
That “suitable” was key. Elizabeth was supposedly a madwoman, after all. Theophilus and Samuel thought her friends’ visits made her mental condition worse, so was it not a kindness to prohibit them? Given Elizabeth’s sickness, surely it was suitable treatment that she wasn’t free to leave the house? As a leading psychiatrist of the day put it, “To deprive the insane of their liberty is a sort of first principle…and so imperative as to render…interference…unnecessary and impertinent. Nobody questions the right of the husband to confine his wife in his own house if she is [mad].”14
Theophilus soon had reason to believe his “suitable” treatment was working. Around this time, Elizabeth suddenly acquiesced to a request he’d long been making.