He was trying at the time to sell some real estate, but the law required his wife’s consent. Elizabeth had refused to give it. Long ago, her wealthy father had gifted her $600 （about $18,000）， and—as most wives would have done in that era—she’d entrusted it to Theophilus for safekeeping. Yet since 1860, Theophilus had refused to trust her with even $10 of it. In all likelihood, Elizabeth’s fund had probably been swallowed up by his secret debts. But Elizabeth refused to sign the property paperwork until he returned this patrimony. With the money long gone, the Packards had been left at loggerheads. Yet Elizabeth now proposed a deal: she’d give her consent if he returned her Bible class essays.
It was an easy win for Theophilus. He couldn’t see why she wanted them anyway. He called in Mr. Labrie—who was not only the postmaster but a notary public—and asked him to prepare the deeds.
Labrie therefore visited the house…and expressed consternation. “The door to her room was locked on the outside,” he observed. “Mr. Packard said, he had made up his mind to let no one into her room.”15
But Labrie was allowed in, on that day at least. The essays and signatures were duly exchanged.
Possibly in response to Labrie’s reports of the new reality inside the Packard home, Elizabeth’s friends tried once again to reach her. Sarah Haslett, now in the early stages of another pregnancy, called on her one day; she was barred by Samuel. She did not give up. She went to the fastened window and conversed with Elizabeth through it.
Elizabeth reportedly begged to be “released from her imprisonment.”16 She wanted “protection from Mr. Packard’s cruelty.”17
“I advised her,” Sarah said, desperate to help, “to not stand it quietly, but get a divorce.”18
But Elizabeth didn’t want to be divorced. Under nineteenth-century law, to divorce her husband would also be to divorce herself from her children and home. She would have to sue for the rights to both and was highly unlikely to win. Although a handful of mothers had been successful in winning custody suits by the 1860s, almost every such published decision underlined that fathers’ rights took precedence. These rare pro-mother decisions were exceptions to the rule.
“Would it not be becoming an accomplice in [his] crime, by doing the very deed which he is so desirous of having done,” she said plainly, “namely: to remove me from my family?”19
Learning of her resistance, Theophilus could not help but be glad. As long as Elizabeth remained his wife, it would be easy to commit her. He hoped, any day now, to return her to Jacksonville.
But in December 1863, a wrench was thrown in the works of this intended arrangement. McFarland wrote to inform him that the trustees had refused to readmit Elizabeth on the grounds she was incurable. The doctor said—in what was possibly a white lie, given her troublemaking tendencies—that he’d “favored her readmission.”20
The pastor filed the letter among his papers with bitter disappointment. He was not used to having his plans thwarted.
Yet he was not too disheartened.
Time to effect plan B.
CHAPTER 40
In the winter of 1863, the Northampton asylum in Massachusetts held 383 patients, 216 of them women. Theophilus schemed that very soon, Elizabeth would be among them.
Though he already possessed McFarland’s certificate of insanity, the pastor wanted to secure a declaration from another doctor too. He’d in fact started this ball rolling as early as November with a Manteno physician, James Mann.
“Mr. Packard had told me she was insane,” reported the doctor, “and my prejudices were, that she was insane.”1
Mann had come to the house and interviewed Elizabeth. To his surprise, he’d found a rational woman. “I was there from one to two hours,” he said. “I could find nothing that indicated insanity.”2
He’d refused to issue a certificate.
At the time, it hadn’t much bothered Theophilus. McFarland thought her mad, and if Jacksonville accepted her as planned, no other doctor’s view was needed.
But with Jacksonville no longer an option, Theophilus renewed his efforts once more. He invited Mann back again, but despite a second interview, the doctor still insisted Elizabeth was sane.
So Theophilus invited Dr. Joseph Way, from Kankakee, to examine his wife. The native New Yorker came for two hours. In that time, he gained Elizabeth’s trust, because she confided in him.
“She said she liked her children and that it was hard to be torn from them,” Way reported. “That none but a mother could feel the anguish she had suffered; that while she was confined in the Asylum, the children had been educated by their father to call her insane.”3