Way thought her “easily excited” with a “nervous temperament.” Yet as they chatted about various subjects, he found her “perfectly sane.” At least until they talked about religion. Elizabeth, he felt, expressed “undue excitement on that subject.” Her original thinking was shocking too. He therefore reached the conclusion Theophilus desired: “I thought her to be somewhat deranged or excited on that subject [of religion].”4
Theophilus duly added Way’s certificate to his file.
All these visits from physicians made Elizabeth suspicious. When another man walked through her door in the week before Christmas, she asked him directly if he was a doctor.
But he wasn’t. He was a sewing machine salesman. She ended up chatting with him for three hours, an extraordinary amount of time to grant a passing salesman, which spoke volumes about Elizabeth’s loneliness. They talked about sewing machines, women’s rights, the war, and religion.
But the salesman, Elizabeth thought, showed rather too much interest in her views on the latter. As they raked over the subject on which so many had previously found fault with her, Elizabeth suddenly felt foreboding. Her mouth fell silent; her manner became clipped. She felt “some calamity would befall her”5 because of this stranger. It was mad in itself, she knew, to fear such an innocent passerby. Nevertheless, when he took his leave, she refused to shake his hand. She did not care what he thought; she just wanted this black crow of calamity gone.
After he’d left, she got really scared. Before the year was out, she suggested, radically, to Theophilus that she leave the house—to go alone to New York to try to get her book published.
But Theophilus couldn’t allow that. His plan to incarcerate her for life was nearing fruition. If she left now, all his preparation would have been in vain.
“It [is] my duty to prevent [you] going,”6 he told her strongly.
He said he used no force to stop her. Whether he did or didn’t, he got his way. He wrote in his diary, “She gave it up.”7
The new year started with an unusual spell of extreme cold weather that more than matched the atmosphere in the Packard home. Across the state, people froze to death from the terrible temperatures; others suffered frostbite and amputated limbs. Snowdrifts were ten feet deep, the thermometer showing thirty degrees below zero. Outdoor operations were “almost totally suspended, except such as were necessary to the preservation of life.”8
Stuck indoors, chained as much by the weather as by Theophilus’s edicts, Elizabeth proposed to the children that they clean and polish the cookstove one day, to which plan her husband, for once, consented. He withdrew to the nursery while they worked, taking his mass of papers with him. Feeling the chill, he lit Elizabeth’s stove to warm him.
But there was no such heat come Saturday, January 9, 1864. On this day, Nabby Hanford and Rebecca Blessing tried again to visit Elizabeth.
To their surprise, they were allowed in—almost as though their bad influence no longer mattered. Theophilus simply found the nursery key and unlocked the door to let them enter.
Shockingly, they found Elizabeth sitting in a room with no fire. Given the extreme weather, it was cruel indeed. Yet the three women had no choice but to sit there in the freezing cold, with Theophilus apparently unconcerned at the incivility.
But his worries were almost over. He was just days away from taking Elizabeth to the Northampton asylum. He counted them down in the way he’d always counted slights against him: harboring them close to his chest, picking over them like a vulture. The Saturday passed without incident, then Sunday and Monday too.
But at 10:00 a.m. on Tuesday, January 12, the pastor’s plot abruptly derailed.
He perhaps heard the horses’ hooves first, pounding to his door. Then an officious knock that demanded answer. When he opened up, a court clerk stood upon his doorstep. He presented the pastor with a legal writ.
A writ of habeas corpus.
Theophilus knew exactly who to blame. “Four intermeddlers in town got out a writ of Habeas Corpus,” he raged, “as though I was falsely imprisoning her!”9
He did not seem to see the cleverness behind that legal filing.
Because such a document could never have been issued if Elizabeth was already at Northampton. Then, her commitment would have been legal. But to be held by her husband in her own home was not. Who was Theophilus to keep her prisoner? Not a doctor, protected by the perks of his profession. A cruel husband: no more, no less. Because locking up a wife in her own home was potentially unlawful, and habeas corpus could therefore be used to grant her a trial to find out.