She suddenly remembered the stranger who passed by her window every morning. He was now her only hope. She quickly scribbled a note to Sarah Haslett, informing her of the imminent danger. When, the next morning, the stranger passed by, she beckoned him to her and managed to slide the note out from her sash window. She found a small gap where its two parts came together, though they could not be pried apart.
“Stranger, please hand this note to Mrs. Haslett,”9 she whispered urgently.
It had therefore been Sarah who’d raised the alarm. Given the proximity of danger, a proposal was made that Elizabeth simply break the window to escape and her friends would protect her, but Elizabeth rejected this hasty plan. “If I should not finally succeed in this attempt,” she reasoned, “my persecutors would gain advantage over me, in that I had once injured property, as a reason why I should be locked up.”10
Instead, Sarah went to the Kankakee courts, and with her went four men: her husband, William Haslett; seventy-two-year-old Zalmon Hanford, husband of Elizabeth’s friend Nabby; sixty-five-year-old Daniel Beedy, Manteno’s first-ever town supervisor; and sixty-one-year-old Joseph Younglove, a local merchant. It was these four men—“responsible citizens”11 one and all—who’d filed the writ of habeas corpus on Elizabeth’s behalf.
And now, mere hours after he’d been summoned, Theophilus arrived outside the Kankakee courthouse with his wife. Both looked up at the grand building with something approaching awe. It was an impressive, three-story monument, constructed from brick and limestone and topped with a pretty wooden cupola. The Packards duly entered, passing by jail cells on the first floor, county offices on the second, before finally arriving at the courtroom on the third.
Though Kankakee was the county seat, one wouldn’t have known from its dilapidated courtroom. It had a bare floor and “ill-arranged seats,”12 which made it “very difficult for the Officers of the Court to preserve the order and decorum which should at all times be preserved in a Court of Justice.”13
On that front, Elizabeth’s habeas corpus hearing was already proving challenging. A massive crowd had gathered; Theophilus observed it was “enraged”14 and “seething.”15 Kankakee was a religiously diverse city, its population of thirty-eight hundred worshipping at nine different churches. Elizabeth’s case, as described by her friends, had already inspired outrage. As Elizabeth put it, “I have neglected no duties, have injured no one, have always tried to do unto others as I would wish to be done by; and yet, here in America, I am imprisoned because I could not say I believed what I did not believe.”16
Theophilus viewed the crowd with apprehension. At least he could take some comfort from his lawyers. Two stood to represent him. One was Mason Loomis, a young lawyer in his midtwenties, who shared office space with Dr. Knott, the Kankakee physician who’d issued Theophilus with a certificate of insanity in 1860. His other, lead attorney was the impressive Thomas Bonfield.
Bonfield’s name was almost synonymous with that of Kankakee. He was one of its earliest settlers, becoming its first elected president in 1855. Aged thirty-six, he was a neat man with a balding forehead, tightly clipped beard, and astute, dark eyes. “Devoid of all ostentation,”17 being a quiet chap with a retiring disposition, Bonfield sat calmly at his lawyer’s table, his presence reassuring to the anxious minister.
The lawyer who was to fight in Elizabeth’s corner could not have been more different. Thirty-one-year-old “Steve”18 Moore was of Irish descent, “the life and soul”19 of any party. He loved a good practical joke and wore his beard outrageously long, like a legal Santa Claus. Good-natured and humorous, courteous and affable, he attracted “hosts of friends”20 wherever he went. He had a strong nose, bushy eyebrows, and a solid head that contained a remarkable brain. Becoming a lawyer had been his childhood dream, and he was known as “one of the most gifted and able members”21 of his profession.
Yet he was also one of the most thoughtful, “benevolent and charitable above the average of his fellow-men.”22 His biography declared, “He gives his bread to the hungry23 and never turns ‘his face from any poor man.’” With the Civil War aflame, he’d recently started representing war widows struggling to get pensions, often acting without fees. For Elizabeth, he’d done the same, agreeing to defend her “without any expectation of fee or reward, except such as arises from a consciousness of having discharged my duty toward a helpless and penniless woman.”24 He was assisted in his endeavors by two attorneys: twenty-nine-year-old James Orr, and Harrison Loring, a decade older.