Elizabeth Packard: A Noble Fight

16 Final Campaigns

16 Final Campaigns Th er e is c onsider a bl e ev idenc e that Packard’s legislative activities continued during the 1880sand 1890s. An article in the Atchison Daily Champion notes that she appeared before the Kansas legislature in 1881“to secure additional legal protection for married women and for inmates of insane asylums.”1 In 1883 she sent an “Open Letter to the Legislatures of Nebraska, Kansas, and Colorado,” requesting passage of a postal rights bill and a bill to protect the personal identity of married women. The letter included statements of support from ministers, doctors, and lawyers along with signatures of 804 legal voters. One testimonial noted that the bills would “secure to American people some of their most sacred liberties,” while another praised the married women’s “Identity Act” as “a cure for the woman suffrage complaint.”2 In the letter, Packard noted that she had presented these bills in four other states during the past winter. The Nebraska legislature evidently responded with passage of postal rights legislation.3 Senator L. E. Finch introduced her bills in the Kansas legislature; however, neither bill was enacted that year.4 There is some evidence that she turned her attention to the South and successfully shepherded two bills through the South Carolina legislature in December 1884.5 By February 1885, she was in Raleigh, North Carolina, where she addressed the state Senate Judiciary Committee in support of a bill to establish the “legal identity and personality of married women.” The local newspaper reported Packard was “a fine talker” who was “calm, deliberate and self possessed.” The writer added that it was the “most interesting committee meeting” that had occurred or would occur during that legislative session.6 In May 1886 Packard was back in Illinois, staying at the Leland Hotel in Springfield. A Springfield newspaper reported that she had traveled to nearby Jacksonville “with a lady friend and her lawyer, Judge S. R. Moore, of Kankakee,” to confront Andrew McFarland. The article explained that Packard felt “hampered in her humane work” by McFarland, and was now trying to extract from him a written promise to stop libeling her by call- ing her insane.7 McFarland refused to sign any such document and Moore instituted suit against him in Packard’s behalf, claiming $25,000 damages for libel. The editor opined that this “was quite considerate, when this claim might easily have been $50,000.”8 McFarland told a Chicago Tribune reporter that he had received Packard and her companions “courteously” at his Oak Lawn asylum and confirmed that he had been summoned to appear at the Kankakee County Circuit Court the coming September. He suggested that the whole thing was a publicity stunt to sell books.9 Kankakee County Circuit Court records confirm that Summons No. 7881 was delivered in the case of Elizabeth P.W. Packard v. Andrew McFarland and others. Abijah Dole, John Ure, and William Schrock were also named as defendants. The suit claimed the men had attempted “to impair and utterly destroy” Packard’s book business and humanitarian work in a “false, scandalous , malicious and defamatory article” published in the Newark Sunday Call in December 1885.10 The fragmentary records of the case still extant at Kankakee County court house appear to have been written by Stephen Moore. The evidence presented appears to be a rehash of the testimony and depositions given during and immediately following Packard’s 1864 trial. The available records do not indicate a verdict in the case. After enduring twenty years of personal attacks, it is unclear why Packard chose this time to sue McFarland and other detractors. It may have been, as McFarland suggested, an effort to draw publicity to her cause or to generate material for a new book. There is no evidence that suggests she was in financial distress at the time. Perhaps the most interesting information gleaned from records of the suit is the physical description of Packard offered by one witness for the defense. He described his encounter with Packard as she canvassed for her books in New Jersey in 1885: “She is at least sixty-five years of age . . . but in the dark hair she wears there is not one thread of silver. Intelligence and shrewdness gleam in her brown eyes . . . Her features are thin and sharp.” This somewhat witch-like image of the diminutive Packard, who was actually seventy years old at the time, suggests the strength she still projected as well as...