Gaslighting
Kankakee, Illinois – 1864
A Woman Declared Insane
Elizabeth Packard, 47, was not on trial for a crime; she was fighting for her sanity in the only court that would hear her. Four years earlier, her husband, the Reverend Theophilus Packard, had her seized at home and committed to the state insane asylum in Jacksonville—entirely legal in Illinois at the time, thanks to a rule that allowed a husband to institutionalise his wife without a public hearing. She had disagreed with his theology, spoken up in church, and defended abolitionist John Brown; for this, she was branded “slightly insane,” and removed. She would spend nearly three years at Jacksonville, refusing to renounce her views. In June 1863, the hospital discharged her—declared “incurable”—and returned her to her husband.
She came home to learn he’d rented out the family house the night before, sold her belongings, taken their children to Massachusetts, and begun preparing to have her confined again. Under coverture, she had no clear claim to her children or property. Friends quietly organised a writ of habeas corpus. The court ordered both Packards to appear before Judge Charles R. Starr in Kankakee in January 1864. What followed was five days that transfixed Illinois: a sanity trial born from a habeas petition, in which neighbours, ministers and physicians debated whether an articulate, inconvenient woman was “mad.”
“I do not call people insane because they differ with me… I pronounce her a sane woman, and wish we had a nation of such women.”
That line—delivered to the jury by Dr. Duncanson, a physician who examined Packard—was the pivot. On January 18, 1864, the all-male jury took just seven minutes to return its verdict: sane. Judge Starr ordered that Elizabeth Packard “be relieved of all restraints incompatible with her condition as a sane woman.” She walked out of court free—but homeless, penniless, and separated from her children.
Closing the Loophole
The case mattered because it illuminated a legal blind spot big enough to swallow a life. Illinois had modernised involuntary commitment procedures in the 1850s—requiring a public hearing—yet carved out a breathtaking exception: husbands could still consign wives to asylums without that safeguard. Packard’s ordeal showed how a private marital judgment, laundered through a compliant process, could become a civil death. Her victory, dramatic as it was, exposed how narrow the law’s mercy remained for married women.
Packard did not retire into relief. She understood the system that had failed her, and set about changing it. She founded the Anti-Insane Asylum Society and began to write at speed, turning her notes from confinement and committees into books that sold—Marital Power Exemplified; or, Three Years’ Imprisonment for Religious Belief (1864), The Prisoners’ Hidden Life, or Insane Asylums Unveiled (1868), among others. In Springfield, legislators read her pages alongside testimony from doctors and superintendents. In 1867, Illinois passed the Bill for the Protection of Personal Liberty, guaranteeing a public hearing for anyone accused of insanity—wives included. Massachusetts followed; other states, too. She could not recover the lost years, but she could close the loophole that had consumed them.
Writing as Survival
Her writings are not cool memoirs; they are legal briefs in plain speech. She describes the capture at home, the locked wards, the elastic diagnoses, and the way power—domestic, medical, clerical—can align to erase a woman’s testimony. She also records the smaller violences: the letters intercepted, the windows nailed shut, the neighbours turned witnesses. In teaching-text clarity, she connects the law of coverture to the practice of confinement: if a married woman’s legal existence was folded into her husband’s, how easily could the state agree with him that she had no mind of her own to protect.
The transformation from patient to reformer was hard on her. Doctors and officials derided her as a zealot. Yet the record is stubborn: one trial, five days; one quote, perfectly aimed; seven minutes to undo a husband’s “right.” In the Illinois Supreme Court’s own historical account, Packard’s case is the hinge on which the state’s mental-health law, and the rights of married women entangled within it, began to turn.
The Legacy of Gaslighting
A century and a half later, the story reads with eerie modernity. We have a word now—gaslighting—for the intimate campaign to make someone doubt their reality. Packard’s courage reminds us that language alone isn’t enough; you need procedures that hear the silenced, and judges who will order the doors unlatched.
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