One Glorious Ambition Page 17

  “I have things to do,” she wrote. “There are those in need of me and what little discomfort I feel with a hard bed or mud-wet shoes, these are minor compared to my brothers and sisters, the insane. If I am cold, they are cold; if I am weary, they are distressed; if I am alone, they are abandoned.”

  She began visiting jails and almshouses, canvassing thirty-five towns in one week. She pushed herself, writing early in the morning and late at night, uncertain why she pushed so hard. She thought often of Reverend Channing, hoping he would approve.

  A part of her was relieved she did not have to defend to him the very public argument going on in the newspapers about what Dr. Howe had written and about her public response. The worst part of the scathing letters going back and forth in the newspapers questioned her veracity and motives. She had hoped to remain outside the fray. Thankfully, one editorial had defended her, saying that since Miss Dix cannot vote nor stand for office, she had no motive but good to say what she did. “She has no reason to lie,” the editor concluded.

  She hoped this pronouncement would lower the fury and keep the subject on moral treatment and those who needed it, not on the messengers raising the issues.

  She did have to deal with Dr. Howe though. A part of her felt used that he had taken her material. Instead of preparing it thoughtfully for presentation to the legislature, he had gone on his own, purporting that moral treatment could “cure” the insane. She had not gone that far. It was out of humanity, out of Christian love, that their care should be improved. If people improved, so much the better. If they did not, they still deserved to be cared for as human beings, not wild animals.

  Dr. Howe had attempted to soothe her in his latest letter and had encouraged her to acquire more evidence of the need. “The legislature will require the most recent information and the more we have statewide, the more we can engage the entire House.”

  It was in part why she had set out with this travel schedule that fall and into early winter. But she also needed to tell him how his actions had affected her.

  Dorothea returned to Boston for Marianna’s wedding. Dr. Howe was in Boston too, and she requested a visit. They met in the parlor at Dorothea’s boardinghouse.

  “I had thought you’d write the review and then we would work together to see about approaching legislators. Now we have jailers and doctors displeased. As I travel the countryside, I meet with resistance if people have read of the uproar in Boston. They think I come to malign them rather than help them do better work.”

  “I imagine that if we’re successful in getting funds for the hospitals, the local jailers and the brothers-in-law they hire to assist will have their profits reduced, so we’re not likely to ever have them on our side,” Howe said. He looked at his fingernails, not at her.

  “I prefer to appeal to their better souls. If we describe what we’re doing well, they’ll see the humanity in it and want the best for these people they often refer to as ‘wild creatures.’ ”

  “You are an optimist.” He adjusted his glasses, smiled. “But never fear. The legislature has convened an investigative committee to look into the conditions at East Cambridge. They will affirm what you saw, what we saw. Your words have power, Dolly. While you did not know it, you have approached the legislature. You are approaching a singular legislator.” He cleared his throat.

  She frowned. What’s he talking about?

  “At least I hope to be. I am standing as a Whig for our dear Massachusetts House of Representatives. You will have an inside track at making moral treatment happen if I’m successful.” He beamed.

  He was running for office! That explained the timing of his exposé. She supposed that was good—should he be elected. He was benevolent. Still, there would be others who were not, and if she was to be successful in this realm of politics and policy, she needed to be a wary observer of the men who cast their votes even if she called them friends.

  Marianna’s wedding was a blend of vinegar and honey. Marianna made a good match with Edward Trott, the son of a wealthy industrialist. That was the honey. They planned to leave Boston and move south. That was the vinegar.

  “I will miss you,” Dorothea told her after the ceremony, careful as she hugged the girl not to crush the Belgian lace that lined her throat like alyssum.

  “You travel so much, Mummy. Perhaps you’ll come see us in Georgia.”

  “That could be.” She still warmed at the word Mummy.

  “When we have our first child, you must come for the baptism. You will, won’t you? Edward and I want you for the godmother.”

  “I will be there with ribbons on my fingers.”

  Marianna left her to greet the other guests. Dorothea avoided the whining cousins. They had allowed Marianna to wait and marry for love. Of course that meant they maintained guardianship over her longer and thus control over a portion of Marianna’s estate. She wouldn’t begrudge them. They had never prevented Marianna from visiting with her, and she prayed that her husband never would either. It was the way of families: one adapted or was left out.

  Dorothea didn’t always have access to the latest news during her far-reaching travels, but she did learn in December that Dr. Howe had been elected to the House.

  “Now,” he told her, just days before the December session convened, “bring us facts and statistics to show the need. It must be a memorial, an officially written statement of facts that will go with our petition to the legislature seeking funds for a new hospital. Pull all of it together, and I will present the memorial to the legislature. We’ll have our public hospital for those relieved of their reason and treat them with moral treatment. Bring the results of your painful and toilsome tour to light once and for all.”

  At the boardinghouse, Dr. Howe reviewed her work and made suggestions. She would spend the evening revising her report. At first, he seemed to resist her approach. “We must convince them that the policy of placing insane people in almshouses and jails is wrong and keeps people from a cure. Once they agree to that, it will be easier to move to the solution being a new hospital advocating moral treatment.”

  “We’re not selling cures. They need to see the souls of these people. I’ll not pepper the memorial with numbers but with human souls,” she said. “It’s too easy for them to argue over whether there are two hundred or ten people held in chains or whether doctors come daily to check or never come at all. Those numbers are distractions. What matters are the lives of people merely surviving in inappropriate places and how their plight speaks to our souls, to your fellow legislators’ souls.”

  “I suppose you’re right.” He adjusted his vest over his ample stomach. “Though some of these episodes read like your emotional children’s stories.”

  “Stories appeal to all ages,” she said. “They will remember the stories much better than if I simply list bare facts.”

  When she handed him the final memorial at his office, he read it quietly. Dorothea’s eyes noted his framed degree on the wall; she heard noise in the hallway of busy aides shuffling here and there. He was interrupted several times by aides who handed him papers. He directed others, then returned to her pages. Lamplight flickered against the cherry wood walls. She didn’t know the name of the plant behind him on the credenza, but it was lush and promised blooms.

  “You do mention ‘hundreds of insane persons seen in every variety and circumstance.’ It’s good you tell how many months of travel you’ve made and that your interest began more than two years previous. That’s wise.” He continued to read, then he looked up at her across the desk. “You name specific places visited.” She nodded, not sure if he thought that wise or not, but she thought it essential so these men in power might learn of a distant relative or at least not be able to put these sad people at arm’s length. She wanted them to “touch” them as she had.

  “It’s a very powerful work,” he told her, laying the manuscript down and removing his glasses. “You have captured the plight of the insane. It’s a … horrifying account, ac
tually. Horrifying.”

  “I only witnessed it. I don’t have to live it.”

  “But you conclude that for many of those you’ve seen little improvement can be expected.”

  “I believe that’s true. The majority are well treated, and their caretakers are doing the best they can. It’s the minority I worry over, those whose lives are the saddest picture of human suffering and degradation. They are worthy of all of this.” She gestured to the memorial that had consumed so much of her recent life.

  He looked through several pages again. “You failed to include any note of the origins of insanity or the state’s duty to care for them because of the disorder caused by our imperfect social institutions and freedoms of our modern world.”

  “The causes are irrelevant. Our duty is the same. Moral treatment may not cure insanity caused by sin or misfortune or even the freedoms of democracy, but the patients still have a right to be safe, comfortable, and peaceful. That cannot happen, I believe, in almshouses or jails. They need a hospital. They need a physician’s care. That’s what this is all about.” She heard the passion in her voice and calmed herself. “I would come to the committee and tell them directly, if that would help.”

  Howe shook his head. “Women are not permitted. Against the feminine nature.”

  “My feminine nature allows me to witness the horror, to write of it, but not to speak of it to men who can do something about it?” She wasn’t disagreeing with him but noted the irony.

  “We must keep you as pure as we can. It’s what I tell Julia, but she doesn’t listen to me and insists on speaking publicly of abolition. I think it lessens her moral authority. I don’t want that happening to you.”

  Should I be comforted by his worry over my reputation or is this yet another way for him to use my work for his own gain? What mattered, she decided, was that he would introduce the memorial to the legislature. He would be her voice and the voice of the mad in securing them a safe and humane place where some might improve. But improvement was not the goal. Being treated as a human being was.

  Twenty-Two

  Thousands Await

  “This is astonishing,” Anne told her. Dorothea’s Memorial to the Legislature of Massachusetts had been introduced on January 19, 1843, with copies printed as a pamphlet for interested readers. A few newspapers decided to serialize portions.

  The two friends sat in Anne’s parlor at Brookline, newsprint spread before them. It had been months since they had shared an afternoon. During the legislative session Dorothea sat in the gallery, ready and willing to give Dr. Howe more information, should he need it. Thankfully, he had been named chairman of the memorial committee.

  “Your examples of the poor suffering people,” Anne continued. “I know you wrote of some of them, but to read of them here in the way you’ve presented them, it’s quite … moving.”

  “Not for everyone, judging from the letters to the editor. There’s more controversy when there should be none. Relieving suffering is part of the human condition. I so hope it moves the legislature to act.”

  “The story where you were asked by the insane man if you had lost dear friends too. Do you suppose it was your dark dress that made him think you were in mourning?”

  “It might well have been. And I didn’t think him insane. Just lost of his reason. Temporarily.”

  “But did the conversation really go as you wrote?”

  Even her friend questioned her veracity? “I answered him as I would anyone who would ask. ‘I’ve not lost all my friends,’ I told him. And then he said, ‘Have you any dear mother or father to love you?’ ” Her voice caught at the memory. “Oh, Anne, his gentle question brought tears to my eyes.” Dorothea brought clasped hands to her throat. “Imagine, his being lucid enough to comfort. That he laughed and paced his stall and shouted with his fists to an unseen monster right afterward did not take away from his moment of aware compassion. That he would strike to the core of my orphan state, with no mother or father to love me, to never have had them to love me, speaks to his humanity.” She patted her fingers at her heart.

  “One wonders if those people have a special telescope to peer into the soul of others,” Anne said. “Less distracted by the demands of daily living, they perhaps can be more observant of the emotions of others.”

  “And might that not suggest that those whose art is recognizing human suffering might be that close”—Dorothea put her thumb and finger to within a smidgeon of each other—“that close to madness themselves?”

  “Oh, posh, not you. Though I do worry over your exertions.” Anne stuck her knitting needles into the ball of yarn and pulled on the servant cord to ask for tea. It was that time. Her sisters would be back from their walk soon.

  “I find it interesting that your account of the baby in the arms of the vacant mother was quite different from Howe’s use of it in his article last fall,” Anne said. She cleared the table of books for the tea tray.

  “Which did you prefer?”

  “Yours,” she said after a pause. She leaned toward Dorothea and lowered her voice. “I also thought he might have inflamed the baser senses by describing the half-naked man in the cell next to the young woman. The image of him pounding on the thin wall, hoping to reach ‘the comely girl’ to do heaven knows what damage. Well, it was quite vivid.” She pursed her lips. Mock prurient disgust? Dorothea sat back. What could be titillating about the slippage of humanity?

  “Perhaps that sort of sexual image appeals to readers of the Advertiser.”

  “Such words, Dorothea.” Anne fanned herself.

  “I wanted to evoke compassion from the legislators, not fear or voyeuristic emotions. I hope that as brothers, fathers, and husbands, they will see the importance of sensitivity to their less fortunate sisters, mothers, and wives. Even brothers. That man could have been a father.”

  “Well, the excerpts in the papers have certainly aroused comment.” She set aside her fan for the tea. “How does your shawl for Marianna progress?”

  Dorothea looked at her hands. “The yarn dye blackens my fingers, so I’ve put it off for a time in case I need to remove my gloves to make notes in the legislative gallery.”

  “The dye wasn’t set properly if it stains,” Anne said. “There is another letter to the editor today. Did you see it? From the Danforth jail officials. They’re quite upset and said you wrote out of your imagination.”

  “I’ve become accustomed to such furor.” Still, her stomach ached with the criticism.

  “They called the memorial a series of barefaced falsehoods, false impressions, and false statements. Does it … bother you, that people question your integrity?”

  The words hurt as much as the reviews of her book The Garland of Flora had. “I wish you had not told me,” Dorothea said.

  “I thought you would want to know the truth.”

  “There’s little I can do about the negativity, and I’m not new to it.” She sipped her tea. “Truthfully, it’s an added pain to hear those words from your mouth, dear friend, even though you are just repeating them.”

  “Oh, I never meant to hurt you! I truly thought you would want to know.”

  “I know.” She smiled, trying to lighten the mood she had changed by expressing her feelings. She had no one with whom she could feel safe. No one who would understand that the repetition of an untruthful statement from the lips of a friend pained her more than if she had read it herself. Psalm 57 came to mind. “ ‘They have prepared a net for my steps; my soul is bowed down.’ Only I will not bow down. I must respond to the Danforth claims, of course. I cannot let such accusations stand now that I know of them.”

  “But it makes you so … public if you start a word war. You risk becoming like Julia Ward.”

  “I’m not preaching in front of crowds about abolishing slavery.”

  “You are becoming known, though, in a public forum.”

  “For the suffering,” Dorothea said. “I make myself a public person for them.”

 
; She did not tell Anne that she had publicly solicited letters of support for a new asylum from hospital superintendents around the region. Nor did she tell Anne that she had replied quite firmly to an editorial that had been supportive, but the editor suggested one minor inaccuracy. They had a flurry of letters between them, thankfully not published in the paper. Facts were facts that must be defended, however minute the issues might appear to someone less informed.

  She kept to herself the more positive letters she received. Anne would think her prideful, and it might feed an envy she had so casually witnessed. L. M. Sargent, a prominent speaker of temperance reminded her, “Woman was last at the cross and first at the tomb, and she is never more in her appropriate situation, than when placed precisely as you are at this moment.” She reread that letter several times.

  Dr. Howe supported Dorothea more privately than publicly. When he did respond to editorials or letters, he never once said that he too had visited many of the same facilities and saw the same things Dorothea described. Once he suggested that perhaps on another day things might have been much better, that the vagaries of treatment in the jails could not be pinned down quite so much as one might like.

  Dorothea read his letter and felt her face burn. He was succumbing to the complainers, mitigating the horrors that were real and every day for those who suffered without treatment in cold, smelly jails. It was something of the political world she could not grasp, this weathervane mentality as she thought it, never being certain who one’s allies really were or if they would stay the course or turn as the winds blew differently. If not Howe, then who could she count on to bring the memorial to its perfect solution? She could not do it herself. Her skirts could not cross the threshold of the assembly.

  The memorial included a request for one hundred thousand dollars to build a moral treatment hospital. Yes, it was a quarter of the entire commonwealth budget. But she assured Howe that she could acquire donations for most of it, leaving the state to come up with perhaps only twenty-five thousand more dollars and the ongoing maintenance costs. But as a woman, she was not allowed to testify before the committee to these factors.