One Glorious Ambition Read online

  “I’m trying to keep the discussion of the committee from focusing on the accuracy of your descriptions and move them toward debate about a new hospital,” Howe told Dorothea. He had taken supper with her. They sat in the parlor now, drinking coffee and eating carrot cake. The fuchsia plant near the window offered a spot of pink color to their surroundings.

  “I do understand; I do,” Dorothea said. “But in listening to the debate yesterday, it seemed that the minds of the representatives speak to expanding Worcester’s hospital rather than building a separate one. You invited testimony from the superintendent, and it seems to me you made less use of my arguments—which I could not make myself. Where will moral treatment end up with a mere expansion?”

  “The superintendent supported the base of your memorial. We must take what wins we can, Dorothea,” Howe said. “It is the nature of politics.”

  “I’m not certain I much like politics,” she said.

  “It requires a certain masculine skill.”

  She accepted the rebuke. “You do know I wrote to Representative Allen?”

  “Yes. Comparing his passion for eliminating slavery in the state to our commonwealth holding the insane in dungeons did not sit well with him. They are two different but very important issues.”

  “I appealed to his reason, or so I thought,” she said. “How can he fight for the freedom of slaves and not fight for the freedom of the insane?”

  “He does not see the connection. He is not a supporter. And when the vote comes up later this week, which I hope it will, I believe it will not be for a new hospital as we had hoped but for an addition to Worcester, if that.”

  It would be a defeat. Her work—her arrival on the public stage at risk to her private, proper feminine role, where women stayed out of the limelight, knew their place—would all be for naught.

  “What could I have done differently?”

  Howe shook his head. “I don’t know.”

  In the next weeks, Dorothea immersed herself in political schemes and the vagaries of political speech. She discovered that she must provide material daily to the committee members while in session, competing with other interests for their attention. She might meet them in the morning and get a warm reception, but by nightfall someone else had slipped in and placed another bill in a higher position, and she would have to begin again. Nothing ever appeared certain.

  Except the suffering of those relieved of their reason.

  When the vote came, Dorothea was in the gallery. It went as Howe had predicted. She had raised the issue, kept it on the minds of many, but in the end, only one hundred fifty more beds added to the existing two hundred fifty at the Worcester State Lunatic Hospital would become available. Only one hundred fifty of those hundreds caged and forgotten in the almshouses and jails from Cape Cod to the mountains would have access to a better existence. And none served by the moral treatment approach.

  She had reduced the suffering of a few. Thousands more waited.

  Twenty-Three

  To Ask for More

  With Reverend Channing gone and the campaign for the hospital on to new phases that did not need her, Dorothea pondered her future. She wrote to Marianna and to Anne, being honest but cheerful. She kept in touch with the Channing children and Sarah Gibbs, their aunt, writing that perhaps her memorial was not such a failure. After all, she had gotten more beds set aside for the mentally ill, and in the process she had established relationships with several asylum directors in the region, a few of whom had already formed an association. “This could be a powerful group to get behind my objectives to separate the insane from jails and almshouses and move them into moral treatment facilities,” she wrote to Sarah. “Though I’m unsure of their acceptance of a woman’s contribution to the cause.”

  She would approach her next steps as a military campaign and look beyond the immediate battle to the larger war to combat human suffering.

  “I’m going to travel,” she told Dr. Howe when they met at the end of the session. “Expand beyond Massachusetts and focus on those who cannot be treated, the hopeless cases who nevertheless deserve lives of dignity, free of pain and degradation.”

  “A noble effort. Keep me informed, would you? We might be able to pick up where we left off if we have new legislation to consider.”

  “What would we ask for? They chose expansion over a new facility.”

  “Think big,” he said.

  She would think hugely but never forget the individual lives she might make better through her specific interventions. How long she could juggle both she did not know.

  She spent the next six months visiting small towns in Vermont, New Hampshire, eastern Canada, and Rhode Island, bringing her inquisitive eye to the almshouses and jails. Her pattern was to find a reputable inn and interview the innkeeper about the local leaders and their interests, who the pastors were, and what charitable groups helped keep the town on an even keel. She used that information to identify civic-minded men she could solicit for support and to meet their wives. Women were the streams that fed the ocean of action. She needed these men and women to sustain her work and keep it brewing after she left, or she would be setting fires without andirons. She would meet with them and gauge who could be helpful, as Howe had certainly been, but she’d be wary with them too. As political beings, men could also change their minds or temperature of support, and she might not anticipate when they were so moved.

  Weekly, she checked her ledger books, careful of her spending. This crusade was at her own expense.

  As she unpacked her bags in Providence, Rhode Island, she considered how distant she was from her brothers, but she stopped those thoughts—an activity she found she could control if she kept busy and focused on the needs of others. It kept her from despairing or self-pitying. Her brothers both had families. Joseph had their aunt and uncle. Charles had his shipmates. Even Marianna was happily married. Dorothea’s family was now the insane.

  She found in some small towns that her reputation preceded her. The controversy over the memorial and her legislative success with the expansion reached many towns and villages.

  “Dix,” an innkeeper said aloud, looking at her sweeping script that embellished the fine-lined pages of the yellow guest book. “Aye. Heard of you. Work with the imbeciles.” She would nod agreement and wait to see what they might say next. “Got a niece. In the Providence jail. Didn’t mean to do anything, but now she’s there. Needs help I can’t give her nor her mother either.”

  “I’ll visit and see what I can do.”

  The innkeeper himself carried her trunk to her room.

  While renowned educator Horace Mann and his new wife traveled in Europe, and Samuel and Julia Howe joined them on their honeymoon, visiting the castles and glories of Italy and France, Dorothea rode the dusty roads of villages nestled in the mountains of New Hampshire or spent her evenings in a quiet guesthouse on the Canadian border, writing of what she had seen. When she finished a tour, she provided copious notes to each state’s interested parties with the hope that the asylum movement to provide moral treatment and to address the needs of the incurable would move forward village by village, state by state.

  She visited private asylums as well and recognized a stiffness in some of the superintendents. “Most everyone is curable with medical treatment,” one told her.

  “Bloodletting and castor oil are no treatment, sir.”

  “Neither is putting raving imbeciles in an asylum of their own. It would prove a madhouse. No, those are best left to caretakers in rooms where they can be contained. Small jails where they can be watched and kept from harming themselves or others.”

  She would watch those superintendents. She was not surprised when her legislative contacts told her they had been visited already by these men who did not share her views on the value of moral treatment.

  Dorothea’s back would ache by day’s end, after hours spent on dirt floors or standing beside barred cages, sometimes offering small suggestions to the
jailers. She sought permission for a musician to come and play slow tunes to calm the inmates. She suggested a relative be allowed to visit and read to an inmate. “Soft voices can often relieve their agitation,” she assured skeptical jailers. Then she would read to the inmates, and the shouts and cries of the confused stopped when they heard her melodious voice.

  “It must sometimes feel like you’re imprisoned too,” she ventured once to a jailer in Berlin, New Hampshire.

  “I get paid.” He was a burly man with a part of his ear missing.

  “Yes, but is there pay enough to every day witness the downtrodden, those whose mental faculties are in peril? I say you suffer too. You who care for them and cannot make their lives or yours better.”

  Sometimes they would scoff at her, but more often the grizzled jailers would scratch their beards, cock their heads, and soften their stares. “How do you know that?” they would ask.

  “We suffer, too, who want to make things better but seemingly can’t,” she said. “I know you work hard. I can see it.” She might reach out and touch a gloved hand to their knuckles. Tears welled in the faces of men who let this woman feel that side of them they dare not admit existed, for to do so would be to admit that they were powerless.

  “I intend to help the legislature see how difficult your work is and how much we need to place some of your … residents in a hospital. That’s where they should be, not here, not harassing other inmates or adding to the damage of your long days.”

  They would nod and show her the most despicable cases that would cause her to gasp with the stench but also propel her onward. So many suffered. She had so little time.

  Twenty-Four

  Polishing the Soul

  “So he’s a miser,” Dorothea said.

  “Indeed. But you might, with your gentle charms, relieve his purse of a few coins,” Providence minister Edward Hall commented. Several other prominent Rhode Islanders nodded and murmured their assent as they spoke of Cyrus Butler, renowned miser, or so they said.

  Dorothea entertained these guests at the Oakland Inn where she had stayed off and on during March 1844. Mrs. Hall paused behind the settee, listening and saying little, but Dorothea knew her to be both wise and kindhearted like her husband.

  “His contribution could put us forward on a facility for the indigent insane, get them away from the almshouse and into decent quarters for care.” This observation came from yet another civic leader.

  “Why has he not been approached before?”

  “Oh, he has; he has,” Reverend Hall said. “But none of us has had the least bit success in relieving him of even a penny. For any worthy cause.”

  “I’ve always liked a challenge,” Dorothea told the men. She rubbed her gloved hands as though at a fire and the men smiled. Her challenge wasn’t in getting the money, though, but in finding out what pained the man to make him so unaffected by the needs of his community.

  “If he would give you twenty-five thousand dollars, that would go a long way toward a new hospital,” the cleric said.

  “He’s elderly and without issue?” Dorothea asked. Heads nodded. His legacy would weigh on him as it does with all men. What is earthly success when the last moments are spoken between a man and his Creator? “He suffers.”

  One of the men laughed. “I’d like to suffer with his bank accounts.”

  Dorothea turned to the man, her blue-gray eyes piercing. “We all suffer. And when we give reason to be generous, we relieve a modicum of that terrible distress. Did our Lord not say it was easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven? But we who open that tent gate, that eye of the needle, make a way for the souls of men to move toward a closer association with God. It is our duty to do what we can for such men.”

  “Well, Edward. It seems it’s your duty to relieve a wealthy man of his coins.” The men chortled.

  Dorothea’s face grew warm with the mocking. She must temper her opinions.

  “Let’s consider this. I’ve prepared an article for the Journal,” Dorothea said. “If published, it is my hope it will soften the hearts of potential donors such as Cyrus Butler. I would approach him after he has had the opportunity to read it.” She hoped there would be few distractions with letters to the editor since she wrote about an area so far from the capital. Accessing private money might be more productive than convincing legislators to expend public funds. She did not want controversy; she wanted compassion. “It’s about an unfortunate man, Abram Simmons, whom I met in Little Compton—”

  “You went that far in your research?” Mrs. Hall interrupted. “Little Compton is so remote. Near the Sakonnet River?”

  “Across the bay from Massachusetts,” Dorothea confirmed. “To the far corners, yes. A countryman rowed me over the river to the almshouse.”

  “Was it safe to travel so far south?” Mrs. Hall persisted, a blend of curiosity and admiration in her voice. “The citizens are a … quirky lot, are they not?”

  Women are capable of so much more than we’re allowed. “Quite safe.” She handed a copy of the proposed newspaper article to Reverend Hall, but Mrs. Hall came from behind the settee and intercepted it.

  “Let me read this to us all,” she said. The men affirmed, allowing her to read. “ ‘It is said that grains of wheat, taken from within the envelope of Egyptian mummies some thousands of years old, have been found to germinate and grow in a number of instances. Even toads and other reptiles have been found alive in situations where it is evident that they must have been encased for many hundreds, if not thousands, of years.’ You capture us, Miss Dix, with this interesting opening image of tenacious seeds and frogs. It says nothing about the insane.”

  Dorothea smiled and urged her to read on.

  “ ‘It may, however, be doubted whether any instance has ever occurred in the history of the race where the vital principle has adhered so tenaciously to the human body under such a load and complication of sufferings and torture as in the case of Abram Simmons, an insane man, who has been confined for several years in a dungeon in the town of Little Compton.’ ” Mrs. Hall looked up. “You will use his name?”

  “I must. God named all whom He loves. Abram Simmons will be seen for who he is: an individual who clings to life despite the wretched conditions inside his coffin-size cage with frost on the stone walls and his teeth chattering constantly from cold.”

  Mrs. Hall finished and into the silence, a bird in a cage in the boardinghouse chirped.

  “Our God awaits us to act on His behalf.”

  “What would you have us to do to help?” Reverend Hall asked.

  “The article is scheduled for publication on Saturday, the tenth. Would you set up a private interview for me with your Mr. Butler after that? And come join me, of course, to make the proper introductions. But let him have time to read of Mr. Simmons and let God work within the man’s heart.”

  As the visitors were leaving, Dorothea stood on the stairway leading to her room. She had to educate even the supporters. She overheard Mrs. Hall say, “She is a shining example of womanhood, self-appointed critic that she is. She’s strong and quite beautiful. I suspect Butler will be well taken with her.”

  “Right on all accounts, my dear,” Hall told her.

  Self-appointed critic? Is that what she was? Dorothea pondered that as she finished her climb to her second-floor room. That was not a bad observation. Critics changed things, and that was what she was about. On this journey to change the lives of the insane, she must never be in doubt.

  Cyrus Butler welcomed them to his Providence estate a few days later. Considering his assumed wealth, the home was modestly furnished without the usual silver service prominently displayed on a sideboard. Dorothea saw an open Bible there instead. An industrialist, he had accumulated his wealth “by himself,” he was known to say, and he did not want to interfere with the paupers who would one day want the pleasure of saying they had made their own way too.

  “T
o what do I owe this visit of the gentlewoman from Massachusetts?”

  Dorothea decided to be direct. Men of means liked that, though they might not expect it from a woman. “We have come to ask for a bit of your money.”

  Butler laughed. He wore a waistcoat with a high starched white collar. A diamond pin sat at his throat. “As do most who walk through my office doors. Hall here has been trying to get me to donate to his churchy functions for years. Haven’t you, Reverend?”

  Hall nodded meekly. “She insisted on seeking a consultation with you. You know how women can be.”

  “And what charity do you represent, Miss Dix?”

  “None. I come on behalf of the insane. A voice for the mad who cannot speak for themselves. The ones who are in a paupers’ jail when they belong where they can be properly cared for.”

  “Ah, that Simmons man in Little Compton. I read of him.”

  “Yes, for him and thousands like him. And I come for you.”

  “Me? Ha-ha!”

  Although he laughed, Dorothea could tell it was from discomfort not disdain.

  “Let us take coffee, Miss Dix.” He pulled the servant cord for the maid to come.

  They spoke of small things then, of the roads along her travels and the weather. She let him set the pace, smoke his cigar, until he said, “So you’ve come for the weak and you’ve come for me, eh?”

  “I’ve come to offer you a way to polish your soul of the tarnish of years and choices.”

  “And you have knowledge that my soul needs polishing, do you?” That same ha-ha followed.

  She used her most gentle voice. “Here’s what I know of you, Mr. Butler. You treat your employees kindly. You do not hire children. You have not wasted your profits on bobbles but have put them back into your business to improve conditions. There are troughs outside your offices for horses to drink from in the heat. You hired someone to keep the troughs cleaned and filled. You do not like to see suffering. I can tell that.”