But it is not so with my kindred, and other friends. I am not alienated from them, for I have had no just and adequate cause for alienation. They erred ignorantly, not willfully. They were willing to know the truth; they were convicted, and are now converted to the truth. They have confessed their sin against me in thus neglecting me, and have asked my forgiveness. I have most freely forgiven them, and such penitents are fully restored to my full fellowship and confidence. To prove they are penitent, one confession will serve as a fair representation of the whole. I give it in the writer’s own words, verbatim, from the letter now before me. “We are all glad you have been to visit us, and we regret we have not tried to do more for you, in times past. I am grieved that you have been left to suffer so much alone—had we known, I think something would have been done for you. Forgive us, won’t you, for our cruel neglect?” Yes, I do rejoice to forgive them, for Christ allows me to forgive the penitent transgressor. But he does not allow me to do better than he does—to forgive the impenitent transgressor. And I do not; but as I have before said, I stand ready with my forgiveness in my heart to extend it to him, most freely, on this gospel condition of repentance—practical repentance.
“Dr. McFarland, the Superintendent of the Asylum, says she is insane; and he ought to know.”
Yes, he ought to know. But, in my opinion, Dr. McFarland, does not know a sane from an insane person; or else, why does he keep so many in that Asylum, as sane as himself? And mine is not the first case a court and jury differed from him in opinion on this subject. He has been so long conversant with the insane, that he has become a perfect monomaniac on insanity and in his treatment of the insane. I never saw such inhumanity, and cruelty, and barbarity, practiced towards the innocent and helpless as he sanctions and allows in that Asylum. I could write a large volume in confirmation of this assertion, made up of scenes I myself witnessed, during my three years’ incarceration in that terrible place. The material is all on hand for such a book, since I kept a secret journal of daily events, just as they occurred, so that my memory is not my only laboratory of such truths. And in arranging this matter for a book, I intend to turn Jacksonville Asylum inside out. That is, I shall report that Asylum from the standpoint of a patient, and if this book don’t prove my assertion that Dr. McFarland is a monomaniac, I am sure it will prove him to be something worse. But I claim to defend his heart from the charge of villainy, and his intellect from imbecility, for I have often said of him, “Dr. McFarland is the greatest man I ever saw, and he would be the best if he wasn’t so bad!”
But this is not the place to make a defence for Dr. McFarland. Let him stand where his own actions put him, for that is the only proper place for either superintendent or patient to stand upon. But I will own, God made him fit for one of his great resplendent luminaries; but Satan has marred this noble orb, so that now it has some very dark spots on its disk, such as his patients can behold without the aid of a telescope! Yes, as a general thing, his patients are not allowed to behold anything else but these dark spots, while the public are allowed to see nothing except the splendors of this luminary. And when my telescopic book is in print, the public may look, or not look, at the scenes behind the curtain, just as they please. The exact scenes are now fully daguerreotyped on my brain and heart both, as well as on my manuscript journal. In this volume I am only allowed to report what relates to myself alone. Therefore I have but little to say; for as it respects his treatment of me, individually, I regard him as a practical penitent, and on this basis, I have really forgiven him. And God only knows what a multitude of sins this man’s repentance has covered! And my Christianity forbids my exposing the sins of a practical penitent, after having practically forgiven him.
As proof of his penitence, I bring this fact, that it was under his superintendence, and by his consent alone, that I was permitted to spend the last nine months of my prison life in writing “The Great Drama.” This book was commenced as an act of self-defence from the charge of insanity, and this man was the first person in America that ever before allowed me any right of self-defence. And this act of practical manliness on his part, awakened, as its response, my full and hearty forgiveness of all the wrongs he had hitherto heaped upon me; and these wrongs had not been “like angels visits, few and far between.” But I had, in reality, much to forgive. At least, so thought my personal friends at the Asylum, if their words echoed their real feelings. Their feelings on this subject were not unfrequently uttered in very strong language like the following: “If Mrs. Packard can forgive Dr. McFarland all the wrongs and abuses he has heaped upon her she must be more than human.” And I now have before me a letter from one who had been for several years an officer in that institution, from which I will make an extract, as it corroborates this point. She says, “How the mind wanders back to those dark hours. O, that hated letter! once presented you by a ——, who delighted to torture those he could not subdue. Our hearts did pity you, Mrs. Packard. Mrs. Tenny, (now the wife of the then assistant physician, but my attendant at the time referred to,) and myself often said, everything was done that could be, to annihilate and dethrone your reason. Poor child! They had all fled—none to watch one hour! All I have to say is, if there can be found man or woman who could endure what you did in that three years, and not become a raving maniac, they should be canonized.”
Yes, God, God alone, saved me from the awful vortex Mr. Packard and Dr. McFarland had prepared for me—the vortex of oblivion—God has delivered me from them who were stronger than I, and to his cause, the cause of oppressed humanity, for which I there suffered so much in its defence, I do now consecrate my spared intellect, and reason, and moral power.
This “Great Drama,” written there, is my great battery, which, in God’s providence, I hope sometime to get rich enough to publish; and it is to the magnanimity of Dr. McFarland alone, under God, that my thanks are due, for letting me write this book. He dictated none of it. He allowed me perfect spiritual liberty, in penning this voluminous literary production of seven hundred pages; and if ever there was a book written wholly untrammelled by human dictation, this is the book. But as I said, his magnanimity, even at the eleventh hour, has, so far as I am concerned, secured my forgiveness.
But he has been, and I fear still is, a great sinner against others, also; for, as I have often said, it is my candid opinion, that there were fifty in that house, as patients, who have no more right to be there than the Doctor himself. Judging them from their own actions and words, there is no more evidence of insanity in them, than in Dr. McFarland’s words and actions. He certainly has no scruples about keeping perfectly sane persons as patients. At first, this was to me an enigma I could not possible solve. But now I can on the supposition that he don’t know a sane from an insane person, because he has become a monomaniac on this subject, just as Mr. Packard has on the woman question. The Doctor’s insane dogmas are, first: all people are insane on some points; second: insane persons have no rights that others are bound to respect.
He has never refused any one’s application on the ground of their not being insane, to my knowledge, but he has admitted many whom he admitted were not near as insane as the friends who brought them were. He can see insanity in any one where it will be for his interest to see it. And let him put any one through the insane treatment he subjects his patients to, and they are almost certain to manifest some resentment, before the process is complete. And this natural resentment which his process evokes, is what he calls their insanity, or rather evidence of it. I saw the operation of his nefarious system before I had been there long, and I determined to stand proof against it, by restraining all manifestations of my resentful feelings, which his insults to me were designed to develop. And this is his grand failure in my case. He has no capital to make out his charge upon, so far as my own actions are concerned. No one ever saw me exhibit the least angry, resentful feelings. I say that to God’s grace alone is this result due. I maintain, his treatment of his patients is barbarous and criminal in many cases; therefore he shows insanity in his conduct towards them.