Energetic of character, and kindly of heart, she at once lent herself to the work of elevating and instructing the degraded and suffering classes she found there, and becoming deeply interested in the welfare of these unfortunates, she continued to employ herself in labors pertaining to this field of reform, until the year 1834.
At that time her health becoming greatly impaired, she gave up her school and embarked for Europe. Shortly before this period, she had inherited from a relative sufficient property to render her independent of daily exertion for support, and to enable her to carry out any plans of charitable work which she should form. Like all persons firmly fixed in an idea which commends itself alike to the judgment and the impulses, she was very tenacious of her opinions relating to it, and impatient of opposition. It is said that from this cause she did not always meet the respect and attention which the important objects to which she was devoting her life would seem to merit. That she found friends and helpers however at home and abroad, is undoubtedly true.
She remained abroad until the year 1837, when returning to her native country she devoted herself to the investigation of the condition of paupers, lunatics and prisoners. In this work she was warmly aided and encouraged by her friend and pastor the Rev. Dr. Channing, of whose children she had been governess, as well as by many other persons whose hearts beat a chord responsive to that long since awakened in her own.
Since 1841 until the breaking out of the late war, Miss Dix devoted herself to the great work which she accepted as the special mission of her life. In pursuance of it, she, during that time, is said to have visited every State of the Union east of the Rocky Mountains, examining prisons, poor-houses, lunatic asylums, and endeavoring to persuade legislatures and influential individuals to take measures for the relief of the poor and wretched.
Her exertions contributed greatly to the foundation of State lunatic asylums in Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, New York, Indiana, Illinois, Louisiana and North Carolina. She presented a memorial to Congress during the Session of 1848-9, asking an appropriation of five hundred thousand acres of the public lands to endow hospitals for the indigent insane.
This measure failed, but, not discouraged, she renewed the appeal in 1850 asking for ten millions of acres. The Committee of the House to whom the memorial was referred, made a favorable report, and a bill such as she asked for passed the House, but failed in the Senate for want of time. In April, 1854, however, her unwearied exertions were rewarded by the passage of a bill by both houses, appropriating ten millions of acres to the several States for the relief of the indigent insane. But this bill was vetoed by President Pierce, chiefly on the ground that the General Government had no constitutional power to make such appropriations.
Miss Dix was thus unexpectedly checked and deeply disappointed in the immediate accomplishment of this branch of the great work of benevolence to which she had more particularly devoted herself.
From that time she seems to have given herself, with added zeal, to her labors for the insane. This class so helpless, and so innocently suffering, seem to have always been, and more particularly during the later years of her work, peculiarly the object of her sympathies and labors. In the prosecution of these labors she made another voyage to Europe in 1858 or '59, and continued to pursue them with indefatigable zeal and devotion.
The labors of Miss Dix for the insane were continued without intermission until the occurrence of those startling events which at once turned into other and new channels nearly all the industries and philanthropies of our nation. With many a premonition, and many a muttering of the coming storm, unheeded, our people, inured to peace, continued unappalled in their quiet pursuits. But while the actual commencement of active hostilities called thousands of men to arms, from the monotony of mechanical, agricultural and commercial pursuits and the professions, it changed as well the thoughts and avocations of those who were not to enter the ranks of the military.
And not to men alone did these changes come. Not they alone were filled with a new fire of patriotism, and a quickened devotion to the interests of our nation. Scarcely had the ear ceased thrilling with the tidings that our country was indeed the theatre of civil war, when women as well as men began to inquire if there were not for them some part to be played in this great drama.