Having reported her discoveries to the men of science, she next appealed to the men of wealth. Providence had at that date a multi-millionaire, by the name of Butler; he left four millions to his heirs. He had never been known as a philanthropist; he did not himself suppose that his heart was susceptible. It is said that knowing persons smiled when they heard that Miss Dix intended to appeal to him. Further, it is said that Mr. Butler, at the interview, ingeniously diverted the conversation from topics that threatened to be serious. He apparently had no thought of giving Miss Dix a penny. At length she rose with the impressive dignity so often noted by her pupils and said: "Mr. Butler, I wish you to hear what I have to say. I want to bring before you certain facts involving terrible suffering to your fellow creatures all around you,—suffering you can relieve. My duty will end when I have done this, and with you will rest all further responsibility." Mr. Butler heard her respectfully to the end, and then asked, "What do you want me to do?" "Sir," she said, "I want you to give $50,000 toward the enlargement of the insane hospital in this city." "Madam, I'll do it," he said, and much more of his estate afterward went the same way.
Three years of devoted study of the problems of insanity, with limitless opportunities for personal observation, had given Miss Dix an expert knowledge of the subject. She had conceived what an insane asylum should be. Hitherto, she had been content to enlarge upon foundations already laid; now she would build an asylum herself. She saw, we are told, that such an institution as she conceived could not be built by private benevolence, but must have behind it a legislative appropriation. She chose New Jersey as the field of her experiment. Quietly, she entered the state and canvassed its jails and almshouses, as she had those of Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Next she digested her facts in a Memorial to the Legislature. Then, with a political shrewdness for which she became celebrated, she selected the member, uniting a good heart with a clear head and persistent will, into whose hands it should be placed. Much of her success is said to have been due to her political sagacity. The superintendent of one of her asylums said, "She had an insight into character that was truly marvellous; and I have never known anyone, man or woman, who bore more distinctly the mark of intellectuality." Having placed her Memorial in the hands of a skilful tactician, she retired to a room appropriated to her use by the courtesy of the House, where she spent her time writing editorials for newspapers, answering the questions of members, and holding receptions. "You cannot imagine," she writes a friend, "the labor of conversing and convincing. Some evenings I had at once twenty gentlemen for three hours' steady conversation." After a campaign of two months the bill establishing the New Jersey State Lunatic Asylum was passed, and the necessary money appropriated for its erection. She was always partial to this first creation of her energy and genius. She called it 'her first child,' and there, forty-five years later, she returned to pass the last seven years of her life, as in a home, a room having been gratefully appropriated to her use by the trustees of the asylum.
At this date, Dr. S. G. Howe wrote her: "God grant me to look back upon some three years of my life with a part of the self-approval you must feel. I ask no higher fortune. No one need say to you, Go on! for you have heard a higher than any human voice, and you will follow whithersoever it calleth." Indeed, she already had much of her future work prepared. While waiting for the Legislature in New Jersey to take up her bill, she had canvassed Pennsylvania and had the happiness to see a bill pass the Legislature of that State founding the Dixmont Hospital, her second child, soon after the birth of her first. The Dixmont Hospital is the only one of her many children that she would allow to be even indirectly named for her. Meanwhile, she had canvassed Kentucky, had been before the Legislature in Tennessee, and, seven days after the passage of her bill in New Jersey, she writes from a steamer near Charleston, S. C., as follows: "I designed using the spring and summer chiefly in examining the jails and poorhouses of Indiana and Illinois. Having successfully completed my mission in Kentucky, I learned that traveling in those States would be difficult, if not impossible, for some weeks to come, on account of mud and rains. This decided me to examine the prisons and hospitals of New Orleans, and, returning, to see the state prisons of Louisiana at Baton Rouge, of Mississippi at Jackson, of Arkansas at Little Rock, of Missouri at Jefferson City, and of Illinois at Alton.... I have seen incomparably more to approve than to censure in New Orleans. I took the resolution, being so far away, of seeing the state institutions of Georgia, Alabama, and South Carolina. Though this has proved excessively fatiguing, I rejoice that I have carried out my purpose."
Between June 1843 and August 1847, she states in a letter that she traveled 32,470 miles, her conveyance being by steamboat when possible; otherwise by stage-coach. It is suggestive of the wrecks and delays she had experienced with the shattered coaches and mud roads of the south and west that, as we are told, she "made a practice of carrying with her an outfit of hammer, wrench, nails, screws, a coil of rope, and straps of stout leather, which under many a mishap sufficed to put things to rights and enable her to pursue her journey." "I have encountered nothing so dangerous as river fords," she writes. "I crossed the Yadkin when it was three-quarters of a mile wide, rough bottom, often in places rapid currents; the water always up to the carriage bed, and sometimes flowing in. The horses rested twice on sand-bars. A few miles beyond the river having just crossed a deep branch two hundred yards wide, the axletree broke, and away rolled one of the back wheels."
When she said that river fords were her greatest danger, she must have forgotten an encounter with a highwayman. She was making a stage journey in Michigan, and noticed with some consternation that the driver carried a brace of pistols. To her inquiries he explained that there had been robberies on the road. "Give me the pistols," she said; "I will take care of them." More in awe of her than of robbers, the driver reluctantly obeyed. Passing through a dismal forest the expected happened. A man seized the horses and demanded her purse. She made him a little speech, asked if he was not ashamed, told him her business, and concluded, "If you have been unfortunate, are in distress and in want of money, I will give you some." Meanwhile the robber had turned "deathly pale," and when she had finished, exclaimed, "My God, that voice." He had once heard her address the prisoners in the Philadelphia penitentiary. He begged her to pass, and declined to take the money she offered. She insisted, lest he might be again tempted before he found employment. People obeyed when she insisted, and he took her gift and disappeared.
Think of the hotel accommodations,—the tables and beds,—she must have encountered in these wild journeys. This is the woman who, a few years ago, seemed to be dying with hemorrhages of the lungs. Did she have no more of them? Oh, yes; we are assured that "again and again she was attacked with hemorrhages and again and again prostrated by malarial fever." A physician said, "Her system became actually saturated with malaria." Invalid as she almost always was, she had left her foot-prints in most of the states of the Union and had carried the war into the British Provinces, where she had been the means of establishing three insane hospitals: one in Toronto, one in Halifax, one at St. John, Newfoundland, besides providing a fleet of life-boats at Sable Island, known as "The Graveyard of Ships," off the coast of Nova Scotia.
In the United States, during these twelve years, she "promoted and secured," to use her own phrase, the enlargement of three asylums: at Worcester, Mass., at Providence, R. I., and at Utica, N. Y., and the establishment of thirteen, one in each of the following states: New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Illinois, Kentucky, Missouri, Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, North Carolina, and Maryland, with the Hospital for Insane Soldiers and Sailors, at Washington, D. C.
In 1850, Miss Dix proposed a larger scheme of philanthropy than was ever before projected by any mortal. What is more, but for one man, she would have carried it out. She petitioned Congress to appropriate 12,000,000 acres of public lands for the benefit of the indigent insane, deaf and dumb, and blind. A bill to that effect was introduced, watched by her through two sessions, and finally passed by both Houses. She was inundated with congratulations from far and near; but the bill was vetoed on constitutional grounds by President Pierce. The day for giving away the public lands in sheets had not come.
The blow seems to have been more than Miss Dix could endure. She went abroad for change and rest. What rest meant to her, she expresses in a letter to a friend at home:
"Rest is not quitting the active career:
Rest is the fitting of self to its sphere."