One Glorious Ambition (26 page)

She received the letter after a long day helping to quell a minor conflict between a livery owner and a man she had helped to find work there. The letter was from Sarah Gibbs, who was traveling with the Channings in Vermont. William Ellery Channing—icon of the Federal Street Church, Sarah’s brother-in-law, and Dorothea’s mentor—had died of typhoid fever. Dorothea gasped, tears pricking her eyes, flooding them so hard she couldn’t read the details.

Channing had been as close to her as any father could be, and now, in the midst of her first big battle, he was gone. She wished
she had been in Vermont so she wouldn’t have to grieve alone in the little townhouse on Mount Vernon Street, wished she could have heard his inspiring voice just one more time.

She picked the letter up and finished reading. Sarah would be selling the townhouse in which Dorothea now lived. Sarah would be staying in Vermont with Channing’s widow, Elizabeth. Dorothea put her hands to her throat. She was not invited to join the Channing household. Nor, she realized, would she desire to be so. She had work here to do, though it meant grieving alone.

Dorothea’s article was published the day after Channing’s death, but Dorothea took little notice. Once again she was packing. Once again she had no home. But she had a plan.

Relieving the suffering of others will relieve my own,” Dorothea reread in her diary. She dated it November 1842. This insight led her to put some of her things—including her writing desk—into storage. She packed a trunk with the simple uniform she was known for: a black merino-wool dress with a small, white lace collar. She arranged her hair in two swooping waves on either side of her face and collected it in the back in a tasteful bun sheltered by netting. Simple and easy. With ample supplies of pens, paper, and ink, she began to travel. She visited jails up the coast to Cape Cod, then across the interior to the Berkshire Mountains and back again. The inns along the way became her home. She made sure she did not fall into the despair she had felt after her grandmother’s death and the loss of Orange Court.

“As I am homeless, I will create homes for the insane,” she wrote in her diary and later to Anne, when the latter urged her to
pace herself and to consider living with her in Boston. “We could grow old together.”

“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, actually. 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.”