One Glorious Ambition (31 page)

That evening, after a day of awakening at 5:00 a.m. for tea and a biscuit, a light noonday meal of vegetables and a piece of chicken, and soup for supper, Dorothea collapsed in her room with barely enough energy to brush her hair before retiring. A tightness in her chest and a small cough alarmed her as exhaustion crept along her shoulders and settled like a snake curling around her.

Still fatigued in the morning, thinking her lung disease was returning to overtake her, she wrote to her friend George Emerson, “My strength of will threatens to be insufficient for my stern purposes of self-extinction.” She lay the pen down to reread what she had written.
Dare I expose such despair?
Was she trying to extinguish her life through interminable exertion? “Please forgive my self-pitying,” she resumed writing. “I have no one else to whom I can relay my inadequacies.”

“You are as a daughter to us,” Emerson wrote back. “Our home fire will always welcome and warm you. But be wary of your health.”

Dorothea read concern in his words, but most of all she savored the word
daughter
. She would have to reassure him that the
illness was of a mind fatigue drawn from talking to assemblymen, possible benefactors, lawyers, and trustees, and he was not to worry. There was so much to do, and she had to work
with
others and
through
others. She would fight off this cold.

Twenty men crowded the drawing room at her Philadelphia boardinghouse in December 1844. The Pennsylvania assemblymen sported watch fobs on gold chains dangling over portly vest coats. Dorothea listened to the talk of territories petitioning to become states, of slavery issues, of the apportionment of land in the West.

Then she began. She flattered them for their efforts of taking a census of indigent paupers. “Many states have not,” she told them. She complimented them on their obvious interest in creating committees to look after these important policy issues of prisoner care and those relieved of their reason. She cajoled them into identifying all they had done well, and then, when they finished exchanging smiles, she praised them again for how they were relieving suffering. Then she added in her softest yet clearest voice, “Sadly, you still have work to do. I’ve nearly finished my latest memorial.” She added, “I am confident that with this information you will alert your colleagues to the dire circumstances within your districts and what can be done about it. You cannot slip back into looking at information only and praising yourselves for accumulating it. Such information must propel you to action.”

“What would you have us do, Miss Dix?”

“I’d begin—”

“It’s all hypocrisy,” a western Pennsylvania legislator interjected. He had listened to Dorothea with a smirk, and now his words burst like a firecracker over a Fourth of July celebration. “Humbug and poppycock. There aren’t that many imbeciles, and even if there were, we’ve done our duty by housing them. What more can you ask the good citizens of this state to do?”

The room grew silent, and Dorothea suspected that he spoke what a number of others had not had the courage to say.

“I’m familiar with your district,” Dorothea said. “Let me tell you of some of the abuses I personally witnessed. The auctions are the hypocrisy, sending paupers with limited mental faculties to become the slaves—I use that word advisedly having seen slaves in the South better treated than these wretched souls. Will you wish to stand before your Maker at the end and explain how you failed to act to rescue the least of these, turned the impaired into slaves?”

“I’m familiar with Scripture. I don’t need you to preach at me.”

“Of course you are. It’s just that we are all so privileged here in this room, so more is required of us.” She went on to give another five examples of deplorable conditions within his district. “Sadly, the same could be said of any district. These examples of suffering are meant to appeal to our humanity, not to shame. We wear finely tailored clothes, and some might even suffer from gout caused by too much rich food. But those who are relieved of their reason, the indigent insane especially, are often half-clothed and starving through no fault of their own.”

“She has you there,” a colleague said. “Your gout, I mean.”

The legislator laughed.

She spoke for more than an hour. She told of how a simple book could bring comfort, how giving meaningful work returned dignity to even the basest human being. “God expects more of those to whom He’s given much. Let me begin to share with you the conditions of the insane in your prison system.” Her throat was sore and her chest tight.

The assemblyman pressed his hands to his ears. “I don’t want to hear any more! I am convinced, convinced!” More than one colleague raised his eyebrows. “You can decide for yourselves,” he told them. “I will vote for your hospital, Miss Dix. But I want you to come to the legislature. ‘Miss-Dix’ our Pennsylvania senators.” The other assemblymen laughed. “I mean for you to inform them as you have me, though you might choose examples from other districts.”

“That I will do,” Dorothea told him. “And I must say that as a teacher and grammarian, I find it quite inventive of you to form a verb from my name.”

“Verbs are actions, are they not?” he said. “And being Miss-Dixed has brought about an action. I will vote for your legislation. But tomorrow, you must be on the train to Harrisburg. I’ll have the Speaker of the Pennsylvania House and the president of the state senate there, and you, dear lady, shall ‘Miss-Dix’ them on the train and then move on to the halls and the conference rooms.”

The next morning, Dorothea rode that train, and with her most diplomatic efforts, she “Miss-Dixed” the Speaker and the
senate president until each agreed. “Pennsylvania shall have its indigent hospital for the insane.”

New Jersey acted first. The legislature accepted her report in December, substituting it for the usual committee report.

“I am honored,” she told the assemblyman with whom she had worked. This would surely shorten the debate. On the day the legislation was introduced, the Salem County poorhouse burned to the ground. Eighty paupers housed there survived, but now they had nowhere to go. Their need was more desperate than ever.

The usual legislative wrangling occurred, but this time Dorothea stayed. She did not travel to Pennsylvania to move that bill forward. She felt something good about New Jersey—namely, the people’s commitment to those who had no voice. She met with many assemblymen, served tea to their wives, appealed to their humanity, even their egos, that this might be the first public hospital for the indigent insane devoted solely to moral treatment. It would be something to be proud of, she told them.

During a weekend lull in the session, she hired a carriage to drive her to the countryside, to clear her mind of the facts and figures and fatigue. She passed fields with melting spring snow that looked like white doilies on a cherry table. She had breakfast at a country inn where she chatted with guests from faraway places. When asked her name, she noticed one or two nod and say they had heard of her work and were grateful she had taken up the
cause. She would have gone on to the beaches, but she couldn’t risk not being at the statehouse on Monday morning. No one ever knew about the New Jersey weather or roads. There might be more questions, and she did not want the bill to fail for lack of answers.

On March 20, 1845, the measure for New Jersey to build and fund a public asylum came up for a vote. Dorothea was in the gallery. All her work, would it be for naught yet again? Her shaking knees trembled the book she used to count the votes as each name was called and she heard an aye or a nay.

“It’s passed!” She jumped up. The book hit the floor. Heads turned, and she sat back down. “It’s passed,” she said again. She couldn’t erase the smile from her face. The clerk read the vote then. She was right. A New Jersey state lunatic asylum had been authorized. At last!

In the hall outside the chambers she accepted the congratulations of legislators, chatted about the Trenton site, and basked in the praise for her part in this success. She hoped she wasn’t being prideful. That evening at the boardinghouse she wrote in her diary: “This is the first new hospital to be built with public funds for the indigent insane who will receive moral treatment. I am so grateful that God has given me a small part in bringing comfort to my family for that is who my true family is: the mentally ill, and I will do whatever I can to reduce their suffering. God grant me good health that I may continue in His service.”

There would be much to do. She had been appointed to the implementation committee for the Trenton hospital. She would
help determine the site and structure, maybe even have a say about the pictures on the wall. Most members had not ever seen even a private asylum, as far as she could discover, and knew little of Jarvis’s or Kirkbride’s work designing structures to enhance moral treatment. But their hearts were in the right place, and together they would help the county programs expand immediately to meet the needs brought on by the almshouse fire while they moved forward with building. Private hospital physicians were on their side this time.

Back at her boardinghouse, she danced around the room to the music of a tinkling music box she had purchased in celebration. She planned to give it to the local county jail in the morning, but this night it would accompany her celebrating heart.

Pennsylvania also passed its hospital bill, the “Miss-Dixed” assemblymen and senators deciding it was necessary for their citizenry. Perhaps the auctions would be discontinued. That would be her hope.

“Father” Emerson wrote to say her accomplishments were extraordinary, given the rumor that Pennsylvania already had a debt of forty million dollars.

Dorothea wrote back with the lament: “I should have suggested a larger facility. I’ll need a place there myself if I must work daily with legislators.”

She hoped it wasn’t a premonition.

With no other states seeking her advice, Dorothea became restless. She began a book titled
Remarks on Prisons and Prison Discipline in the United States
, which included her theory that lack of discipline was the primary reason for prisoner incarceration and for the poor behavior of prisoners behind bars. She supported the separation movement, which advocated keeping prisoners isolated from each other so they would meditate on their actions without distraction while they worked alone. Not all agreed with her assessment once the book was published, but she did not remain in Pennsylvania long enough to participate in the war of words among the book’s many reviewers. Instead, she headed to Kentucky, where the Eastern Kentucky Lunatic Asylum solicited her help in lobbying for a new hospital.

“Surely you won’t go there alone. The state is a backwater,” Anne Heath said. The two friends sat at a quilt frame in Anne’s room. “Did you enjoy meeting your brother’s wife? I’m so sorry you weren’t able to attend the nuptials. Perhaps the invitation could not find you with all your travels?”

“I sent a gift along,” Dorothea said. She poked her finger with a needle and sucked on it. “And I did meet her. Quite lovely. Joseph is happy I think. He keeps a tight lid on his thoughts. He did ask for a loan, which I granted, though he doesn’t seem to realize he’s used up his portion and is now into Charles’s and mine.” She sighed. “But I’ll not let money interfere with even a loose family tie. So I’m on to Kentucky. As for taking wagons and coaches to the hinterlands, Kentucky can be no more challenging than the distant regions of Rhode Island. I survived those. I shall sail through the jails and almshouses and provide needed information to the legislature to see if they will act.”

What she did not know until she arrived in Lexington was that Kentucky followed out-of-door relief. Many of those in need were housed in private family settings rather than the public jails and poorhouses. Determining the state of the insane in private homes was not an avenue she had walked before.

When a dry-goods owner told her he knew of a mentally ill person living nearby with an aunt or uncle, she knocked on the door but was not invited inside.