Ungentlemanly Acts Read online

  FOR NICHOLAS STEPHEN BARNETT

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  One - BEGINNINGS

  1 - SCANDAL

  BYRON AND STOWE

  2 - DRAMATIS PERSONAE

  LIEUTENANT ORLEMAN

  CAPTAIN GEDDES

  GENERAL ORD

  3 - FORT STOCKTON AND THE WEST TEXAS FRONTIER

  Two - COURT-MARTIAL

  4 - THE PROSECUTION

  LILLIE ORLEMAN

  LOUIS ORLEMAN

  ABDUCTION

  INTERLUDE

  VIRGINITY

  QUARTERS

  LITERATURE AND ITS DISCONTENTS

  THE COMMANDER OF FORT STOCKTON

  5 - THE DEFENSE

  REBUTTAL

  6 - REVIEW

  Three - FINALE

  7 - AFTERMATH

  8 - FINAL ACT

  EPILOGUE: INCEST AND JUSTICE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ALSO BY LOUISE BARNETT

  APPENDIX A

  APPENDIX B - The Baird Report

  APPENDIX C - Documents Relating to the Reinstatement of Andrew Geddes

  NOTES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  INDEX

  Notes

  Copyright Page

  One

  BEGINNINGS

  1

  SCANDAL

  Today, Americans are accustomed to the image of the court stenographer, clacking away at a machine that will spew forth a printed transcript of a trial almost immediately. But in 1879, transcripts were still copied out in longhand. For army courts-martial, these transcripts were boiled down into bare-bones abstracts, which provided an official printed summary of the proceedings. Each abstract listed the name of the defendant, the accusation, the verdict, and the sentence. Accusations were broken down into two parts: charges, which were general (“conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman,” for example), and specifications, which described exactly what was done, where, and when.

  In the case of Captain Andrew J. Geddes, whose trial lasted for the extraordinarily long period of three months, an exception was made. Geddes was tried for “conduct unbecoming,” but in the space where specifications were usually listed in the printed record appeared the phrase “not fit to be specified.”

  What abhorrent crime had Geddes committed? What deed so horrifying that the Army’s official record could not mention it? In the answer lies the true irony of this case. Geddes had accused a fellow officer, Lieutenant Louis H. Orleman, of an unspeakable offense—but instead of investigating Orleman, the Army tried Geddes for speaking of Orleman’s alleged crime. And as it turned out, there would be a great deal in the proceedings against Captain Geddes that would not be fit to be specified.

  Nothing in the extensive professional experience of Civil War veteran General E.O.C. Ord, commander of the Department of Texas, could have prepared him for the document that arrived at his San Antonio headquarters in April of 1879. The sworn and notarized deposition of Captain Andrew J. Geddes of the Twenty-fifth U.S. Infantry baldly accused First Lieutenant Louis H. Orleman, an officer of the Tenth U.S. Cavalry, of incest. Both men were stationed at Fort Stockton, a small frontier post in the still wild and sparsely populated region of West Texas. Ord regarded Geddes as one of his best field officers, but his deposition was shocking, even unprecedented. In an army where officers often preferred charges against each other to settle disputes, the matter of Geddes’s charge was extraordinary.

  Geddes stated that he had spoken out only in self-defense because he had learned that Orleman was bringing charges against him. To defend himself against these charges, he had to expose the relationship of “criminal intimacy” he had accidentally discovered between the thirty-eight-year-old lieutenant and his eighteen-year-old daughter, Lillie:

  I would state that on Sunday March 2nd 1879 … I saw Lt. L. H. Orleman, 10th Cavalry, having criminal intercourse with his said daughter … . I heard from the adjoining quarters (the same being of [sic] those of Lt. Orleman, and divided from mine by a partition wall) a voice which I recognized to be that of Miss Lillie Orleman, saying, “Papa, please don’t. I’ll call Major Geddes,a if you don’t quit” and … in the most piteous and pleading tone, “Oh, Papa, for God’s sake don’t. Major Geddes is Officer of the Day and will hear us” and other expressions in which my name occurred. Having had my suspicions aroused before this that something was wrong, I went to the window of said room and looked in, and there saw Lt. Orleman in bed with his said daughter, having criminal intercourse with her.

  On the following day, March 3rd 1879, Miss Lillie Orleman confessed to me that her father, Lt. Orleman, had been having sexual intercourse with her for the past five years, or since she was thirteen years of age, and that he had placed a loaded revolver to her head, threatening that he would blow out her brains if she did not consent to his horrible desires. Miss Orleman begged me repeatedly and implored me on bended knee to save her, and take her from this terrible life of shame that she had been leading since she was thirteen years of age. This I consented to do, with the full knowledge and consent of her father; I having told him, at her urgent request (March 12th 1879, I think) that I had discovered his infamous crime, I made full preparations to take her away, either to her home in Austin, or to my wife—in the latter case, with the understanding that she (my wife) should be made aware of my reasons for so doing, and that Miss Orleman should herself tell to my wife her sad story.

  Geddes’s deposition concluded, aggressively:

  I would state that I was not alone in my suspicions that criminal intimacy existed between Lt. Orleman and his daughter. Mr. Joseph Friedlander of Fort Stockton and myself, together with Lt. Orleman and his daughter, went from Fort Stockton to Fort Davis and return[ed] in an ambulance and while on the road we saw Lt. Orleman fondling with the breast of his daughter, and heard her appealing to him to desist.

  I respectfully submit that if this unfortunate affair is to be brought before a Court (which on account of the young lady, I deprecate beyond measure) that he who is guilty should be tried, and I believe a Court of Inquiry would determine as between Lt. Orleman and myself that he should be the party who ought to be tried.1

  As departmental commander, General Ord had complete latitude in determining how to proceed, and the unusually sensitive nature of the issue might have given him pause. He could have considered Geddes’s deposition a privileged document and handled the matter quietly. Well before the events of Geddes’s affidavit, Orleman had applied to retire from active duty for reasons of ill health. He and his daughter would soon be leaving Fort Stockton, and with their departure the scandal surrounding the episode might have been contained. As Geddes intimated, a court proceeding was bound to be agonizing for Lillie Orleman. Vindication of her innocence would be a Pyrrhic victory at best. But Ord chose to order a court-martial, not of Orleman, but of Geddes, on the charges Orleman had preferred. Orleman claimed that Geddes had libelled him with a false accusation of incest as part of his attempted seduction and abduction of Lillie Orleman.

  Why did General Ord so quickly conclude that Orleman’s charges had merit and Geddes’s did not? Before the trial both sides were represented only by competing stories. But acknowledging the possibility of incest by bringing charges against Orleman would have officially validated and magnified a scandal that would have haunted the Army, and the Department of Texas, for years to come. Fortunately for Orleman, this course of action was unthinkable because incest itself was unthinkable in America in 1879. It was far easier for General Ord to believe the familiar kind of wrongdoing set forth in Orleman’s accusation: that Geddes’s charge was an act of retaliation after his effort to seduce and abduct Lillie Orleman failed.

  Ord was the single
most powerful figure in the trial—although he had no role in the actual court proceedings. It was up to him to rule that a court-martial would take place, on charges that required no “oath to accompany their filing nor a formal pretrial investigation to test their validity.”2 He chose the officers who composed the court, appointed the judge advocate who prosecuted the case, and reviewed the verdict and sentence, which were merely recommendations to him. Until 1920, the departmental commander had the power to reverse acquittals or return “inadequate” sentences to the court for augmentation.3 Too many acquittals were considered incompatible with military discipline.

  As military historian William Generous writes of that period, “charges could be made almost capriciously,” and the verdict of a court-martial would be reviewed “by the very commander who levied the charges, convened the court, and appointed its members and officers.”4 Under these circumstances, command influence was unavoidable. The judge advocate, who presented the Army’s case, was also supposed to represent the defendant, but in practice he usually functioned as a prosecutor. The judge advocate had to approve defense applications for witnesses—an enormous power, although his decisions could be overruled by the court—and he joined in the court’s deliberations.

  That giving the judge advocate such a dominant role in the proceedings might lead to abuse seems to be the message of one military authority on court-martial procedure. Stephen Vincent Benet, whose Treatise on Military Law and the Practice of Courts-Martial was a widely invoked manual, wrote about the judge advocate in a cautionary tone:

  The court is not required to decide points of law and fact according to his advice or opinion. He is a mere prosecutor, not a judge; and the members of the court, and they alone, are, by their oaths, to administer justice according to their consciences, the best of their understandings, and the custom of war in like cases—and not according to the understanding and conscience of the judge advocate.5

  Benet’s phrasing suggests that overactive judge advocates might rather easily usurp the prerogatives of the court.

  As late as the 1950s, another military writer recalled a Judge Advocate Basic Officers’ Class in which students training to be judge advocates were taught that they were officers first, lawyers second, and their commander was their most important client.6 A commander could always, if he so desired, “exert great influence over the results of courts-martial.”7

  In general, courts-martial during the frontier army period (roughly the post-Civil War era to 1898) were characterized by the kind of procedure that may be found today in a small-claims court—an assembly-line approach marked by haste and standardized responses. It was always difficult to round up enough officers for a trial session. Continually downsized by Congress, the postwar army was spread too thin to perform any of its duties adequately—to police the still volatile South during the early years of the period, to oversee thousands of miles of frontier, to train adequately, and to conduct courts-martial. Commanders of understrength units were loath to give up their officers to court-martial duty for long periods of time, and, as one anonymous voice indicates, the officers themselves tended to regard this service as a tiresome duty:

  The worst of our dreary routine

  Upon the bleak frontier,

  If to meet in solemn conclave

  And these stupid cases hear. 8

  In 1879, the year that Geddes came to trial, there were 2,127 army officers to handle 1,673 courts-martial, at a time when the full strength of the Army was only 26,389.9 Probably because there were so few officers available, a member of the court or the judge advocate was also allowed to appear as a witness in a court-martial.

  Since many offenses now handled by administrative punishments had to go through the court-martial procedure back then, the sheer volume of trials, “often for trivial offenses, was staggering,” and the time involved correspondingly great.10 Given that the overwhelming number of cases resolved themselves into desertion or some form of alcohol-induced offense, the members of an army court often gave in to the temptation to dispose of each case quickly. (Incidentally, having been court-martialled himself did not disqualify an officer from subsequently serving on a court.)

  In spite of the rigid hierarchy that automatically conferred presidency of the court on the highest-ranking officer, and the formulaic language, some aspects of court-martial procedure were astonishingly casual. For one thing, few officers knew anything about law, and—it might be said—not by accident. As General of the Army William Tecumseh Sherman wrote,

  It will be a grave error if … we permit the Military Law to become emasculated by allowing lawyers to inject into it principles derived from their practice in the civil courts … . The objects of the civil law are to secure to everyone all the liberty, security, and happiness consistent with the safety of all. The purpose of military law is to govern armies of strong men, so as to be capable of exercising the largest measure of force at the will of the nation.

  Sherman envisioned the contrast between the two systems of jurisprudence in terms of soft and hard, “happiness” versus “force,” or peace versus war. As the image of strong men capable of exercising force and the threat of emasculation insinuate, an unstated formulation of Sherman’s ruminations might be female versus male. Civil law can concern itself with individual rights, but military law—because of its special mission—must be made of sterner stuff. “Civilian lawyers,” Sherman remarked, “are too apt to charge that army discipline is tyranny.”11b

  Another commentator, General Alfred Terry, spoke in favor of legal expertise when he addressed an 1876 congressional hearing on the subject of military judicial reform. “As a rule,” General Terry observed disapprovingly, “the officers who are empowered to convene courts are no more versed in the law than the officers who compose them.” Terry, a lawyer himself, came to a conclusion opposed to Sherman’s:

  In view of the despotic character of all military institutions, of the powers necessarily given to the superior over the inferior in rank, it would seem that a precise and definite construction of the law, an exact and systematic administration of it, would be even the more necessary.12

  For Terry, the very nature of the military demanded safeguards. For Sherman, this same nature demanded something more coercive than the civilian judicial system.

  Geddes was charged with two counts of conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentlemen—one for an attempt to corrupt and abduct Lillie Orleman, the other for accusing her father of incest—and one count of “false swearing to the prejudice of good order and military discipline.” This charge simply restated the incest accusation charge, focusing on Geddes’s affidavit.

  According to the first charge Geddes, “a married man, did by persuasion, advice, threats, and other means, endeavor to corrupt Miss Lillie Orleman … to his own illicit purposes.” He was also accused of plotting to abduct her.

  The second charge stated that Geddes

  did, by wilfully and falsely accusing said Lt. Orleman of the heinous crime of incestuous intercourse with his said Orleman’s daughter … and by threatening to make the same public, attempt to force and coerce said Lt. Orleman into giving his consent to the departure of his daughter … with the said Captain Geddes, and did subsequently further attempt to obtain this consent just mentioned by promises, then and there, made to the said Lt. Orleman to keep secret his accusations hereinbefore mentioned if said Lt. Orleman permitted the departure of his said daughter Miss Lillie Orleman with the said Captain Geddes; and all this on the part of the said Captain Geddes with the intent to corrupt the said Miss Lillie Orleman to his own illicit purposes.

  Charges in army courts-martial of this period tend to be rhetorically overblown, using a ritualized and excessive language that is often tempered in the court’s final written disposition of the case. Having such singularly promising material at hand, the author of the final specification against Geddes (probably the judge advocate, the officer who prosecuted the case for the Army) expressed his moral outrag
e at some length. Geddes had “wickedly and maliciously” devised and intended “unlawfully and unjustly to aggrieve, oppress, injure, defame and falsely accuse” Lieutenant Orleman. Then the specification repeats the whole sequence of condemnatory words, this time marshalling them against Geddes’s behavior toward Lillie Orleman.

  Geddes had hoped to have the matter settled without a court-martial by entering a plea in bar,c but this was rejected. He then pleaded not guilty to all charges.

  In commenting on the charges at the beginning of court proceedings, Judge Advocate John W. Clous invoked “the great unwritten law of the Army” that any matter that may be considered conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman is a proper subject for trial. “Conduct unbecoming” was the military’s charge for any misbehavior that did not fall tidily under one of the Articles of War. Such behavior was instead governed by “the custom of the service, a usefully vague concept.”13 In fact, the notion of the proper behavior of an officer and a gentleman embodied an idealistic view of the officer corps. Major General John M. Schofield, in his annual report for 1875, was matter-of-fact in asserting that “it is not necessary even to refer to the generally recognized high standard of honor among military men.”14 This high standard was routinely invoked in courts-martial, where the label “conduct unbecoming” was attached to whatever actions someone believed it applied to.

  In his opening statement to the court, Judge Advocate Clous immediately addressed the issue of conduct unbecoming: