Ungentlemanly Acts Page 17

  Or perhaps, like other compulsive womanizers, he didn’t think ahead. The sixty-two-year-old head of the Army, its highest-ranking general, William Tecumseh Sherman, succumbed to a woman who was in her thirties while imagining that he regarded her simply as another of his daughters in need of masculine aid. Geddes might have responded to the importuning Lillie in the same way. After all, a score of women novelists of his era had produced one best-seller after another in which an older guardian suddenly emerged as the heroine’s romantic interest. Lillie had recently read one such novel from Geddes’s library.

  The court had two strong motives for conviction: absolving the Army of being an institution in which the most stringent sexual taboo could be broken and legitimately punishing a vile seducer.

  It is only by chance that a case in some ways analagous to that of Andrew Geddes had occurred six years earlier at Fort Stockton and in his own Twenty-fifth Infantry Regiment.aj General Christopher C. Augur, then commander of the Department of Texas, set aside the guilty verdict of Sergeant Benjamin Mew, who was accused of attempting to poison his wife and her lover, Corporal Lee. The case rested entirely on the testimony of Corporal Lee and Sergeant Mew’s wife, Martha, but Augur observed that the relationship of these two made their statements highly suspect. They were, in other words, interested parties. The language of Augur’s decision is cumbersome, but pertinent:

  The motives that influence parties to a trial in their actions, in relation to the subject matter thereof, anything in their evidence causing suspicion of their good faith requiring explanation, conversations they had on the matter before the court, wherein their statements may be at variance with their sworn testimony, are all proper subjects of investigation, and relevant to the issue. These remarks are particularly applicable to cases like the present, where the witnesses referred to may be said to rest under the imputation of being strongly and improperly interested in the conviction of the prisoner. As has been said in General Court-Martial Orders from the War Department, courts-martial had much better err on the side of liberality toward a prisoners, than by endeavoring to rolve nice technical refinements in the law of evidence, assume the risk of injuriously denying him a proper latitude for defence.15 [my emphasis]

  In this, Augur anticipated General Terry’s 1876 testimony to Congress that insofar as it was a “despotic” system the military should be especially punctilious in establishing judicial safeguards.

  The very thing Augur cautioned against, denying the defense “a proper latitude,” occurred repeatedly in the Geddes court-martial. And the Orlemans, who, like Martha Mew and her lover, corroborated each other’s stories, were scarcely less disinterested. Although Sergeant Mew may have been, like Geddes, an innocent victim, his trial exposed only a relatively banal adulterous love plot, not a deeply held taboo like incest. Karin Meiselman, a present-day writer on the subject, observes that “overt incest, like murder, is one of those human events that is so unthinkable to most people that there is a tendency to suppose that anyone who would do it must be ‘crazy.’”16 I would modify this assertion in one important respect: to most people incest is even more unthinkable than murder.

  There is another crucial difference between the Mew and Geddes cases. Both the Mews and Lee were black, and the two men were enlisted men. They were not held to the high standard of “an officer and a gentleman.” Mrs. Mew, established as an adulterous spouse attempting to get rid of her husband by a false accusation of murder, received no sympathy from the court. But Lillie Orleman, who was an officer’s daughter, and a victim regardless of the truth of her story, was constantly protected from reasonable questioning by the same court that explored her virginity in such detail.

  After the trip to Fort Davis, Friedlander told Geddes that he believed the Orlemans guilty of criminal intimacy: “No pure-minded honorable father would put his hand under his daughter’s clothes in my presence.” Friedlander testified that after Geddes had left Fort Stockton, Orleman sought him out and reproached him for having taken sides against him, saying, “I have always been a good friend of your brother’s at Fort Clark and done everything that I could to help him and have also been a friend of yours here.” He then showed Friedlander an affidavit his daughter had made, which Friedlander rejected as false. As he recounted their conversation for the court, Friedlander told Orleman, “‘You know what I saw.’ He said, ‘What was that’? I said, ‘I saw you put your hand under your daughter’s clothes, take hold of her leg, she asking you to desist.’ He said, ‘That was nothing.’”

  Such a response might be construed to mean that Orleman thought that his grasping his daughter’s leg was insufficient grounds for Friedlander to take Geddes’s part or to imagine that a criminal intimacy existed. Yet it sounds uncomfortably dismissive as well, another veiled assertion of his paternal right to touch his daughter’s flesh without interference or censure.

  If it happened, Geddes’s alleged pressing of Lillie’s knees was done under cover of his voluminous officer’s cape or a lap robe and thus was intended to be unobserved. The actions and speech Friedlander attributed to Orleman were just the opposite—so obvious that the other occupants of the ambulance could not have failed to notice. If Friedlander’s account is accurate, Orleman’s actions could have been unconsciously motivated by a desire to warn off the other man. Taking hold of his daughter’s leg was a flourishing of proprietorship in the face of a man who might have sexual designs on her.ak Orleman’s crude comment, “What a big leg you have, Lillie,” can be compared to the husband’s remark about his wife’s feet in the story Orleman told: in both cases, possession cancels the need for flattery.

  In spite of the enlightened views he had frequently expressed about fair trials, General Ord was not predisposed to rein in a judge advocate who was injuriously denying a defendant a proper latitude for defense when that same defendant had made a scandalous charge against one officer—and had had an affair with his commanding officer’s wife to boot. It would take the Judge Advocate General to act in the interest of justice rather than politics or passion.

  Three

  FINALE

  7

  AFTERMATH

  The Judge Advocate General’s argument was logical and dispassionate, but the Army immediately resisted it, thereby guaranteeing that Geddes would not be able to resume normal life with his regiment. He did return to duty, but his company was immediately exiled from Fort Stockton to the remote camp of Pena Colorado (“painted rock”), an uninhabited area fifty miles south of the post.1 Whatever the possible reasons for assigning an army unit to this area, departmental correspondence demonstrates that Company F of the Twenty-fifth Infantry was chosen in order to remove Geddes from Fort Stockton.2 Instead of being rotated back to the post, as would ordinarily have occurred, the company was kept in wilderness isolation at Pena Colorado until it was transferred to the Department of Dakota.

  While Geddes was virtually imprisoned in the West Texas desert, General William Tecumseh Sherman was feverishly plotting to expel him from the Army by some other means—by any other means, it appeared.

  As General of the Army, Sherman could have accepted the reversal of the court-martial and labeled the dossier “case closed.” Instead, he mounted a determined effort to rid the Army of Geddes. In the spring of 1880 he dispatched Absalom Baird, the assistant inspector general, to undertake a wide-ranging investigation of Geddes’s character, with the object of dredging up damaging information that could result in new charges. In this quest Sherman seemed willing to accept any scurrilous innuendo or gossip at face value. More than willing—avid.

  Sherman committed himself to whatever was necessary to end the military career of an officer who had a distinguished field record and much support within his regiment. As Sherman would write to General Alfred Terry after the report was complete, “I see no escape from a trial by a General Court Martial, unless Captain Geddes resigns as I think he should do.”3

  The simplest explanation for Sherman’s zeal to rid the Army
of Andrew Geddes is his long friendship with General E.O.C. Ord. They had been friends ever since their cadet days at West Point, and Sherman was intensely loyal to Ord. At the time of the Geddes case Sherman was trying to persuade President Hayes not to forcibly retire Ord, one of a group of generals the President had targeted. Sherman had sloughed off the criticism of Ord by Philip Sheridan, the Army’s second-ranking general, who had complained in 1877, “I have lost confidence in his [Ord’s] motives and his management of his department is a confusion which is demoralizing to his subordinates.” In 1879 Sheridan again complained, this time of Ord’s “eccentricity of character and the devious methods he employs to accomplish his ends.”4 Sherman, who would lose the battle to keep Ord from being retired, would have been predisposed at any time to accept the judgment of his “life-long friend” on a court-martial.5

  Yet friendship is ultimately not a compelling argument to explain Sherman’s extraordinary vendetta against Geddes. Ord’s fate would not be decided or even affected by the disposition of the Geddes matter. What emerges from the record is the intensity of Sherman’s conviction that Geddes was a monster.

  Like Dunn, Sherman was removed from the immediate vicinity of the case and might have been expected to view it without emotion. But incest and seduction were emotional issues, even when they occurred elsewhere. As the reviewing judge, Dunn had been able to set aside powerful cultural attitudes in his assessment of the judicial record. Sherman was not similarly immune.

  Concerning women, particularly young and vulnerable women, Sherman was a gallant who envisioned himself in the ideal male role of defender of the weaker sex. When the young widow of George Armstrong Custer addressed a moving plea to him for help in removing a statue of her husband from West Point, Sherman enthusiastically embraced her less-than-reasonable cause.al He instantly replied, “I sympathize with every pulsation of your wounded heart,” then told her how to make the strongest case in another letter that she would address to him and that he would send with his endorsement to the Secretary of War.6 For Sherman, Libbie Custer represented suffering womanhood in need of his masculine power to aid and comfort. She was also young and beautiful.

  Sherman was a man of his time in seeing women as delicate creatures who required the protection of men. Had Lillie Orleman appealed to him in person, he would undoubtedly have been sympathetic to her youth and vulnerability. But his partisanship in the case may have had its source in a more veiled aspect of his being, one that he could not so readily articulate as simple charity to a young female unfortunate.

  The devoted father of daughters as well as sons, Sherman was strongly attracted to young women. At the very time that he set in motion the post-trial effort to oust Geddes, he was, at the age of sixty, on the threshold of a long involvement with the widow of his Civil War aide, Major Lewis Audenreid, a woman in her thirties. In the years directly preceding the Geddes court-martial he had had a similar intimate and secret relationship with the beautiful young sculptress Vinnie Ream. 7

  Had he chosen to scrutinize his own conduct, Sherman might have seen himself in uncomfortable proximity to both protagonists in the San Antonio court-martial. Lieutenant Orleman had been accused of illicitly transforming a fatherly role into that of sexual partner. This was, in fact, an issue that would preoccupy Sherman in his coming liaison with Mary Audenreid. Early in the relationship he struggled to impose a respectable order on his feelings:

  As the wife of my aide you were of my family, and I really feel to you as I do to Elly or Rachel [his daughters], to caress and love you as a child rather than as a woman. If I were twenty years younger, I would not even trust myself with you, in the close intimacy in which you hold me.8

  The rationalizing is transparent. Later, his writing to her “I realize that I must play the part of father, not that of lover” articulates a struggle whose expression on paper is an attempt at mastery, not a statement of accomplishment, as if one were to write “I realize that I must give up smoking” without acting on the intention. As Peter Gay observes in his history of the nineteenth-century middle class, “The love for the father … was a highly visible occupation of many women’s lives in the nineteenth century.”9 Sherman could imagine Mary to be another daughter, whose obvious feelings for him, as his for her, could be comfortably subsumed under the rubric of respectable affection.

  Nevertheless, although Sherman was troubled by the difficulty of reconciling his erotic impulses with his fatherly role toward Mary, his feelings for her and other young women were not incestuous. They were directed outside the family circle rather than toward his own daughters. They were, in fact, reminiscent of those of the older male guardians who married their wards in such popular novels of the period as Infelice.

  Still, an unfriendly critic might well view Sherman’s relations with Mary Audenreid and Vinnie Ream as similar to Orleman’s exploitation of his daughter for his own sexual satisfaction. And while the vigorous and powerful head of the Army seemed far removed from the mere lieutenant whose physical disability would soon result in his retirement, the two men shared certain characteristics. Both had large families: in Orleman’s case, larger than he could easily support; in Sherman’s case, larger than he wanted. Whatever Mrs. Orleman’s feelings for her husband, the two were effectively separated for long periods of time, and Lillie had taken her mother’s place at her father’s side. In the late 1870s Sherman had undergone a similar experience: his wife and children had removed from Washington to St. Louis except for one daughter, who continued to live with her father. The separation endured for several years, and the Sherman marriage remained stormy.

  As a strong-willed patriarch who felt underappreciated by his wife, Sherman basked in the admiration and gratitude of younger women. As he once told the sympathetic Mary Audenreid, his wife, an ardent Irish Catholic, regarded “an Irish drayman who gets drunk six times a week and belabors his wife and children—yet who has kept the true faith and goes to Church on Sunday—as a higher type of mankind than a patriot soldier at the head of a victorious army.” While the need for ego gratification is palpable in Sherman’s many complaints about his wife, he saw his behavior toward younger women as beneficent, even when he was warning them off other men. In 1886, Mary Audenreid would start to see General Absalom Baird, who was by then the Inspector General of the Army. Sherman informed Mary that Baird, four years younger than Sherman, was too old for her.10 She never did marry again.

  Except for the development of intimacy, Sherman’s relationship with Vinnie Ream began much like the correspondence with Mrs. Custer. (Had the young and attractive widow of George Armstrong Custer lived in Washington, Sherman would certainly have seen her in person rather than writing her sympathetic letters.) Sherman was on the committee to award the commission for a statue of Admiral David Farragut. Ream had submitted a proposal. At first, Sherman simply gave her advice on securing the commission, but by the time she won the competition he had become a regular visitor to her atelier. Their correspondence, redolent of intimacy and oblique sexual references, was broken off in 1878 when Ream married, but was later resumed intermittently until Sherman’s death.11

  If the age difference between Sherman and the women he loved, and his attempt to view them through the lens of paternal feeling, linked him to Orleman, he was, like Geddes, a married man who had affairs. The puzzling intensity with which Sherman pursued Geddes may have concealed his fear of being exposed as an adulterer. He prided himself on the discretion of his liaisons, instructing both Ream and Audenreid to destroy his letters, as he did theirs. (Both women saved his letters, however.) While Sherman envisioned himself as a protector of women, he described Geddes as a despoiler “of the fair fame of ladies [who] ought to resign his commission rather than subject them to the publicity and scandal of a trial” (my emphasis). In his brief letter of June 17, 1880, to General Terry, whose department was inheriting Geddes from Texas, Sherman uses this significant phrase twice. Because “the case involved the fair fame of ladies entitled to ou
r protection,” he informs Terry, “I ordered a thorough examination by Inspector General Baird whose report is herewith” (my emphasis).12am

  The repetition of this curiously archaic and romantic phrase, “the fair fame of ladies” suggests how important this justification was for Sherman. According to one historian of the frontier army, “an officer would go to any length to protect a lady’s name, even if silence should damn him.”13 Glossing over the common denominator of adultery, Sherman saw himself as circumspectly protecting “the fair fame of ladies” while Geddes destroyed it through his reckless behavior, bringing down “publicity and scandal” on the delicate reputations of women. Like society as a whole, Sherman found it more palatable to believe that Orleman was a good father and Geddes an evil seducer—and a slanderer, to boot.

  Ironically, to achieve his goal of removing Geddes from the army, Sherman himself was willing to sacrifice the fair fame of whatever ladies could get the job done.

  The point of departure for Absalom Baird’s investigation was an affidavit that had been made in June 1879, while the Geddes trial was in progress.anLieutenant Owen J. Sweet, Twenty-fifth Infantry, had solicited the affidavit on his own initiative in order “to shed light on the moral character of Captain Geddes.” When Colonel Blunt forwarded this document to Judge Advocate Clous, he commented—tellingly—that Sweet “was about the only officer then at Stockton who could be relied upon for any assistance the prosecution might need.”14 Not only did the other officers of Geddes’s own regiment remain loyal to him, the officers of Orleman’s regiment also refused to aid the prosecution.