Ungentlemanly Acts Page 18
Lieutenant Bigelow’s diary entries reveal his estimation of Sweet as “mean and deceitful,” as well as a gossip—a type Bigelow detested. Early in May 1879, Sweet had visited Bigelow’s quarters for the purpose of discussing current scandals, but when Sweet began, Bigelow pointedly demanded that they speak of something else. After relating the episode in his diary, Bigelow went on to give his impression of Sweet:
He likes to go among officers, I imagine, and draw them out on personal matters and then go home and have a good talk over them with Mrs. Sweet, reporting everything that he has heard. He delights in the Orleman and Geddes affair, pretends to be very much shocked and amazed at the occurrence of such scandal, but it furnishes just the kind of excitement that he and Mrs. Sweet thrive on.15
Evidently, the prying Sweet and his stout wife were well suited to each other.
Sweet was either an enemy of Geddes or simply an interfering gossip who delighted in exposing the sins of others. It had been his wife who had filled Lillie Orleman’s ears with accounts of Geddes’s amours among the officers’ wives at Fort Stockton. No doubt Sweet knew where to find a witness to Geddes’s affair with Fannie McLaughlen. Reading the affidavit Sweet had solicited, which was forwarded to him as the prosecutor of the case against Geddes, Judge Advocate Clous commented piously, “It is hard to conceive the social ethics of some of the people who were at Fort Stockton and figure in the recent disgraceful scandals.”16
As another witness to Geddes’s scandalous behavior, the laundress Mary Stewart provided an account of parallel and collusive affairs engaged in by Geddes with Mrs. McLaughlen and Friedlander with Mrs. Beck. As Clous wrote to Sherman after the 1879 verdict was overturned, Mary Stewart’s character “does not seem to be bad,” but unfortunately for the general’s plan, the laundress had a significant liability. Clous continued with his evaluation:
It is said that she is living with and is married to a colored soldier for a number of years, and that her behavior was good. Under all the circumstances, it is doubtful whether a clear case could be made upon Mary Stewart’s accusations alone … the prejudices against a white woman living with a Negro, would weigh heavily against her.17
J. C. Nott and George R. Gliddon, in their widely read book on race, believed that the characteristics of offspring differed according to both the sex and the race of each parent. That is, intelligence was inherited from the mother, race more strongly inherited from the father. But this theory came up against a problem if the mother was white and the father black since whiteness was assumed to improve blackness. However, the authors claimed to have no firsthand knowledge of such a case since the pairing of white women and black men was so rare.18
It was not surprising that in spite of their extensive research in the South, Nott and Gliddon had found no such couple. Even consensual sex between a black man and a white woman could result in the man’s being lynched. Aside from the reality of physical danger at worst and social ostracism at best, for a white person to marry someone of another race in Texas in 1879 was against the law. There was a strong gender bias in society’s attitude toward this transgression, a racial extension of the double standard that controlled the sexuality of white women while allowing freedom to white men. The Texas law endured until 1967, when the Supreme Court declared such statutes unconstitutional.19
For Sherman, once the Geddes court-martial had been reversed, Mary Stewart’s account was the logical place to begin the effort to unearth more evidence against Geddes, thus laying the groundwork for a new trial. He gave Baird a wide mandate. Special Orders No. 25, issued on March 13, 1880, dispatched Baird from Chicago to Fort Stockton “and such other points as he may find necessary for the purpose of making the investigation ordered by the General of the Army.”20 By the time Sherman wrote to General Terry in June of 1880, he had received Baird’s report on Geddes, which frankly branded the captain a libertine.
That Baird’s report is studded with condemnatory interjections is hardly surprising, given his explicit charge to discover information useful to Geddes’s reprosecution. The particulars he gathered fall under the general rubric Baird sets forth close to the beginning: according to reports Geddes appeared to be “a man totally destitute of any sense of right and wrong, or of moral propriety as regards casual intercourse between men and women in the society into which his commission as an officer of the army has admitted him.”21
In a community the size of Fort Stockton such goings-on could scarcely have been kept secret. Indeed, Baird added that “the name of Fort Stockton became a bye word [sic], a shame and a reproach throughout the Department of Texas.”22 Yet for all the presumed facts Baird included in his report, the hopes of a new prosecution were pinned on a single problematic document—the affidavit of Mary Stewart, a laundress. Like Sherman and Clous, Baird saw Stewart’s testimony through the lens of race and class prejudice.
Baird’s evaluation was accompanied by a communication from Assistant Adjutant General R. E. Drum to General Ord, who had wanted to know if—on the strength of the Stewart affidavit—he could remove Rachel Beck from Fort Stockton. Drum indicated that the military requirement of discipline, rather than guilt or innocence, should decide the matter:
The commanding officer is not bound to inquire into the question of adultery in such a case as this; the question with him is how will her presence effect [sic] the discipline and good order of his post. An innocent person, who is imprudent and defies public opinion of the garrison so far as to cause scandal, may be dismissed from the Post. On ships of war, women untouched by scandal are not admitted as subversive of discipline … . If Mrs. Beck’s presence would impair discipline in the Army, or would scandalize or degrade the service, her removal would not only be proper, but should be required.23
There were complications, however. “Improper women” could be removed, but this term was intended to describe prostitutes: “It is not supposed that Mrs. Beck could be classed with [such women].” Moreover, Mary Stewart had simply given her opinion that Mrs. Beck was guilty of adultery. And “besides,” Drum felt compelled to reiterate, “she is a white woman married to a negro, and is laundress to a company of the 10th Cavalry … . Her statements are denied by Lieutenant Beck, by Friedlander, and would probably be denied by Mrs. Beck.”24 All interested parties regretfully concurred with this assessment of the affidavit: Stewart’s class and social transgression made her testimony worthless for their purposes.
Lieutenant Beck appears to have been an extremely trusting or naive husband. Although Mary Stewart said that Friedlander had given her money to buy her silence about the affair, Colonel Blunt told Clous that “it was the common talk at Stockton that Mrs. Beck received valuable presents from Friedlander, mentioning as some of the articles a silk dress all made up and a diamond ring.”25 In response to the allegations of impropriety, Beck had told Blunt that his wife was “imprudent and defied public opinion.” The furthest he would go still left room for a benign interpretation of his wife’s activities: “It may be that during my wife’s illness,” he wrote to Clous, “the cure of her by a person who since proved to be a bad woman [Mrs. McLaughlen] was the ostensible reason used by that person to meet her associate [Captain Geddes].”26
The compressed narrative of Beck’s remark dovetails with Lillie Orleman’s trial testimony that an officer’s wife had seen Mrs. McLaughlen and Geddes running from the back of the hospital together, and with correspondence between Alice Grierson and her family referring to Rachel Beck’s illness and Fannie McLaughlen’s care of her. To her son Charlie, Alice wrote on October 18, 1878: “For more than a week, Mrs. Beck had been very sick, and Mrs. McLaughlen had been helping take care of her.”27 That Beck was desperate to preserve his own picture of reality seems confirmed by Clous’s reference to his “many wild assertions.”
If Lieutenant Bigelow’s description can be believed, the Beck household was chaotic at best. When he first came to Fort Stockton in 1878, Bigelow took his meals with the Beck family but soon made other
arrangements.ao He had a host of complaints beyond the overpriced and inadequate food and Mrs. Beck’s “ugly temper.” The Beck children were annoying, “ill bred; beside which their teeth are not clean and they talk horrible English, which their parents do not correct.”28 The unattended children suggest that the parents had other concerns. Beck’s was drinking—his behavior under the influence led to a court-martial—and his wife’s was her affair with Friedlander.
In any case, quite aside from the impression Mary Stewart might make as a witness, an affair between Mrs. Beck and Joseph Friedlander was irrelevant to Sherman’s goal of retrying Geddes, and Major McLaughlen’s aversion to publicizing his cuckoldry would have made prosecution on this ground difficult.
Friedlander had not been idle during the efforts to brand him the adulterous lover of Mrs. Beck. Before either General Ord or Colonel Blunt could investigate the Stewart affidavit, he secured an affidavit in his favor from one Quanelo, a man in his employ who, Stewart had indicated, knew of the affair. According to Friedlander’s business rival, M. F. Corbett, Quanelo was a person whose opinion could be bought. In his own affidavit for the 1879 court-martial Friedlander had complained that he was the object of an army vendetta because he had refused to be “bulldozed” by the prosecution in the Geddes court-martial.
In a report dated February 10, 1880, in which Clous addressed the credibility of both Stewart and Friedlander, he dismissed Friedlander’s accusation that the Army was out to get him because it had been made on June 6, 1879, before Friedlander had been called as a witness in the trial. This time sequence would not necessarily invalidate such a charge. It must have been clear well before the trial how he would testify, since Friedlander had been summoned as a witness for the defense.
Still smarting from the reversal of the court-martial, which he maintained—incorrectly—had nothing to do with the facts of the case, Clous claimed that Friedlander’s affidavit was false:
A person who, under oath, states that he heard through a solid wall of two feet, persons softly walking over the floor in their stocking feet, and that floor is shown to have been thickly carpeted, has too elastic a conscience to be accredited with any truthfulness in a crime where his own misdeeds are in issue.29
Friedlander was an interested party in the matter of Mrs. Beck, but the prosecutor’s reference to Friedlander’s trial testimony about hearing noise from Orleman’s quarters shows how easily facts became obscured by biased interpretation in the Geddes court-martial. Orleman had testified that the floor was covered by a “heavy layer of hay and a carpet stretched over it.” The thickness of the carpet had not been specified, and a “heavy layer of hay” may well have crackled when walked over, producing the sounds Friedlander (and others) had testified to hearing. Moreover, the canvas ceiling could have negated the effectiveness of the two-foot partition wall—if indeed the wall was that thick.
In writing of the court-martial, Baird blamed Geddes for subjecting Lillie Orleman to “all the cruel torture which unscrupulous lawyers employ to shield guilty clients from just punishment.” 30 Like Clous, Baird disregarded the many substantive matters Dunn’s review had raised. He stated that the verdict had been overturned “on the ground of certain rulings of the Court thought to be erroneous, and in no way effecting [sic] the facts in issue”—in other words, because of a technicality.31 This simply was not true.
The libertine behavior attributed to Geddes was certainly an offense to morality, but Baird, like his taskmaster Sherman, was less than objective in his conclusions. In the course of events leading up to the court-martial Geddes had not attacked “the fair fame of ladies” with the scandal of public exposure. Like most men who have affairs with married women, publicity was the last thing he wanted. He had intended his deposition about the Orlemans to be a privileged communication to the departmental commander, and he had submitted it only when Orleman preferred charges against him.
Baird reveals his determination to believe in the Orlemans’ innocence when he justifies their sleeping arrangements. He writes, arrestingly, “that this fact of a father sleeping in the same chamber with his daughter already on the verge of womanhood should excite remark is not strange, but it is natural that the father would be the last one to perceive the changes from childhood to maturity in his own child.”32
In transmitting the Baird report to Judge Advocate General Dunn on June 15, Sherman made his own position emphatically clear:
I suppose I have no right to call on you officially to aid me in the discharge of my duties, yet I have no doubt you will privately. I send you herewith, all the papers in the case of Captain Geddes, 25th Infantry, against whom charges were made which would have opened up terrible scandals, and before ordering a Court-Martial, the whole matter to be inquired into by Inspector General Baird, to whose report and appendix I ask your attention. By these papers Captain Geddes is not a proper person to be an officer of the Army, indeed [he] must be a sort of a monster, ruining women who have been honorable wives, virgin children, overwhelming a father by the monstrous charge of debauching his own child, and by perjury and ingenuous complications making it highly undesirable to try him by a General Court Martial.33
Sherman’s characterization suggests that he had not read Dunn’s meticulous analysis of the trial, or at the least, that he had brushed aside its conclusion that Geddes was more believable than Orleman. For Sherman, Geddes had ruined “virgin children”—although the only person to qualify for that category would have been Lillie Orleman—and brought a “monstrous charge.”
Baird’s goal had been to obtain further information that could lead to new charges against Geddes, but while the large fund of anecdotes that he had brought back from Texas might have been true, it seemed unlikely to stand the test of judicial scrutiny. As Clous had observed, invoking a legal authority, “it is very rare, indeed, that the parties are surprised in the direct fact of adultery.”34
Although the Baird report made for spicy reading, Dunn’s opinion, speedily rendered the day after he received the packet of documents from Sherman, confirmed that the material was not well suited to its intended purpose, that of convicting Geddes in another court-martial. On June 16, 1880, he wrote to Sherman that he could not advise reprosecution:
As to the charges of illicit conduct with Mrs. McLaughlin [sic] and the girl named Nevares [Josephine]—the latter does not appear to be sustained by explicit testimony; and, as to the former, the evidence is so far conflicting that it might very likely raise a reasonable doubt with the court in favor of the accused. In view of the great scandal to the service which a trial upon these charges would induce, and the doubtful result and profit of such a trial, I should hesitate to advise—upon the evidence thus far submitted—a resort to a court martial. At the same time the reputation, influence and example of Capt. Geddes (as they appear from the within statements), are such as clearly to make it desirable that his resignation should be induced if practicable.35
Dunn, who had been impressed by the testimony of officers loyal to Geddes, now made an institutional decision that the appearance of scandal was strong enough in this case to override the question of guilt. Or he may have realized that Sherman could not be dissuaded from his commitment to rid the Army of Geddes, and the preferred way to achieve this end was to have Geddes resign.
In spite of Dunn’s strong opinion that another trial would be ill-advised, Sherman forged on. He wrote to General Terry the next day that he “saw no escape from a trial by a General Court Martial unless Captain Geddes resigns.”36 Dunn’s caution about “the great scandal to the service” seems to have made no impression on Sherman, nor did the potential for another round of scandals that Dunn did not mention: the shattering of “the fair fame of ladies” who might have engaged in an adulterous relationship, even though they were characterized in Sherman’s account as “honorable wives” who had been “ruined” by Geddes rather than as sinners in their own right. But if Sherman’s paternalism deprived the guilty women of volition, it di
d accurately reflect their status. This was a contest between men in which women, in keeping with their societal powerlessness, were to be used as necessary in realizing male objectives, regardless of the detriment to the women’s own interests.
Captain Geddes’s resignation could not be “induced.” When he was first informed that Baird was investigating him at Fort Stockton, he wrote to the assistant inspector general that he had “great pride in and love of my profession.” He added that he considered his trial to have been unfair “from beginning to end—which also seems to have been the opinion of the revising and reviewing authority.”37 Sherman’s idea had been to confront Geddes with what Baird had learned, supported by two letters of Mrs. McLaughlen’s—a blatant attempt to force his resignation. Geddes’s reply showed that he could play hardball, too:
I am pained greatly by the fact that, if I am brought to trial thereon, the name of a lady will be thrown broad-cast about the country in the most public and scandalous manner. The lady in question is connected socially with some of the first people of New York and elsewhere, and when I think of the newspaper notoriety which will certainly ensue, I am filled with feelings of the greatest repugnance at the mere contemplation of such an unfortunate result. The lady in question has always borne an untarnished reputation, and that it should now be blasted by the mere testimony of a monstrosity of the basest description—viz., a white woman who has been living with a Negro for ten years—is to be regretted of all good people.38