Ungentlemanly Acts: The Army's Notorious Incest Trial Read online

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

  An officer of the Army has higher obligations than the ordinary citizen—he is responsible to a far more comprehensive code than that found in the laws of the United States, the common law or the laws of the several states. He must at all times conduct himself as a gentleman should and whatever is unbecoming a gentleman is of necessity unbecoming an officer.

  Trying to abduct a brother officer’s daughter, he went on to say, qualified as conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman.

  As characterized by the prosecution, Geddes was not acting in good faith in bringing an affidavit to departmental headquarters; instead, he was making “counter accusations of such a frightful and heinous nature, and with such a force as to secure himself the vantage ground of accusor instead of becoming the accused.”

  The Geddes court-martial would go on for the extraordinary period of three months, with court in session every weekday between the hours of 10:30 and 1:30 or 2:30, May through August, the hottest part of the year in San Antonio. As Major General Irvin McDowell reflected on court-martial custom, the early hour of adjournment was a relic of older times:

  [A] great inconvenience and delay in the administration of military justice … [is] the limitation now imposed by law on the hours of session of courts-martial, making it illegal to sit after three o’clock p.m … . The restriction has ceased to have any justification; and is simply a relic of the past which is the cause of much inconvenience and delay.15

  The court met in departmental headquarters, a building erected for the Army by the well-known Maverick family.16

  When Geddes first entered the courtroom on May 19, 1879, he found himself in a familiar situation. Seven years earlier he had been the defendant in a completely different kind of case, one involving financial transactions. Cleared of intentional fraud by the court, he was nevertheless dismissed, only to be reinstated through the decision of the Army’s first Judge Advocate General, Joseph Holt.d In reversing the decision and restoring Geddes to his duties, Holt had written, “It is hoped that he will profit by the lesson of this trial, and that his future career will exhibit the same scrupulous regard for his obligations as an officer of the Army that testimony to his previous reputation seems to show him to have observed in the past.“17

  After the 1872 verdict, but before the Judge Advocate General had ruled, Geddes addressed a plea for clemency to Secretary of War William Belknap. “I am proud of my state and proud of my profession,” he wrote. “If I were to be dismissed, it would be as if my whole life were ruined.”18 These were prophetic words.

  BYRON AND STOWE

  Although the decision to prosecute Captain Geddes rather than Lieutenant Orleman may seem more than a little odd to observers in our day, a publishing event in 1869 reveals attitudes toward incest that explain the Army’s action.

  Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and a woman known for her stern sense of moral duty, published a magazine article stating that the celebrated poet Lord Byron had committed incest with his half sister, Augusta Leigh.19 In response to the outcry that followed, Stowe turned her “True Story of Lady Byron’s Life” into a substantial book, Lady Byron Vindicated: A History of the Byron Controversy from Its Beginning in 1816 to the Present Tïme.20 This famous and widely acclaimed American author had expected that her revelation would provoke a furor, and she hoped it would divert sympathy from Byron to his wife. She never imagined that the episode would destroy her own reputation.21

  The title of Stowe’s book indicates her compelling motive—to defend a woman she first met in 1853 and came to regard as a friend. When she returned to England in 1856 Stowe was summoned to Lady Byron’s sickbed, where she found the elderly woman preoccupied by her doctor’s pronouncement that she should not live much longer.e During the months that followed, the two women were often together until, on a memorable day in early November, Lady Byron took Stowe aside for an interview lasting many hours in which she confided the secret behind her separation from her husband after a year of marriage: he had committed incest with his half sister Augusta and fathered Augusta’s child Medora. The revelation was not proffered as mere scandalous gossip:

  She wanted Harriet’s advice. Some publishers were about to bring out a cheap edition of the poet’s works and in the promotion meant to revive the old story of Byron’s having been driven to exile and death by the cold, mercenary heart of his wife. Should that wife keep silent any longer?22

  With her characteristic moral fervor, Stowe at first intended to advise immediate publication. Her sister Mary persuaded her otherwise, so that the advice Stowe ultimately gave Lady Byron was to trust “discreet friends” to publish the truth after Lady Byron’s death. No one knows what Lady Byron thought of this advice: she neither answered Stowe’s letter nor spoke out about her late husband.

  Byron had ridiculed his wife publicly during his lifetime, and, after his premature death in Greece in 1824, many of his supporters characterized Lady Byron as a cold and uncongenial wife. Her failure to respond with her own version of their separation had naturally given her husband’s side of the story some advantage.

  By 1869 both Byrons were dead, but the recent publication of the memoirs of Teresa Guiccioli, Byron’s Italian mistress, revived the old complaints about Lady Byron. When no English friends rose to tell the story as Stowe had heard it from Lady Byron herself, Stowe jumped into the fray with her usual zeal for a good cause, in this case defending a blameless and high-minded woman who had been abused by a monster of depravity. “Reverence for pure womanhood is, we think, a national characteristic of the American,”23 Stowe wrote confidently, failing to realize that, even among the respectable, her portrait of a faultless Lady Byron might be less appealing than the reading public’s image of Byron, the flawed yet attractive poet who had died at the age of thirty-six as he prepared to fight for Greek independence.

  The accusation of incest produced a firestorm on both sides of the Atlantic. A number of British critics were outraged that an American should meddle in such private English matters: in the Times of London Stowe, who had been much admired in England for Uncle Tom’s Cabin, was described as “a stranger and a foreigner.” Others took her to task for having violated Lady Byron’s confidence.

  When they turned from such issues to the substance of Stowe’s accusation, critics generally exonerated Byron and excoriated Lady Byron and Stowe. One writer asked, “Did she [Lady Byron] believe the hideous tale she told? Was she the wilful fabricator of the monstrous calumny, or was she herself the victim of insane delusions?”24 These appeared to be the only possibilities the press entertained to explain Lady Byron’s behavior. In this respect Justin McCarthy’s front-page article in The Independent was typical:

  I am not defending Byron’s moral character. He lived at a time and in a society when morality was rare among men. His temptations were unusually powerful, and he often succumbed to them. But I am sure no one will believe him guilty of the hideous crime of incest, merely because Mrs. Stowe says Lady Byron told her so. I do not think Mrs. Stowe has done much to serve the memory of her friend; and I know she has done much to injure her own fame. She has stooped to promulgate a foul and filthy scandal; she has helped to pollute American households with a story of worse than Byzantine abomination. Were it true, its publication would still be inexcusable.25 [my emphasis]

  Another article remarked that Byron was “guilty of sins enough in his maturer years.” But, it concluded, “he was probably not a beast.”26

  Significantly, “pollution” ranked high among the charges levelled at Stowe. The “reverence for pure womanhood” that she had expected to elicit for her side of the controversy was deployed against Stowe herself. She was seen as a violator of female purity because she spoke out about incest. When Stowe promised to follow up her article with a book on the subject, one periodical expressed the hope that publication could be preve
nted:

  There is no good reason why she or any body else, should be permitted to needlessly poison the public mind, and deprave the public morals. We hope grand juries will interpose to save the world from the polluting influences of this promised deluge of nastiness, if a private sense of decency will not.27

  There was a sexist bias to this criticism. In the Spectator’s opinion, “a woman should not have stained herself with handling the story at all.” The Independent flatly proclaimed that “an offense against Christian charity is more ungentle in a woman than in a man.”28

  Unlike McCarthy, who was certain that few people believed the story, the anonymous reviewer for the Saturday Review did believe it, but still condemned Stowe for publishing the article.29 True or false, incest was not a fit subject for discussion, particularly among women.

  Most negative reactions simply dismissed the accusation out of hand. As J. Paget wrote in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, the tale was “so monstrous, so improbable, so contradictory to all the rules that govern the actions of human beings” that it was impossible to believe. Or, as another writer for the Independent insisted, “The very fact that it is a crime against nature ought to be prima facie evidence against its commission.”30

  The Savannah Republican reported that near Stowe’s Florida residence people jokingly said they wanted to erect two monuments to “the heroes of her most famous novels—Uncle Tom and Lord Byron.”31 Other critics pointed out that Stowe’s efforts, in contrast to her stated purpose, had only made Byron more popular.

  The denial that Byron, or indeed anyone, could be guilty of a crime like incest, came exclusively from male writers. In his disavowal James Russell Lowell made a nice distinction. “Incest,” he wrote with an assumed expertise, “when it does happen (and it is rare enough) is not the fruit of perverted lust but of thwarted animal passion. It occurs in lonely farmhouses and not in cities swarming with public women.”32 How a cultivated man of letters like Lowell could speak so authoritatively is a mystery since at the time virtually nothing was known, let alone published, about incest.

  The editor of Harper’s was a dissenting voice. He described the indignation against Stowe as “evidence of the universal unwillingness to believe any man guilty of so hideous an offense. But for all that,” he continued, “the reception of her statement has not been candid. There has been an evident disposition to insist that it is too horrible to be true, and that that is the end of it.”33

  Not surprisingly, the prominent feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton saw the Byron marriage as part of a universal paradigm: the real issue was the relations existing between men and women. From the response of the press, she wrote, “one would suppose that American editors had lived only in the atmosphere of Paradise, wholly ignorant of the facts of life, of the hideous, disgusting slavery in which the women of every class and clime ever have been and are held to-day.” The ignorance, she goes on to say, is willfull: “All alike turn from the mirror that so truly reflects the crimes of our present social system, from which they see no escape.”34

  For Stanton, the controversy was an occasion to preach against “the worst form of slavery, that of woman to man, that has ever cursed the earth.” Where men donned the mantle of natural protectors, they were in fact enemies of woman’s development, who promulgated “the monstrous thought that woman was made for man!—not for herself, for happiness, and heaven”!35

  After her experience of the “many abusive articles” that followed her disclosure, Stowe, too, saw the episode more clearly in terms of a conflict between the sexes: “There are thousands of poor victims suffering in sadness, discouragement, and poverty; heartbroken wives of brutal, drunken husbands; women enduring nameless wrongs and horrors which the delicacy of their sex forbids them to utter.” And if these victims are rendered mute by the constraints of their nature, in Stowe’s view, their victimizers are not similarly held back. As she describes Byron, hating his wife for knowing his secret, the discovery of which would have brought him “utter ruin, and expulsion from civilized society,” he “tried to destroy her character before the world, that she might not have the power to testify against him.”36

  By the time of her book, Stowe was also able to see a particular version of the double standard that had driven the negative reception of her article: “The world may finally forgive the man of genius anything; but for a woman there is no mercy and no redemption.”37 Neither for herself—the messenger—nor for the wronged wife.

  More than a century later, it is now widely accepted that Byron did have an incestuous relationship with Augusta. To arrive at this conclusion, twentieth-century researchers have consulted large caches of documents that were unavailable to scholars in the nineteenth century, notably, Lady Byron’s voluminous record of events, prepared at first to ensure that her husband would not gain custody of their daughter and continued, it would seem, out of a lifelong obsession with the affair that ended her marriage.38

  According to a recent biographer, Byron assumed he was the father of Augusta’s daughter Medora, who was said to resemble him as a child. The poet referred to her as his daughter, but might have done so without a sense of biological paternity, since he was her godfather. To friends he remarked that Augusta’s husband had been away during the time of conception whereas he had been at hand.39 Shortly after the baby’s birth, he wrote to Lady Melbourne, his confidante, a manic letter in which he defended his relationship with Augusta: “Oh! but it is ‘worth while.’ … I have been all my life trying to make some one love me—& never got the sort that I preferred before.—But positively she & I will grow good.” He also noted that “the child is not an ‘Ape,’ a reference to the superstition that an incestuous relationship would produce a monster. Byron further intimated to Lady Melbourne that the “new situation” (that is, his having fathered Augusta’s child) might make her withdraw her support of his proposed marriage to her niece, Annabella Milbanke.40

  Annabella recalled that after she had married Byron, he was “continually lamenting her [Augusta’s] absence, saying no one loved him as she did—no one understood how to make him happy but her.” When Augusta came for a visit, Byron tormented his wife by making his preference for his sister’s company apparent, even sending Annabella up to bed two hours early and remaining below with Augusta. Lady Byron would ultimately avow that he had confessed to being Medora’s father. In 1841 she would also announce this as a fact to Medora, and later to her own daughter, Ada, arranging a meeting of the putative half sisters in Paris. As Medora became increasingly estranged from her mother, and destitute, Lady Byron stepped in to provide financial help.41

  The use of documentary evidence is a telling difference between the approach of researchers today and that of the critics who rushed to attack Stowe. For many of the latter, their own revulsion from the idea was reason enough to cast doubt on Stowe’s account. For others, the denials of those around Lady Byron were sufficient to negate the accusation. One story featured Lady Byron’s longtime personal maid, Mrs. Minns, who had come forward to denounce Stowe’s book. Her evidence was that Lady Byron “always spoke well of Mrs. Leigh”!42f

  The Byron scandal, which became displaced onto Harriet Beecher Stowe, is instructive in the Geddes case although some particulars differ. For one thing, Stowe’s accusation partook of the gratuitous: the principals were long dead,g she had not been asked to intervene, and any affair that existed between Byron and his sister was a consensual affair between adults who evidently loved and respected each other. The incest Geddes accused Orleman of was an exploitative and coercive relationship in which a powerful father abused a vulnerable daughter.

  But there was this common denominator: The easiest attitude for a public that never spoke about such things was to assume that an accusation of incest could not be true. Even if it were, many would maintain, bringing it to light was the greater scandal, a corruption of public discourse.

  2

  DRAMATIS PERSONAE

  In a military courtroom,
two men who were officers and presumed to be gentlemen would contest the truth: Lieutenant Louis Orleman and Captain Andrew Geddes. Each would claim to be a victim of the other’s lies. Each would accuse the other of inventing these lies to cover up his own wrongful actions. Through a court-martial, the Army would decide between them.

  There was a third figure in this contest, unseen in the courtroom but dominating the proceedings nevertheless. This was the departmental commander, General E.O.C. Ord.

  LIEUTENANT ORLEMAN

  Louis Henry Orleman was born in Worms, Germany, and came to the United States on the eve of the Civil War. He was twenty-four when he enlisted as a private in the 103rd New York Infantry Volunteers in 1862. He moved to the 119th New York a few months later as a first lieutenant and finished the war as a captain. His unit, composed mostly of Germans or men of German descent, saw plenty of action—at Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, and Atlanta—and it accompanied Sherman on his march to the sea. It also became part of a sharp controversy in which Orleman played a small but significant role.

  The battle of Chancellorsville on May 2, 1863, was one in a series of bitter Union defeats, more bitter because it could have been an impressive victory. The Army of Northern Virginia, commanded by Robert E. Lee, had 60,000 men and 170 guns. It was opposed by a much stronger army of 131, 491mean and 400 guns commanded by Joseph Hooker, but because of a series of blunders, the superior Union force was profoundly defeated. As one man in blue wrote about his own side, “Never was an army more completely surprised, more absolutely overwhelmed.” While Hooker and his generals ignored intelligence and expected an attack elsewhere, the Eleventh Corps, in which the 119th fought, was “crushed” by Stonewall Jackson’s far greater strength.1 The Eleventh became the scapegoat for the defeat.