Ungentlemanly Acts: The Army's Notorious Incest Trial

by Louise Barnett

  After the battle, the graceless Hooker blamed his subordinates, particularly the commanders of the Eleventh, although Theodore Dodge, who fought in the battle and later wrote about it, charges that the fault was Hooker’s for allowing the right flank to be held by “an untried corps, composed of the most heterogeneous and untrustworthy elements in the Army of the Potomac.” What made the Eleventh “heterogeneous and untrustworthy,” according to Dodge, was simply the number of foreign-born it contained: his oblique but readily understood language expresses a native New Englander’s prejudice. After the Chancellorsville defeat, the German troops in the Eleventh “were hooted at on all sides and called in derision Dutchmen,” or “flying Dutchmen” because they were thought to have run from battle.2

  Not long after Chancellorsville, the commander of the Third Division of the Eleventh, Major General Carl Schurz, wrote to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton to protest: “It is a very hard thing for soldiers to be universally stigmatized as cowards, and is apt to demoralize them more than a defeat.” In his report on the battle Schurz commented that the Eleventh Corps had been “overwhelmed by the army and the press with abuse and insult beyond measure.”3

  Not all of the commanders Hooker castigated were content to be scapegoats. Schurz, himself a German immigrant, requested and received a court of inquiry to determine if Hooker’s “strictures” on his conduct were proper. Schurz testified that because he was leading the First Brigade of the Eleventh, he had expected to be followed by the rest of the corps. Instead, he found himself alone: the Second and Third Brigades had halted, “under orders.” Several witnesses reported they had been given these orders by Captain Orleman, at that time a staff officer serving under Colonel Wladimir Krzyzanowski of the Second Brigade. One witness added that Orleman had not said where the orders came from.4

  The court’s “Statement of Facts” rejected Hooker’s strictures and vindicated Schurz’s conduct. “There is nothing in the evidence,” they concluded, “to authorize or justify the halting of the Second Brigade at the time and place it did. Orders had been given to and received by its commander to follow the First Brigade … . The only evidence on this subject is the hearsay statement of a staff officer of Colonel Hecker, who testifies that he was told by a staff officer of Colonel Krzyzanowski [Orleman] that he (Krzyzanowski) had been ordered to halt.”5

  It was never determined where the mysterious orders, countermanding the orders of the division commander, had come from. Orleman’s role, if blameless, was certainly inglorious, one tiny action that exemplified the large-scale disaster it was part of.

  The court of inquiry vindicated Schurz, but the bad reputation of the Eleventh remained, no doubt buttressed by the prejudices of people like Dodge who automatically blamed foreigners. Philippe Regis De Trobriand, that thoughtful observer of the American military, noted that the Eleventh Corps “was the object of a general hue and cry, nobody stopping to ask if there were not some extenuating circumstances—so quickly does injustice germinate in adversity.”6 Thus, Orleman would carry into his postwar career in the regular army the stigma of having served in a unit accused of cowardice and blamed for defeat.

  In any case the battle of Chancellorsville was not his entire Civil War. From September 4, 1864, he served as a topographical engineer under the direction of Brevet Brigadier General O. M. Poe at the headquarters of General Sherman.

  When the Army administered qualifying tests to its officers after the war, Orleman did extremely well. He answered every mathematical question correctly—in keeping with his training in engineering—but was similarly proficient in defining latitude and longitude, naming the number of states and the country’s principal rivers, and discussing the republic’s early history.7

  On the frontier he was commended twice for his participation in encounters with warring Plains Indians. When Captain Louis Carpenter made a fierce dash over unfamiliar territory to save his former commander, George Forsyth—under siege from a large body of Cheyenne—“the task of laying out and running the course to be followed was intrusted to Lieutenant Orleman.”h Orleman was commended for that rescue and for an action at Beaver Creek pitting eighty men against some six hundred Indians. In a general field order General Sheridan thanked the men involved.8

  Orleman wrote up for the St. Louis Daily Democrat one of his frontier experiences, an attempt to find desperately needed forage in a howling blizzard and ice storm. Seven of the eight men with him became frostbitten. Horses began to bleed from ice cuts. On the second night out, “without food for the men, or forage for the stock, we passed the night without shelter, and exposed to a keen north wind.”9 A member of the frontier army might receive a medal or a commendation for fighting Indians, but the more constant and equally deadly enemy on the Great Plains was the weather. Extreme and capricious, it ultimately disabled more men than the Indians did.

  In another fierce storm Orleman contracted the ailment that would eventually end his active duty, a severe case of conjunctivitis that claimed most of the sight of his left eye and seriously weakened the right. His eyes became painfully sensitive to light, forcing him to wear dark glasses out of doors.10

  Carpenter’s H Company of the Tenth Cavalry, which rescued Forsyth’s scouting party, also escorted General Sherman from Fort Sill to Fort Gibson in 1871. Carpenter, Orleman, Sherman, and Sherman’s aides constituted a small band of officers: during this trip Orleman surely would have mentioned to Sherman that he had been attached to Sherman’s Civil War headquarters, and reminisced with the general about the Atlanta campaign. When the Geddes court-martial came to his attention eight years later, Sherman might well have remembered Orleman.

  CAPTAIN GEDDES

  As a child Andrew Geddes had been transplanted from Canada to the little town of Vinton, Iowa, but his parents had come from Scotland, where an elder brother had been born. Geddes had joined the Union volunteer army in 1861 at the age of sixteen.11 His Civil War record appears to have been exemplary. For most of the war he served as a captain in the Eighth Iowa but was mustered out as a lieutenant colonel of volunteers, possibly the youngest man to hold that rank. Describing a battle outside Memphis, Lieutenant Colonel William B. Bell reports that when his regiment became inadvertently divided, he left Captain Geddes in command while he rode off to find the missing units. Geddes was nineteen at the time.12 Of the action at Spanish Fort, New Orleans, Brigadier General Eugene A. Carr wrote, “I cannot commend too highly the conduct of the officers and soldiers of my division during this trying, dangerous, and laborious siege.”13 He included Andrew Geddes in his list of officers to be specifically commended.

  In 1868 Geddes received brevets of captain and major for “gallant and meritorious service” in the siege of Vicksburg and the capture of Spanish Fort. In recommending these brevets, Nelson Miles, who would attain the Army’s highest rank, described Geddes as “a gentleman of high culture, an officer of fine ability and excellent character.” In 1867 Geddes sought an appointment in the regular army, buttressed by the usual letters of recommendation. N. B. Baker, the Adjutant General of Iowa, wrote to Secretary of War Stanton that Geddes was “brave, capable, prompt and of the strictest integrity.”14 His congressional representative extolled him as “a brave and gallant soldier … a man of correct habits and good moral character … [who] has all the qualities and the capacity for a good officer.”15 Geddes became a first lieutenant in the Fortieth U.S. Infantry on September 15, 1868.

  In 1872, Geddes found himself facing court-martial charges for breaking an archaic and universally violated regulation.16 He had made several transfers of advance pay to two post traders at Fort Clark, accompanying each transfer with a signed certificate that enabled it to be cashed when it fell due on the last day of the month. The traders then advanced Geddes the specified amounts, minus their fees. On one occasion Geddes had attempted to cash one month’s pay in two different places, intending to cancel one before it matured, but when one of these checks failed to clear, he wrote to the holder of the acco
unt and “made prompt amends.” This practice of anticipating one’s pay happened to be illegal. It was also widespread. The Army argued that certificates signed in advance were false because the money would not be available until the end of the month.

  J. P. Alexander, a post trader, testified that he had known Geddes for five years and always had pleasant relations with him. He said that it was customary for officers to transfer their accounts to him before they were due, and that he would not accept them without a signed certificate since otherwise they could not be cashed. Two other post traders stated that they followed the same practice.

  Captain J. W. French, Twenty-fifth Infantry, Geddes’s company and post commander, gave Geddes a character reference. He related that Geddes had served as adjutant and quartermaster. He knew “nothing derogatory to his character as an officer and a gentleman.”

  Geddes did not deny the transactions; he did disclaim any intent to commit fraud. In his closing statement to the court he hoped that “in a spirit of liberality” it would rule that he had made “an error of judgment only.” Nevertheless, he was found guilty and sentenced to be cashiered (dismissed dishonorably).

  Reviewing the case, Judge Advocate General Joseph Holt noted that officers in Texas “habitually transferred their pay accounts before they were due … . That such a custom has grown up in the service is notorious, and that the paragraph of the army regulations forbidding it has come to be looked upon as a dead letter cannot be questioned.” Rather than upholding the letter of the law, however dead, the Judge Advocate General surprisingly concluded that “prevailing custom affords a moral if not a legal defense.”17

  Moreover, to judge officers culpable for signing certificates before the last day of the month “would probably render nearly every officer of the army answerable to trial.” There were many circumstances in the uncertain life of a frontier army officer that might make the signing of a certificate in advance prudent. If a married officer were to go on field duty, where he might remain away for a lengthy and indeterminate period, it would only be common sense to leave a signed certificate with his wife so that she could collect his pay in his absence.

  In short, Judge Advocate General Holt found a number of reasons for leniency:

  The absence of any wrongful intention on the part of the accused, … the unsullied record his career as a soldier presents, together with the manifest feeling of humiliation at his position, affords, it is believed, ample basis for the conclusion that the mortification inflicted by his trial and conviction may be safely accepted as a sufficient expiation for his conduct.

  While Holt was reviewing the case, some of Geddes’s old friends were not idle. The Iowa state treasurer, who had served with Geddes during the Civil War, wrote on his behalf: “A better and braver soldier was not to be found. I cannot think that his present offense was committed with any criminal intent.”18 Another supporter asked the Secretary of War for clemency, adding that if Geddes had any fault, “it is a reckless use of money.”19 Influence was always useful, but the commonsense opinion of the Judge Advocate General was probably more telling. The verdict was thrown out and Geddes reinstated.

  After the verdict, but before the Judge Advocate General had ruled, Geddes addressed a plea for clemency to Secretary of War William Belknap: “I give you my word of honor that I am innocent of any intention of wrong or evil in what I did,” he wrote. “My conduct was careless and I regret it more than I am able to express.”20

  On the frontier, Geddes’s most notable exploit was an 1875 march that quickly became legendary. Accounts of the Texas frontier army always refer to it, but perhaps no one has described this saga with more gusto than that chronicler of West Texas, James Evetts Haley. Lieutenant Colonel William R. Shafter, a rugged non-West Pointer, was given command of a field expedition out of Fort Concho in 1875. On October 23, near Cedar Lake, he “detached Lieutenant Andrew Geddes with two companies of cavalry and Seminole scouts, ordering him ‘to follow the trail [of the Indians] as long as possible.’” Geddes, Haley writes admiringly, “was one of those remarkably determined individuals, badly out of the [sic] place in the world today, in that he took the English language literally and believed in following orders.”21

  Geddes rode south on the trail of the Indians. At a place called Howard’s Wells he dispatched his provision wagons to Fort Clark with orders to replenish supplies and rejoin them on the way back. He crossed the Pecos and continued south toward the Rio Grande. “This day’s march was a very hard one,” Lieutenant Hans J. Gasman wrote in his diary, “over very mountainous country and completely covered with Bear and Dagger grass, causing the lameness of several horses and mules.”22

  Two days later Geddes found the Indians he had been pursuing, “killing the only brave there and capturing four squaws and a little boy.” He was told that the other Indians had left. Now weary, with horses going lame and suffering from lack of food, the force turned back, finally meeting up with a provisions wagon on the San Antonio road. Due to an error, provisions for only one day had been sent.23

  When Geddes arrived at Fort Concho on November 27, he had “marched 650 miles over trying terrain following the trail as far ‘as possible’ within the territorial bounds of the United States, and had wound up with only one scalp.” As Haley concludes, regretfully, “Had less than an impartial providence watched over the affairs of warriors—both red and white—he would have got back with a tow sack full.”24 It was, then, a typical frontier army foray: the Indians eluded pursuit; the soldiers demonstrated their ability to endure the rigors of a harsh terrain.

  If Geddes did not slaughter a large number of Indians, he did perform valuable service by finding water holes and camping places that would be useful to future expeditions southwest of Fort Concho. And his arduous trek earned him the respect of Shafter, who would continue to be his firm supporter in the days ahead, and of Ord, who would not.

  For Geddes himself, when proof of his military virtue was called for, his youthful service in the Civil War and his 1875 march for Shafter remained examples of performance to be flourished like battle-worn flags, tattered but still proud, even in a losing fight.

  One more entry needs to be added to the resume of Andrew Geddes. The Geddes supporter who wrote to the Secretary of War that Geddes’s one fault was recklessness with money may not have known otherwise, but his assertion was inaccurate. Geddes did indeed have another fault: he was a persistent, perhaps even compulsive, womanizer who had had a number of liaisons with married women, some of which produced scandalous repercussions (including at least one child). Although these episodes never found their way into the 1879 court-martial, they were widely known in the Department of Texas.

  The Army eventually learned of a number of specific incidents when it set out to investigate Geddes after the 1879 trial. In 1869 Geddes had been the groom in a shotgun wedding to a young woman of Montgomery, Alabama, whom he had seduced.i He lived apart from his wife and evidently pursued other women regardless of their marital status.

  The earliest instance of adulterous behavior the army investigator reported linked a then unmarried Geddes with Mrs. Baily, “wife of Surgeon Baily of the Army, whose trial a few years ago brought great scandal on the service.”25 The court-martial of army surgeon Elisha J. Baily in 1870 had been a strange and embarrassing affair from the beginning. Baily was charged with conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman because he had abandoned his wife “without cause” and refused to support her. For his part, Baily asked if the court would, “on mere rumor, step in and force the accused to defend himself and lay bare his domestic difficulties,” although the matter had “nothing whatever to do with the military service.”26 The Army did step in and lived to regret it.

  The Bailys had never been happily married, largely because of Mrs. Baily’s flirtatious and independent ways. In fact, as the court-martial would reveal, the trusting husband had been badly and repeatedly deceived. He eventually obtained an act of divorce from the legislature of his ho
me state and refused to support the woman whom he began to refer to as his “so-called wife.”

  Andrew Geddes made a brief appearance at the end of this marital debacle. Once her husband had renounced her, Cornelia Baily travelled to Pensacola, Florida, where her lover, Captain William Cuyler (son of one of her husband’s oldest friends), had been transferred. She hoped that Cuyler would agree to support her, but “he refused to have anything to do with her, in any form.27

  Cornelia did manage to find consolation for Cuyler’s disdain, at least temporarily. Geddes had accompanied her to Florida, and there was compelling testimony that the two had shared a room with one bed. In an extremely long concluding statement at Baily’s court-martial, Baily’s attorney heaped scorn upon Geddes for his part in the affair:

  The philanthropy of the Officer of the 25th Infantry in thus coming to Pensacola with this lone woman according to Captain Burbank’s testimony—when he had nothing else to call him there—and his willingness to give her the “temporary” protection of his name in a marital capacity, cannot be too highly commended for the instruction and imitation of such officers “still in the Army” as have an idea that it is a very proper or convenient thing to do thus toward those who may in any way have been connected with the families of Brother Officers.28

  After hearing a mountain of evidence about Mrs. Baily’s activities and Baily’s long forbearance, the Army acquitted the doctor, wisely deciding that this was a civil matter, after all.29

  Cornelia Baily was from Wilmington, Delaware, and had spent the past three years in Massachusetts. Geddes was stationed in New Orleans at the time of the Pensacola trip. How the two met and came to an understanding is unclear. It seems unlikely that they could have had a long acquaintance. Whatever brought them together, they were two of a kind, people who sought sexual adventure whenever an opportunity presented itself.