Ungentlemanly Acts: The Army's Notorious Incest Trial

by Louise Barnett

  Cornelia Baily was only the first of Geddes’s many sexual improprieties discovered by the Army. In the more recent past, according to the army investigator, Assistant Inspector General Absalom Baird, Geddes’s intimacy with a citizen’s wife at Fort Davis had led to a dramatic confrontation. The outraged husband discharged a shotgun at Geddes, but a bystander “threw up the muzzle of the gun,” thus deflecting the bullet intended for the captain. Since the Army’s report has no other details, and attributes the account to no definite source, we can assume that this story came to Baird in hearsay form.

  A Fort Stockton episode involved a Mexican servant girl named Josephine. The deposition of Private Robert Jones affirmed that he had delivered notes back and forth between Geddes and Josephine, who worked for the post trader. Jones was able to describe in detail a pair of slippers Geddes supposedly gave Josephine: “They were a small pair of ladies slippers, they had open spaces across the toes, with blue color in the open spaces between the leather.” According to Jones, Geddes had enjoined secrecy: “The general impression was, and is, that improper relations did or had existed between them for some time.” Around Christmas of 1878, Josephine was “sick at her stomach avomiting the way ladies do when they are in delicate health” (a euphemism for pregnancy).30

  Unfortunately for the Army’s desire to build a case against Geddes, a man named John Burton also gave a sworn statement asserting that Josephine had been treated for constipation, a recurring ailment. She had never had an abortion or miscarriage nor been pregnant. Since she subsequently married a soldier, the army investigator reluctantly advised that this charge not be pursued.31

  Geddes also appeared to have been active at the other end of the social scale, notoriously with Fannie McLaughlen, the wife of Fort Stockton’s commanding officer, Napoleon Bonaparte McLaughlen. Mrs. McLaughlen was a cultivated lady from a socially prominent New York family, “no longer in the bloom of youth, formerly rather restrained and prudish in her intercourse with gentlemen.” In August of 1878, when the affair with Geddes was either incipient or already under way, Lieutenant John Bigelow, Jr., described Mrs. McLaughlen in his diary as “very well dressed” and a good dancer, but “no longer handsome.”32

  Presumably under the influence of Geddes, Fannie McLaughlen’s character changed completely, and she was soon running with a fast crowd that included another adulterous couple, Geddes’s friend Joseph Friedlander and Rachel Beck, the wife of Lieutenant William Beck. Finally, after giving birth to a child who was repudiated by her husband, Mrs. McLaughlen was sent back to her wealthy family in New York.

  When McLaughlen was questioned about his wishes in the matter, his mood was much like that of the ghost of Hamlet’s father, willing to leave his wife to heaven’s justice but eager to see her lover prosecuted. McLaughlen claimed that his wife had not denied that Geddes had fathered her child.

  Lieutenant Bigelow, a young officer in the Tenth Cavalry, observed Geddes’s romantic overtures with disgust and condemned him in the pages of his diary. The cosmopolitan Bigelow, a graduate of West Point, had been educated in Europe when his father was United States ambassador to France.j He had decided opinions and disliked most of his fellow officers (including a fellow diarist, Captain George Armes), but he was a careful observer, not only recording his own actions and thoughts but commenting insightfully on aspects of the military and the world around him. Fond of transcribing passages from writers he admired, Bigelow on one occasion copied into his diary the maxim “Nothing but an adherence to principle conduces to a quiet conscience.”33 Like the high-minded Victorian American he was, Bigelow gave much thought to the moral dimension of action. His distaste for gossip suits his character but has deprived posterity of details of the Fort Stockton scandals that a less scrupulous diarist might have set down.

  Lieutenant Bigelow’s diary records an episode concerning Geddes that evidently never progressed beyond flirtation and thus does not turn up in the Army’s report. The entry of August 18, 1878, notes that a Miss Candelaria Garza was considered the belle of an officers’ ball that had taken place that evening. A week later Bigelow told his diary that Geddes and a local trader, M. F. Corbett, were “at swords’ point”: Corbett had forbidden Geddes to enter his house because of his bad character. Bigelow went on to note that in spite of being married, Geddes had been “very attentive to Miss Garza,” who, in her innocence, had given ear to his “seductive speeches.” Bigelow and another officer, “determined to protect female virtue against a man’s infamous designs,” enlightened Miss Garza about Geddes’s marital status.34

  When Bigelow first heard about the Geddes-Orleman affair, he saw it as a repetition of Geddes’s designs on Candelaria Garza, believing that Geddes had “used his devilish arts with such success as to have blinded her [Lillie Orleman] to the danger of his company.”35

  Much of the Army’s investigation of Geddes was unsubstantiated allegation, but by the time he first met Lillie Orleman the thirty-four-year-old captain had a well-established reputation as a philanderer.

  GENERAL ORD

  The man who had total power over the military disposition of the Geddes-Orleman affair was Edward Otho Cresap Ord, who was, at sixty-one, in his fortieth year of military service and within a few years of an unwelcome retirement. He had already commanded four other military departments and had hoped for a last service assignment to California, but in 1875 President Grant, bypassing consultation with the military hierarchy, had dispatched Ord to Texas, where a violent frontier situation was complicated by a troublesome international border.

  Mexico had received its independence from Spain in 1821, but as a new nation it remained vulnerable to European powers, especially because the fledgling liberal government that came to power there in 1861 could not pay its foreign debts. President Benito Juarez was forced to declare a two-year moratorium on repayment. When the United States was preoccupied with the Civil War, England, Spain, and France used the issue of nonpayment of foreign debts as an excuse for invading Mexico. Early in 1862 England and Spain agreed to withdraw their forces and negotiate; France, obeying the imperial prescription of Napoleon III, pressed on, while publicly proclaiming that it had no territorial ambitions. Privately, France expected the Civil War to weaken, if not completely destroy, the United States and thus render American opposition ineffectual. The French established a provisional Mexican government whose hand-picked assembly immediately voted for monarchy and then obligingly offered the crown to Napoleon’s candidate, Maximilian of Austria.36

  The United States steadfastly refused to recognize Maximilian’s government, and as the Civil War drew to an end, with Confederates talking of continuing to fight from Mexico, federal military units were dispatched to Texas for a show of force. At the time it seemed possible that the French-Mexican empire would destabilize the border, but the threat quickly evaporated. Confederate holdouts surrendered, and France agreed to withdraw its troops from Mexico. Only a few months later, in June of 1867, the Juárez government defeated and executed Maximilian.

  The Monroe Doctrine triumphed,k but Mexico remained unstable and the border on both sides of the Rio Grande was a lawless area. Indian raids steadily bled West Texas of settlers and livestock because the raiders had no trouble escaping into Mexico. This was the situation Ord inherited when he arrived in Texas. Calibrating a correct response to Indian and outlaw incursions from Mexico was a delicate assignment, and Ord was more suited by temperament and talent to direct military action. His aggressive response to the problems of Texas caused consternation in Washington and in Mexico but made him immensely popular in the state.

  Ord’s very first posting out of West Point in 1839 had been to the Seminole Indian War, a typical governmental action against Indians whose presence inhibited white settlement. Tracking down these Indians in the Everglades, Ord acquired a reputation for enduring dangers and hardships. He seemed to have an aptitude, or even an actual preference, for such physical challenges. General Sherman once told a congressional c
ommittee that as a young officer Ord “would swim rivers with ice floating in them when he might have bridged them, and he would go over the tops of mountains when he might have gone around.”37

  Even at the end of his life—when he became a railroad representative in Mexico—Ord made field trips into rough country, sleeping on the floor of huts and eating, as he wrote to one of his sons, “what you never had to.”38 The linking of father and son in this remark suggests both Ord’s straightforward satisfaction that he had been able to provide well for his son and the more oblique pride that he had had to face more challenges than his son, give more proofs of manhood. Could a son read such words from his father without a measure of guilt or inadequacy?

  Ord, the product of a Catholic education, saw himself as a moral man: “God Almighty & Pa,” he once wrote his brother Pacificus, “have made us too honorable.”39 As Ulysses S. Grant would one day describe him, Ord was “honest, but unsteady and fond of change.”40 The comment that Ord was “fond of change” referred to a career-long habit of requesting new postings, sometimes simply because Ord felt he had exhausted the possibilities of a job or a place, other times because of personality conflicts with other officers.

  Ord had favored the annexation of Texas in 1845, “as it may give us something to do.”41 When war against Mexico was declared—supposedly because Americans had died, but actually because the United States wanted to acquire new territory—he sought action but was routed to California by way of Cape Horn. He arrived—after a six-month sea voyage during which he shared a cabin with fellow lieutenant William Tecumseh Sherman—only to find the fighting over.

  Ord next saw action as the commander of an artillery company in Washington Territory during the Yakima War (1855–59). When the first expedition of that war failed, Ord preferred charges of incompetency against its commander, Major Gabriel Rains. Army authorities transferred Rains elsewhere rather than calling a court-martial. In a later action Ord achieved what the San Francisco Daily Herald lauded as “the first regular defeat of the Indians” in the war and “the first time the whites had charged the Indians after being attacked by them.”42 Another battlefield success followed and then the Indians’ surrender. Ord returned to San Francisco, but a recurrence of the Yakima War in 1858 brought him back for another rigorous field campaign in Washington Territory. This, too, ended in Indian surrender, and Ord was transferred to Fort Monroe, Virginia, a congenial posting outside Washington, D.C. He was positioned, at the age of forty, to make his mark in the coming Civil War.

  The qualities of eccentricity and individualism attributed to Ord were apt to go against the grain of a hierarchical institution like the Army. During the Civil War he protested serving under General Irwin McDowell because he felt McDowell was “not fit for his command.”43 He was also prepared to resign rather than serve under General John K. McClernand; when President Lincoln brought McClernand back for political reasons, Ord bypassed the military chain of command to write to Lincoln directly. In his letter he resigned command of the Thirteenth Corps, one of the largest in the Army.44

  But along with his contentiousness Ord had powerful strengths. Before the war was over, when Grant replaced McClernand with Ord, Grant wrote to a friend, “The change is better than 10,000 reinforcements.”45 Ord finished the war as commander of the fifty-thousand-man Army of the James, outranked only by Grant and General George G. Meade, commander of the Army of the Potomac.

  By the time Ord came to San Antonio to run the vast Department of Texas, he had had ample experience, not only on the battlefield but in all areas of command. He had fought the rebels with distinction and done his share of politicking in the intensely political atmosphere of the Union military and the Reconstruction South. In Texas, ironically, he would inherit troops he had done his best to avoid, the four black regiments of the Army—troops he regarded as inferior. Some of these were units removed from Virginia at. Ord’s instigation immediately after the Civil War. These black soldiers were assigned to the Twenty-fifth Infantry and sent to Texas, where Ord encountered them ten years later.

  Ord had been brought up in Cumberland, Maryland, as a Southerner and a believer in slavery, a cultural background reinforced by his marriage to a Virginia relation of Confederate general Jubal Early. Although he fought for the Union, a number of Ord’s family members were Confederate sympathizers. Writing to his friend Sherman in 1863, Ord admitted, “I was in 49 & until 54, a pro slavery man, and I am not quite such a radical now as to think we can turn all these black people loose among the whites, any more than we could so many tame Indians, with advantage to either race.”46 Not surprisingly, he was a strong opponent of black suffrage.

  Ord continued to believe that black soldiers were inferior to white soldiers: he would have preferred their elimination from the postwar military altogether. As commander of the Department of Texas, he constantly requested their removal from his area, on one occasion even offering to trade two black regiments for one white one.47

  Ord had had some experiences with the military judicial system at the top—where generals are investigated for actions in battle. He was a witness at the court of inquiry investigating the Crater disaster, for which General Meade held General Ambrose E. Burnside responsible. On July 30, 1864, the Union forces outside Petersburg, Virginia, had set off a charge of explosives in a tunnel they had constructed into the Confederate camp. They rushed into the large hole created by the blast, but found themselves cornered and destroyed there since no one had properly planned out the operation beyond the moment of explosion. Union losses were 4,000 dead to 1,500 for the Confederates. Although several of his subordinates were censured, Burnside was removed but not court-martialed.48

  More significant, in November of 1862, Ord served with four other generals on a military commission charged with evaluating General Don Carlos Buell’s prosecution of the war in Kentucky and Tennessee. Buell had not pursued Confederate general Braxton Bragg aggressively enough to suit his superiors and was relieved of his command. Apparently, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton had intended for a kangaroo court to uphold Buell’s removal, but when the judge advocate voiced this assumption, he received—among other expressions of indignation—a pressing-down from Ord.

  Perhaps because he had himself felt pressure from above while serving on a military court, Ord was sensitive to such influence in the system of military justice. He believed that enlisted men of the same grade as the accused should be allowed to serve on courts-martial. Having only officers on the courts, he wrote to the House Subcommittee on Military Affairs, is “a little like the Republicans having the right to select the juries to try the Democrats.”49 This view was expressed slightly more than a year before the Geddes deposition crossed his desk.

  Like Louis Orleman, Edward Ord had a large family of sons and daughters, and like Orleman his oldest child was a daughter, a beautiful and accomplished young woman only a few years older than Lillie Orleman. A picture of the Ords taken in 1865 shows the handsome general and his wife sitting opposite each other with the pretty child leaning against her father, her arm on his shoulder, their heads touching, his arm around her waist in intimate physical proximity. The positioning of the figures divides the overall composition into a 2:1 arrangement, with father and daughter forming one unit slightly apart from Mrs. Ord. Nine-year-old Roberta (Bertie) wears an off-the-shoulder dress: her skin in the black-and-white photograph seems startlingly white and vulnerable. Ord, sitting with his legs crossed, is still fairly straight and stiff-looking while Bertie’s posture is yielding, clinging.

  Would Ord have prolonged a position of such physical contact when Bertie was eighteen? He might have seen nothing wrong with her leaning against him to sleep during a long journey in an army ambulance (as Orleman was to do with Lillie). He was a devoted father in a culture in which “daughters’ idealization of fathers was encouraged and the affection of fathers for daughters given fairly free rein.”50 When Bertie later married a Mexican counterpart of her father, a general much o
lder than herself, Ord gave her an elaborate wedding.

  This was the man who, more than any other, would determine Andrew Geddes’s fate.

  3

  FORT STOCKTON AND THE WEST TEXAS FRONTIER

  Fort Stockton was established in 1859 on the trail that the Comanches took on their periodic raids down through Texas from the north and into Mexico. The fort was designed to control Indian depredations in West Texas, but a few years after it was built federal troops withdrew to fight the Civil War. When the fort was reopened, it was staffed entirely by black regiments—part of the Army’s effort to keep such troops away from populated areas that might resent their presence. No one at the time saw any irony in one unwanted minority group being used to check another.

  Looking backward from the safety of the 1980s, historian Glenda Riley characterized the conflicts between Indians and whites in mid-nineteenth-century Texas as a “tragic misunderstanding.” 1 There was undoubtedly misunderstanding enough between two radically different cultures that perceived each other through the experience of armed confrontation, but this was secondary to the central issue, which was tragic without being a misunderstanding: the opposed cultures were contesting the land, and however well they came to understand each other, nothing could have made it possible for them to share it peaceably.

  In 1871 General Sherman made a tour of inspection of military posts in Texas, accompanied by Inspector General Randolph B. Marcy. The Inspector General, a talented observer and writer, kept a journal of the trip, in which he noted that “this rich and beautiful section does not contain today [May 17, 1871] as many white people as it did when I visited it eighteen years ago, and if the Indian marauders are not punished, the whole country seems to be in a fair way of becoming totally depopulated.”2