Ungentlemanly Acts: The Army's Notorious Incest Trial

by Louise Barnett

  Q: Did you not also realize at the time that this conduct which you have imputed to the accused might compromise you in the mind of all virtuous people, if they knew these things?

  A member of the court objected because “Captain Geddes is charged with endeavoring to abduct Miss Orleman and not Miss Orleman with endeavoring to abduct Captain Geddes.” The exasperated defense counsel commented, “Hard though it may be, the witness is entitled to no sympathy when the object is the attainment of justice.”

  Predictably, the member’s objection was sustained. Paschal tried to rephrase the question, the member again objected, and the objection was sustained. Paschal exploded: “The accused respectfully asks for an adjournment upon the ground that the rulings of the Court upon questions which the accused relied materially for his defense has so taken him by surprise as to leave him unprepared to go on with the case.”

  Naturally this request was also denied.

  The letters, undated and written in pencil on cheap notepaper, move this story from a confrontation of competing voices to another place. They speak, eloquently, for themselves. After Geddes had told Lillie what he had seen at the Orlemans’ bedroom window, she wrote the captain a pleading note:

  Please be so kind as to tell my father what you saw and heard a week ago last Sunday and I wish you would please tell him in my presence. But I pray you, dear Major, never let him know what I have told you: never let on to my father, by your words or your actions that I have given you the secret of my life. Please promise me that, dear major. Tell him that you came very near telling Colonel Blunt, but that you did not feel like making it public. You must tell him before you go. He did not know that you were going until this morning. Lt. Quimby told him. He was very angry and said I should not go tonight. Will you please grant me that one request, and that is, to tell my father what you saw and heard that Sunday evening. I want him to know that you know the secret he is trying to keep. But please do not tell on me. He asked me last night if I had said anything to you. I told him no, that you knew as much as I could tell you. What could I have said? I did not want him to know that I had told on him. But you cannot blame me. When you said that you did not think he was treating me right, I could not help telling you all. I felt so unhappy I want you to tell him that, as he has decided not to let me go after you had gotten everything ready so as not to let me go alone. He thinks that it would not be right for me to go and you just tell him that if the people knew what he had done, that they would shun him while they honor and respect you. Please throw this in the fire.

  A later note reiterates the themes of the first:

  Please tell my father that you will not tell anyone of his secret. He said that he would have to take his life if you were to tell. Please come over and tell him. Please swear to him that you will not tell. He thinks that you have told Joe F. [Friedlander] You must promise me to swear to him that you will not tell. Just think of his family. He says that he is almost crazy. Tell him that you will not ask me if he will let me go. Promise him that, and he will be satisfied. Please say yes.

  Lillie’s testimony was inconsistent on a critical point, which went unchallenged during the trial but did not escape Dunn, namely, the “secrets” her letters referred to. During her cross-examination she gave this explanation:

  Q: Please state what was the secret of your father, concerning which he said he would have to take his life.

  A: I meant my father’s treatment of me which Capt. Geddes had termed unbecoming an officer and a gentleman.

  But on direct examination Lillie had said that her father had always treated her with great kindness, and that her acknowledgment to the accused to the contrary was knowingly false. In other words, there was no secret, nothing about her father’s behavior that needed to be concealed or, as the Judge Advocate General asserted, would lead him to take his own life, if exposed, or be shunned by the community. In a time when men were the unchallenged heads of their households and corporal punishment of children was both common and accepted, that Lieutenant Orleman would be driven to commit suicide by the charge that he sometimes spoke harshly to his daughter is preposterous, especially since he grew up in Germany, where he would have been acculturated into an even stronger patriarchal system than that which prevailed in the United States.

  The letters indicate that Lillie hoped to use the idea of publicity to secure her freedom: to trade silence about the incestuous relationship for her father’s permission to leave with Geddes. This was walking a fine line: the secret must be both promulgated and contained, communicated to Geddes, and from Geddes back to her father, but no further. Were it to be revealed, as both she and her father knew, there could be terrible consequences.

  Once Lillie recovered from the shock of a sympathetic young officer’s knowing her situation, she was not at all loath to talk about it. Isolated at a frontier fort with her father and “the secret,” she must have longed for such a confidant. Her behavior toward Geddes before the revelation—the veiled hints about her unhappy state—and her attempts to discourage her father’s sexual abuse by invoking Geddes’s name, show that she welcomed the ally she could not have directly approached.

  It is tempting to see another of Lillie’s actions as symbolic of her real feelings. Lillie accidentally locked the door of the Orlemans’ quarters with Geddes inside, her father outside. Locking the door kept Geddes with her and excluded her father.

  If Houston, the stagecoach driver, was telling the truth, Orleman made accusations about Lillie’s having sexual relations with other men that are typical of the possessive father who fears a rival for his daughter.10 Paradoxically, making such charges also addresses the incestuous father’s need to see the daughter-lover as degraded by this “criminal intercourse,” a “whore” who welcomes all comers, including the father, and therefore deserves no respect.11 For Orleman to accuse his daughter of having had a lover before him would have been another way of denying responsibility and minimizing his own act. His imagining his daughter enjoying the sexual attentions of other men bespeaks an anxiety about his own virility. And his crude language, so unacceptable to Victorian America, would further degrade her.

  The trial also focused a great deal of attention on the issue of whether or not Geddes could have seen or heard any evidence of criminal intercourse from the Orlemans’ quarters. In addition to ordering a detailed diagram of the premises, the court heard testimony from every witness who might have an informed opinion on the subject.

  Lillie in her testimony had recounted her careful preparations on the night in question—drawing the blinds, letting down the curtain, shutting the window—and described in detail the placement of every object in the bedroom. She stated that a normal tone of voice could not be heard through the wall.

  Both father and daughter testified that Orleman had entered the bedroom after Lillie had gotten into bed, that he sat on the bed and questioned her with some severity about her relationship with Geddes. In his cross-examination of Lillie, Paschal pursued this:

  Q: When you told the accused on March 3rd that your father had treated you cruelly and meanly, did you tell him in what this cruel and mean treatment consisted?

  A: No sir. I did not. He said he had heard everything that happened that night and I supposed that he had heard our conversation when he said that my father was not treating me right.

  The point at issue is what each party understood by certain general terms applied to Orleman. Lillie said that she had thought Geddes’s accusations referred to her father’s chastising her, and she had agreed that Orleman was “mean and cruel,” which Geddes presumably took to be a reference to her father’s sexual abuse of her. Lost in this semantic confusion is the contradiction between Lillie’s earlier assertion that conversation in the Orlemans’ quarters could not be heard in Geddes’s, and her supposition that the Sunday evening conversation had been overheard. She reiterated this unremarked contradiction in her answer to another question.

  Q: What do you have reference
to when you say “what he had seen and heard that Sunday night”?

  A: Captain Geddes had never explained to me what he had heard that night and I naturally believed that he had heard the conversation my father had with me that night.

  Once again, Lillie assumed that Geddes had heard conversation in the Orleman quarters.

  As for Orleman, why would he prefer charges to the commanding officer of Fort Stockton—thus ensuring publicity regardless of the outcome—when Geddes had sworn to keep the matter a secret? If he was not truly a wronged and indignant man, he nevertheless assumed that role by his action. It was the proper role to play, obviously, if there was any suspicion about his relations with his daughter. And Lillie’s frantic notes to Geddes suggest the motive: Orleman feared that Geddes had told others, in particular his close friend Joseph Friedlander. The lieutenant knew the gossipy nature of an army post: by preferring charges he seized the initiative and launched a preemptive strike, one that had in its favor the antipathy of a conservative Victorian-era institution to confront distasteful sexual matters. He must have further realized that he had the advantage of reputation over the womanizing captain and simply needed to play the part that his world had no desire to challenge, that of the honorable paterfamilias.

  If Geddes’s account of Orleman’s repeated pleas to keep silent are true—his emotion, his reference to his family and to his own ruin—Orleman must also have hated Geddes, both for knowing about the abuse of Lillie and for exposing him to the humiliation of having to plead with him. Preferring charges against Geddes gave Orleman the high ground as the victim of scandalous allegations and paid back the captain for discovering Orleman’s nasty secret.

  Convicting Geddes spared the Army the scandal of finding one of its own guilty of an unspeakable crime and punished a man whose reputation as a philanderer must have told heavily against him in some quarters. Had he confined himself to discreet relations with Mexican servant girls, the rank-conscious Army probably would have shrugged and looked the other way, but to seduce the wife of his post’s commander, an officer well known and liked in the Department! That was crossing a line.

  Even now, as the military seeks to revise its policy on adultery to bring it more in line with contemporary civilian standards, there is considerable feeling within the armed forces against relaxing the official standard of an officer and a gentleman. Such debates on the morality of officers have occurred periodically. In 1882, the Army and Navy Journal defended the ideal against the criticism that many officers failed to live up to it: “It is the pride of the true soldier that a brave man is generous, manly, and unselfish, devoted to works of chivalry, not of devilry.”12

  But Geddes perfectly illustrates a long-standing model of the gentleman, albeit an unacknowledged one: the man who kisses but does not tell. A patriarchal society regarded his married lovers as pathetic victims who had been preyed upon by a depraved seducer, but they may actually have been independent-minded women who had their own reasons for extramarital affairs.

  Fannie McLaughlen resembles Kate Chopin’s heroine Edna Pontellier in The Awakening, a woman bored with a dull routine and ripe for romantic adventure. Fannie came from a monied and socially prominent background in New York. She was married to a man who was growing old and ill, possibly—from the medical evidence—syphilitic. She was marooned in the Texas desert. Into this aridity came a handsome young captain, well versed in the classics of English poetry and equally versed in the art of appealing to women. He changed her completely, from—in the army investigator’s censorious telling—“restrained and prudish” to devil-may-care. This liberation came at a price in the stifling venue of a frontier army post, would indeed have been scandalous anywhere in late-nineteenth-century America, and she was packed off to her relatives in disgrace. But Fannie’s adultery might have had a positive dimension for her that the Army, an obvious partisan of the wronged husband, would not—could not—entertain.

  If rumor and innuendo can be believed, Geddes seems to have found a number of dissatisfied wives on the Texas frontier. Fort Stockton became known for such unsavory doings throughout the Department of Texas—not surprisingly, since the downsized regular army was a small community in which everyone knew everyone else. In a single department, whose units were intermingled at its various forts, everyone must have known of Geddes’s reputation.

  It hadn’t affected his promotion to captain, but the affair with Fannie McLaughlen, followed by the accusation of incest, produced an unwholesome notoriety. During Geddes’s trial, Colonel Grierson, commanding officer of the Tenth Cavalry, was preparing a list of officers to appear before a retiring board. Of McLaughlen he wrote:

  This officer has been sick much of the time since joining the regiment, is broken down from long and faithful service, is now absent on sick leave for seven months since March 13, 1879, and it is believed that he will never again be fit for active field service in the cavalry.13

  The easiest way to bury the scandal of Geddes and Fannie McLaughlen, as well as the incest charge, was to get rid of Geddes.

  As competing petitions illustrate, the Twenty-fifth was divided by the Geddes case. According to historian Oliver Knight, in the unwritten code of the army officer corps an officer’s personal affairs were “the concern of his regiment alone; it was bad manners for the officers of another regiment to even ask questions.”14 On a small post this line was probably blurred: Lieutenant Bigelow of the Tenth Cavalry had no scruple about intervening to enlighten a possible victim of Geddes’s.

  The outcome might conceivably have been different if the court had had to choose between an obviously guilty Orleman and a completely innocent Geddes. But the six-hundred-page trial transcript of Andrew Geddes’s court-martial is more like the multiple perspectives of Rashomon than a choice between clear antinomies. Both sides told some of the truth; both sides lied.

  In his review of the trial Judge Advocate General Dunn systematically exposed the Orlemans’ lies, but he did not address a problematic area of Geddes’s defense, his relationship with Lillie Orleman. She portrayed herself as a romantic dupe of Geddes: the court was invited to see through her testimony the familiar plot of a cad seducing a young and innocent girl. Geddes, of course, characterized his role as that of benevolent and disinterested friend. As a married man, he could hardly do otherwise. I suspect, however, that each of these contrasting versions contains some truth.

  In all likelihood, Geddes noticed Lillie at the hop and made advances to her there. She returned his interest: all the reasons that made him a sympathetic, if not irresistible, figure to other women worked on Lillie as well, but emphatically so because she longed to be rescued from the incestuous demands of her father. She and Geddes lived in such proximity that it was no trick for them to see each other often in the natural course of the day. Geddes was touched by her story and wanted to help her, but it must have been difficult for this practiced Romeo to restrict his involvement when she offered him at least some encouragement. If her letters to him convict her father, Geddes’s to her convict himself:

  Lillie, I did not think you could be so unkind. Do you regret what happened at the hop? Well, I suppose you are right and that you regret everything that has passed between us … . Think of me kindly sometimes. Your unhappy friend.

  Geddes had taken great pains to convince the court that exactly nothing had happened between himself and Lillie Orleman at the hop, whereas the note implies that an overture was made and later followed up. Then Lillie pulled back because Geddes was, after all, a married man (“I suppose you are right”). But he had presented himself in the stereotypical and strategic role of the misvalued and unhappy husband, an object of pity. The conclusion of the letter confirms this interpretation.

  Another note is simply one line: “Please write. How cross you spoke to me.” In court Geddes maintained that he had grown tired of Lillie’s constantly accosting him in person with more stories of her incestuous experience with her father. “Please write” was, he said, an at
tempt to free himself from those repetitious conversations by having her put her complaints in writing instead—an explanation that seems as weak as Lillie’s attempt to explain her letters.

  Finally, Geddes wrote, “Forgive me, if you will. I would not hurt you for the world. Every tear you shed is like taking a drop of blood from my heart. You seem so unkind at times … . Pity, do not condemn. To err is human, to forgive divine. Please forgive. You know what I think of you—” Here Geddes had probably pressed his advances too far and was begging forgiveness. The correspondence is obviously predicated on a mutual attraction: Geddes writes melodramatically that Lillie’s tears are like drops of blood drawn from his heart; Lillie’s letters typically begin “Darling Andrew.” One of hers ends, “Yours truly, if I may call myself.”

  Geddes may have gone riding every day, as he and other defense witnesses testified, but in spite of his attempt to account for all of the time Lieutenant Orleman was absent at afternoon Stables, his explanation did not preclude rendezvous, possibly brief, between himself and Lillie. They lived in the same building, after all, her door a step away from his. While Orleman was predictably at Stables, a chore that an infantry officer like Geddes escaped, Geddes might have visited Lillie for ten minutes or a quarter of an hour every day between the end of dinner and the time of his ride.

  Lillie did not say that Geddes had told her he would get a divorce and marry her. She said that she thought he would do so, based, no doubt, on his avowals and behavior toward her. Unlike Mrs. Baily, Mrs. McLaughlen, and the wife of the citizen at Fort Davis, Lillie was a young, unmarried girl. Geddes must have known that, aside from other considerations, it would be fatal to his career actually to seduce the daughter of a fellow officer. Perhaps he was merely enjoying her obvious infatuation, thinking that the flirtation would end of its own accord when he delivered her to her mother in Austin.