Ungentlemanly Acts: The Army's Notorious Incest Trial

by Louise Barnett

  Like everyone else who read the Stewart affidavit, Geddes knew that the laundress’s crossing the color line would discredit her testimony. He told Baird that she had been indicted by a grand jury for miscegenation and was awaiting trial: “It will always be easy to prove her a perjurer.” Mary Stewart, who had lived with a black man for ten years in a community that was both socially and legally racist, must have come to regret her intervention in the Fort Stockton scandal.

  Whatever the reliability of Mary Stewart as a witness, there seems little doubt that some part of the accusations against Mrs. McLaughlen were true. Baird’s report said that McLaughlen had not denied the affair, nor was it denied in Geddes’s letter. McLaughlen professed himself satisfied if his wife behaved herself in New York. In keeping with the mores of the times, the McLaughlens did not divorce.

  Geddes, after twitting Baird with the weakness of the Stewart affidavit, concluded his letter with simple dignity: “It would be hard to give up a career and profession followed since my boyhood, a captain at sixteen and Lieut. Col. commanding a regiment at nineteen. I had four brothers in General Sherman’s army.”39 In other words, Geddes was unwilling to resign. And he did not suspect at the time, or possibly ever, that his most formidable enemy was the head of the Army—General Sherman himself.

  The impasse would be resolved from an unexpected quarter. At the end of July Geddes and his company had made the transfer from Texas to Dakota, the last of the regiment to be sent. On September 11 a telegram from General Terry, commanding general of the Department of Dakota, announced to Sherman that new court-martial charges had been filed against Geddes, and that he would suspend action on the “old matter” and try Geddes on the new charges: “We may thus save all scandal.”40

  Again, Sherman’s reply to this news reveals the depth of his determination to see Geddes cashiered. He telegraphed Terry, “That is well—order the trial of Captain Geddes on the new charges. The old can await unless the Statute of Limitations compels an immediate trial.”41 If the new charges did not succeed in removing Geddes, Sherman would insist on pursuing the old—no matter how much the “fair fame of ladies” or the reputation of the Army itself suffered.

  8

  FINAL ACT

  Dr. Benjamin Pope, a meditative army surgeon at Fort Stockton in the 1870s, found in his experience that soldiers could be sharply divided into two classes: “First, those who are chronic transgressors of the law, and second, those who are never in that category.”1 This may have been true in general—or true of enlisted men—but it fails to capture the nuances of Andrew Geddes’s encounters with military law. Even given the high rate of courts-martial in the frontier army period, three trials within eight years would place him in Pope’s category of “chronic transgressors.” Yet Geddes doesn’t fit the typical profile of the repeat offender, the man whose vice—usually alcohol—is a recurring source of grief. All of Geddes’s trials were exceptional in one way or another.

  Geddes went on trial for the third time at Fort Randall, Dakota Territory, on the most common charge in the frontier army: drunkenness on duty. The date was October 1, 1880, exactly a month after the incident in question. Charges had been preferred by Colonel George L. Andrews, the commander of the Twenty-fifth Infantry Regiment and the author of an official statement sent to General Ord earlier that year saying that he did not consider Captain Geddes to be a proper person to have command of a company.2

  The particulars of the case were not in dispute: the issue was one of interpretation. Geddes had consumed a number of drinks during the afternoon of September 1. That evening at dress parade he became unsteady and then left the field. As he mounted the step to the porch of Company G quarters, he “seemed on the verge of falling.”3

  Captain Charles Bentzini testified that he had seen Geddes during the afternoon at the post trader’s: “Before I left the signs of inebriation became apparent on the accused by a flushed face and what I can only express by saying his tongue was beginning to be heavy.” At evening parade, “his body was oscillating to and fro and he showed the most positive signs of drunkenness.” A group of witnesses for the prosecution corroborated that Geddes had been drunk on duty, and that he had had to turn over command to Lieutenant McMartin during dress parade and make a precipitous departure. Lieutenant McMartin himself testified that Geddes was “under the influence of liquor … to such a degree that it became necessary for him to leave the Parade.” One witness described Geddes as “reeling and staggering.” Another characterized him as “unsteady as he stood in front of his Company.” A third baldly asserted that Geddes was drunk.

  The defense responded that Geddes had been sick rather than intoxicated. Geddes himself testified that he had been sober. During parade he felt “dizzy with an extreme desire to get to a privy.” After leaving the field and using the band privy, he felt much better, but for the next few days he had diarrhea. A series of defense witnesses testified that he had been sober at dress parade and had not “staggered.” First Lieutenant Wallace Tear had seen Geddes walking to and from parade and affirmed that on both occasions he appeared sober. He also confirmed Geddes’s frequent visits to the privy and had overheard him saying that he had “the trots.”

  The line between drunkenness and illness was not necessarily clear-cut. Just as illness could cause unsteadiness of the sort attributed to Geddes, so a drunken man might feign illness as a cover. In deciding between the two conditions a number of factors—such as the reliability of witnesses on both sides and the past conduct of the accused—might be brought to bear in a particular case.

  Even if one did not know the behind-the-scenes machinations of the Army’s top brass to get Geddes out of the service, several matters in this trial would raise suspicion. Much of the testimony for the prosecution just as easily supported the defense as the prosecution or was significantly undercut by cross-examination. For instance, the prosecutor called the post trader and the bartender to establish Geddes’s afternoon drinking. Both confirmed that he had been drinking but testified to his sobriety as well. Major Joseph Bush had been working with Geddes that afternoon at the trader’s. He said that Geddes “showed he had been drinking liquor … [but] I considered him able to do his duty. We compared the books together.” Bush might as readily have appeared for the defense.

  First Sergeant Wilson Buckney testified that on the parade ground Geddes was “a little unsteady” and told Lieutenant McMartin to take charge of the company because he was sick. This was during the latter part of the parade, and, according to Buckney, Geddes had performed his duties in the ordinary manner up to that time. Sergeant Buckney hadn’t seen him stagger or reel and said that if this had happened, he would have seen it.

  Corporal Richard Craige, of Geddes’s own Company F, was sitting on the porch of Company G quarters with a Private Truett when he saw Geddes leave the parade and seem on the verge of falling when he negotiated the porch step. “It occurred to me that he had been suddenly taken sick,” he testified. He noticed no “signs of liquor” about Geddes. Cross-examination provided an explanation for Geddes’s stumble: the step was unusually high and the condition of the floor at the place where he stepped was bad, “the end of one of the boards being broken.”

  Perhaps the most damaging prosecution witness to the prosecution’s own case was the post surgeon, who testified that he had treated Geddes for diarrhea. He refused to say that this condition could be a “natural outcome of excessive drinking,” although he admitted that whiskey was a laxative. He indicated that he had seen Geddes on September 1 and found him to be “perfectly sober.” More than that, he maintained that Geddes had not exhibited any “symptoms of intoxication” during the entire period relevant to the charge.

  On cross-examination the doctor was asked if in his experience he had ever known of cases where men had “reeled, staggered, and even fallen in ranks from other causes than drunkenness.” He replied “Certainly,” and went on to name a number of possible causes for such behavior, among them, ve
rtigo, epilepsy, apoplexy, and sunstroke. Even Second Lieutenant McMartin, who insisted that Geddes “was under the influence of liquor … to such a degree that it became necessary for him to leave the Parade,” supported Geddes’s account of having diarrhea. He had seen Geddes making repeated trips to the privy. William Ridell, a carpenter who had observed the September i dress parade, seemed like a particularly weak prosecution reed. When asked if Geddes appeared sober, he answered, “I could hardly tell, as I only remember to have met him once before.”

  Second Lieutenant Robert Loughborough was queried about possible prejudice against Geddes. He told the court that he had no personal prejudice against the accused but had expressed prejudice against him “on occasions.” The court requested clarification and was told, “I mean I expressed myself prejudiced against the conduct of the accused for which he was tried in San Antonio. I should have said I was prejudiced against his conduct but not against himself personally.” Other testimony substantiated that Loughborough had confessed prejudice against Geddes.

  Loughborough should be regarded as only the tip of the iceberg. After the San Antonio trial, the Twenty-fifth Infantry had become factionalized, with groups of committed pro- and anti-Geddes officers. Given such a scandalous case within a small social group, it was inevitable that the majority of officers would have an opinion and choose a side. When the entire military hierarchy, including the regimental commander and the head of the Department of Texas, had taken a public position against Geddes, it is hardly surprising that junior officers would be inclined in that direction. Geddes, who knew nothing of Colonel Andrews’s protest to Ord that Geddes was unfit for command, must nevertheless have known the regimental commander’s feelings about him. The defense tried without success to get a witness to admit that Andrews was out to get Geddes.4

  In a replay of the flagrant procedural violation that had caused Judge Advocate General Dunn to overturn the San Antonio trial, the Fort Randall prosecutor disallowed a number of defense witnesses. While every possible prosecution witness was heard, including the useless carpenter, two privates who were prepared to support the testimony of noncommissioned officers that Geddes had been sober were excused from testifying. The defense offered thirteen character witnesses, including Geddes’s commanding officer at Fort Meade, but the court declined to call any of them on the ground that they were not material witnesses. Yet since the testimony of the material witnesses was divided, some character testimony would have been pertinent.

  Worst of all, Geddes was forced to defend himself because his counsel, Olliver Shannon, was unavoidably absent for three days during the trial and the court had refused to grant the customary postponement.

  The determination to cashier him emanating from the highest quarters of the Army gave Geddes’s attempts to defend himself a pathetic dignity. He submitted the commendation he had received from Lieutenant Colonel W. R. Shafter in 1875 for the famous pursuit of Comanches that Geddes had led, along with other exhibits testifying to his excellence in performing his duty. In his written statement to the court Geddes retraced his military career, beginning with his enlistment in the Civil War at the age of fifteen and his distinguished war service. Then he stated, “The accused is too old a soldier to go upon the parade ground if he were staggering drunk; but would rather remain in his quarters and take the consequences of being absent from parade.” Finally, he asked, “In all candor, if intoxication was the cause of this unsteady motion at parade, would it not have been seen by some of these parties at some of these points before or afterwards”? The charges against him, he asserted, “were trumped up.”

  Geddes was speedily found guilty of drunkenness at dress parade and sentenced to dismissal from the Army. This time his sentence was approved all the way up and signed by President Hayes exactly a year after the President had disallowed the San Antonio conviction.

  Why did Judge Advocate General Dunn not call attention to the same procedural violations that he had pointed out in the earlier trial? Because of what he had learned in the interim about the captain’s personal life, he had been converted to Sherman’s view that the Army must rid itself of Geddes. He had not been convinced of Geddes’s guilt in the San Antonio trial. Nor had he been willing to recommend reprosecution on the dubious collection of hearsay and gossip that Baird had brought back from Texas. But he must have felt that there was enough truth in the stories to brand Geddes an undesirable: Geddes had been too close to scandal on too many occasions for an honorable man to overlook.

  Whether it played a part in his decision or not, Dunn now knew how determined Sherman was to dismiss Geddes. Had Dunn once again disagreed with his superior in rank by recommending that the captain’s court-martial be reversed, Sherman would have proceeded to the far more inflammatory matter of a new trial in Texas. At this point—right or wrong—the choice was between the Army and Geddes. Dunn had thought Geddes should resign, and when he didn’t, signing off on the Fort Randall court-martial in the best interest of the Army must have seemed to be the lesser evil.

  If Geddes was bitterly disappointed at the outcome of his 1880 trial, his counsel, Olliver Shannon, was simply astonished. “My experience before courts-martial, varied as it has been,” he wrote to his client, “prepared me very little for the extraordinary finding in your case … . The testimony of the prosecution carried a preponderance in your favor.” Concerning the denial of postponement during his absence, Shannon commented that “such adjournments are common, and their refusal, when unavoidable absence of counsel is the reason, are very rare. I don’t think the books or cases reported furnish such a case.”5

  Like many a dismissed officer, Andrew Geddes tried to obtain reinstatement through congressional action, an avenue that had worked repeatedly for the well-connected George Armes, but was usually not fruitful. In 1882, House Bill 3205 was introduced into the 47th Congress, first session, to reinstate Geddes, but it was not recommended by the Committee on Military Affairs. Geddes might have suspected but had no way of knowing what he was up against: the machinations of his enemies remained secret. In a letter to the Adjutant General, he wrote of the Baird Report:

  Were these reports true, I would forever hide my face from the sight of man. I ask you to please furnish me with a copy of Col. Baird’s report; and earnestly hope, in simple justice, that my request may be granted. In self-defense I consider that I should know with what I am charged.6

  This basic constitutional right was denied. A few days later, Geddes was informed by letter that the Baird Report was regarded as a privileged communication, and, accordingly, he would not be provided with a copy of it. The day before this letter was sent, someone in the Adjutant General’s office had pencilled a note on it: “The writer [Geddes] is so bad a man that it don’t seem worth while to have anything to do with him.”7

  In conjunction with Geddes’s reinstatement effort a group of seven officers at Fort Randall, including Colonel Andrews, wrote to the President on January 30, 1882, to say the following:

  Owing to his scandalously immoral conduct, only a small part of which is recorded in the proceedings before the General Court Martial published in General Court Martial Orders, No. 66, War Department Adjutant General’s Office, 1879, no officer in the Army could permit the ladies of his family to, in any way, recognize Andrew Geddes, and a majority of the officers would hold no other but necessary official relations with him.8

  Of the seven officers of the Twenty-fifth Infantry who signed this letter, Colonel Andrews had brought the Dakota court-martial charges against Geddes, and Captain Bentzini had testified against him at the trial.

  Geddes would never again be an active army officer. He went to work for the Department of Agriculture in Washington, where he rose to the position of chief clerk, the Department’s highest ranking bureaucrat.9 In this sedentary job, much of his time was spent in routine or low-level correspondence. To the editor of a publication called American Agriculturist, he wrote, “Replying to that portion of your letter of June 23rd
relating to the utilization of celery refuse, I would say that the Department of Agriculture has never investigated this subject.”10

  A number of letters Geddes penned addressed a perennial concern of government agencies, the desire of political figures to obtain jobs for friends or constituents. Geddes wrote to assure Chicago congressman Hugh Belknap that he was giving proper attention to Belknap’s “very earnest letter in behalf of Miss Johanna Quilty”: “I at once made inquiry and find that a large number of microscopists in Chicago have been furloughed on account of slack in the work there.”11 The letter goes on to reassure the congressman that every consideration will be given his applicant when hiring resumes. Most letters indicate that the Department of Agriculture already had its full complement and might in fact be discharging rather than hiring.ap Nevertheless, the petitioner’s candidate would be kept in mind if a vacancy occurred, and so forth. Although he wrote many such letters, Geddes always individualized the predictable message and couched it in sympathetic language.

  By 1891, this life was taking its toll. At the age of forty-seven, Geddes suffered from severe rheumatism, an enlarged heart, and “disease of the eyes.” He was six foot one, but at 197 pounds probably heavier than he had been as a young officers.12

  By 1899, when he was fifty-three, Geddes made still another attempt to remove the stain of dismissal from his record. For this effort he submitted a long letter to the Committee on Military Affairs. It began with the by now familiar reprise of his military career, then continued with an account of the events that resulted in dismissal: