Ungentlemanly Acts: The Army's Notorious Incest Trial

by Louise Barnett

  Historically, in the European tradition incest was a matter for ecclesiastical courts, a sin rather than a crime. This attitude on the part of the state conformed both to the conception of patriarchy that had evolved in Western societies and to the Biblical tradition in which the father’s power over the child is absolute. Modern law has inexorably reduced this power: in our society today a man who intended to sacrifice his child because God told him to do so would be treated for mental illness rather than lauded for religious devotion. And slowly but surely, remedies have come into being for groups formerly denied redress by law—among them, women and children.

  Where the Bible speaks explicitly on the subject of sexual relations, Leviticus 18, it addresses men throughout as those who control sexual relations. Only once is a woman mentioned as an agent, although here, too, the admonition is delivered to men as those who are responsible for the sexual behavior of women: “Neither shall any woman stand before a beast to lie down thereto.”6 The chapter first issues a general prohibition against a man’s approach “to any that is near of kin to him,” and then goes on to proscribe a large number of relationships, many of which—like those by marriage—are not blood kin, but which in terms of family harmony it seems sensible to rule sexually out of bounds:

  Thou shalt not uncover the nakedness of thy daughter in law: she is thy son’s wife; thou shalt not uncover her nakedness.

  Thou shalt not uncover the nakedness of thy brother’s wife: it is thy brother’s nakedness.7

  To ensure communal harmony, “thy neighbor’s wife” is also forbidden, as is a male partner or an animal. Strikingly absent from the long and intricate list of forbidden sexual partners is a man’s daughter.

  Dr. Judith Herman conjectures that this omission speaks to the assumption that female sexuality is a male possession. A man is forbidden to have sex with his daughter-in-law because she belongs to his son and with his brother’s wife because she belongs to his brother. But the unmarried daughter “belongs to the father alone. Though the incest taboo forbids him to make sexual use of his daughter, no particular man’s rights are offended, should the father choose to disregard this rule.” No man, she concludes, “is in a position to challenge a father’s power over his daughters.”8

  Incest has always tended to be deeply buried within the family, more hidden than other sexual relationships and other familial matters of ecclesiastical concern such as marrying outside the faith. How seriously or how often a young woman’s surrogate father, the church, was willing to step in and challenge a father’s power over her is far from clear, but the notorious case of Beatrice Cenci at the end of the sixteenth century would not have offered much hope to incest victims of an earlier age. Count Francesco Cenci was archetypal in his evil, a Roman noble with a long record of acts of violence and two imprisonments—one for blasphemy, the other for sodomy.9 Yet when his abused daughter conspired with other members of her family to kill him, the Pope was more concerned about the challenge to paternal authority than the crime that provoked the murder. The twenty-two-year-old Beatrice was tortured to extract a confession, tried, and condemned to death. She was beheaded.10

  Sigmund Freud, who not long after the Geddes case called the attention of Western culture to the relationship between sexual behavior and psychology, originally believed his female patients who accused their fathers of incest. He later abandoned the idea to the extent that in 1916 he made an emphatic blanket assertion about girls who identified their fathers as seducers: “There can be no doubt either of the imaginary nature of the accusation or of the motive that has led to it.”11

  The state’s record has not been notably better. A standard legal reference book, John Henry Wigmore’s Evidence in Trials at Common Law, advances the premise that women and girls are likely to lie in making sexual accusations.12 First published in 1904, Evidence has had at least eighteen editions and is still used today in spite of its extreme bias. Female complainants, Wigmore writes, should automatically undergo psychiatric evaluation, a process that he makes clear will treat them with hostility:

  Modern psychiatrists have amply studied the behavior of errant young girls and women coming before the courts in all sorts of cases. Their psychic complexes are multifarious, distorted partly by inherent defects, partly by diseased derangements or abnormal instincts, partly by bad social environment, partly by temporary physiological or emotional conditions. One form taken by these complexes is that of contriving false charges of sexual offenses against men.13 [my emphasis]

  As Dr. Herman observes, in support of his position Wigmore was willing to do some lying himself:

  Where … published case reports suggested the possibility of real sexual abuse, Wigmore, like Freud, falsified or omitted the evidence. For example, in his discussion of incest, Wigmore cited case reports of two girls, ages seven and nine, who accused their fathers of sexual assault. In both cases, the original clinical reports documented the fact that the children had vaginal infections … . This and other corroborating evidence was systematically omitted in Wigmore’s presentation, and the cases were discussed as examples of pathological lying in children.14

  Herman concludes, somberly, that Wigmore’s supposedly fact-based views “remained unchallenged for decades in the legal literature, and still retain great prestige and influence in the courtroom.”15

  Assistant Inspector General Absalom Baird, charged by the General of the Army with investigating Captain Geddes after his first conviction was overturned, was akin to Wigmore in seeing such matters through a veil of prejudice that all but ruled out the possibility of incest. Like most people of his time and much later, he would have been shocked and horrified to learn that very young children can be victims of parental sexual abuse or that, as one researcher wrote in 1990, “among women, incest is so common as to be epidemic.”16 This was not knowledge that society was eager to embrace since it placed corruption in the bosom of the primary social unit, the family, and identified the agent of this corruption as the father.

  Everything conspires to deny credibility to an accusation of incest. Since it is a family crime, it exists within the private sphere where witnesses are rare. Family members who know have strong motives to conceal this quintessentially guilty knowledge: both their own implication and the scandal that would descend on guilty and innocent alike continue to be powerful inducements to silence, as well as the likely dissolution of the family that would follow such exposure and its attendant economic upheaval.

  In the discussion of a bill to protect children from parental cruelty, one English legislator acknowledged that the evils addressed were “enormous and indisputable,” but, he went on to say, “they are of so private, internal, and domestic a character as to be beyond the reach of legislation.”17 As late as 1971, Robert Roberts wrote of the slum neighborhood in which he grew up that everyone knew what houses harbored incestuous relationships, “but I don’t recall a single prosecution: strict public silence saved the miscreants from the rigours of the laws.”18

  Incest was and remains such a deep-seated and universal taboo that the majority of Andrew Geddes’s countrymen preferred to believe—regardless of evidence—that it simply did not occur, or if it did occur, it occurred elsewhere, perhaps among uncivilized peoples on the other side of the globe or the ignored underclass of urban ghettos, those beings that so many native-born Americans found so different from themselves. Throughout the nineteenth century researchers were documenting “the prevalence of incest among the poor,” but neither the topic nor the word ever appeared in the press.19

  Such things happened, it was beginning to be said, only among the urban underclass, where an entire family might occupy only one room. Orleman and his daughter sharing a bedroom might have seemed strange to middle-class Americans of 1879, but it would not have suggested a comparison with the crowded conditions of city tenements. The class difference was too overwhelming: Orleman was an army officer, and his daughter was convent educated, a girl who read literature and played the pi
ano.

  Society seemed to collude with the guilty in agreeing that the public was better off not knowing: the word pollution had been used by more than one critic to characterize Harriet Beecher Stowe’s accusation of Lord Byron. In the late nineteenth century, a well-bred person would never entertain ideas about incest since, given the unlikelihood of its actually taking place, any such thought would indicate a morbid imagination.20

  While there is no one type of incestuous father, the clinical studies that have been ongoing since the 1950s have suggested some characteristics that could readily apply to Henry Louis Orleman. A career military officer, born in Germany, he might well have been an authoritarian patriarch: the father who rules his family with an iron hand is a staple of incest literature.21 Such fathers rarely have to coerce their daughters physically because the daughters are cowed and anxious to begin with. They fear the father’s desertion of the family and its consequences, for which they would feel responsible if they opposed their father’s wishes or published his advances.

  One researcher who studied six military men who were incestuous fathers even concluded that incest was a strategy on the victim’s part to preserve a family threatened by dissolution.22 Lillie had confided in Geddes, he said, that her father had made various threats—among them, violence to himself and to her and desertion of the family. Lillie was also the oldest daughter, a typical attribute of incest victims.23 Another consequence she feared—rightly, as modern investigators have also confirmed—was her father’s turning to his next youngest daughter for sexual gratification .24

  Researchers have noted, incidentally, that incestuous families have a “surprisingly large number of children.”25 Orleman, as Lillie confessed, had difficulty supporting his family of eight children, but as the family provider, he nevertheless might have demanded more attention and care than the mother of such a large brood could give him. A sense of being neglected by their wives is common among incestuous fathers. Mothers in these families appear to be “overburdened, and unable to protect their daughters or exert a restraining influence on their husbands.”26 This might be an accurate description of Mrs. Orleman since Lillie told Geddes that her mother knew, but that whenever she and her mother threatened to expose her father, he threatened in turn to abandon the family. Mrs. Orleman was also a native of Germany; thus she, too, had been acculturated into a strong form of patriarchy.

  Orleman had physically isolated Lillie from her mother and younger siblings by taking her with him to various army postings while the family remained elsewhere. This in itself would have been frowned upon by late-nineteenth-century advice books for mothers, which stressed the need for maternal supervision during adolescence.27 Medical authorities of the time also emphasized the formative importance of this period in a girl’s life.28

  In all outward respects, as a number of witnesses testified, the Orleman family was perfectly conventional. In our own time, when far more bureaucratic entities exist to channel societal scrutiny than existed in nineteenth-century Texas, an incestuous family still seems like any other family from the outside: for the most part the family is unknown to “mental health services, social agencies, or the police.”29 The father who terrorizes within the family circle may seem “sympathetic, even admirable” to outsiders. 30 Captain Noel Lustig’s study of the six military men who committed incest describes them as “strongly motivated to maintain a facade of role competence as the family patriarch in the eyes of society.”31 They succeeded in this goal. Of one subject, who was brought to trial for allegedly raping his eight-year-old daughter, Lustig writes that “during the trial his associates rose to his defense and character witnesses were uniformly and emphatically flattering despite the character of his alleged crime.”32 This held true for Orleman. His army file was full of letters that professed him to be “a gentleman in every respect, and a very efficient and capable officer.”33

  Baird’s report refers to Orleman as “a man of little force or energy of character and lacking in bodily strength,” a description obtained from people Baird interviewed rather than firsthand.34 Just as Clous had suggested in the trial that a partially paralyzed man could not have been responsible for the “scuffling” Michael Houston said he heard, so Baird’s characterization was meant to establish that Orleman did not have the physical or mental qualities to commit incest. Present-day research suggests just the opposite, that passivity and a feeling of inadequacy are often found in incestuous fathers.35 Such men may be weak in their relations with the outside world while maintaining patriarchal dominance within the family. Orleman had reasons to feel inadequate in the late 1870s: he had a large family that drained his resources and no hope of earning more because of the scarcity of opportunities for promotion in the frontier army; with the diminishing of the Indian threat, the possibility of military glory receded, and in the immediate past Orleman had been plagued by a persistent ailment that had reduced his vision and incapacitated him for a year. He was on the verge of retiring from active duty for reasons of health.

  Lillie had told Geddes that her father’s sexual demands were constant, even during her “sickness”: “She told me that whenever he was with her it seemed impossible for him to let her alone.” On the strength of this particular, Orleman may have belonged to that subgroup of incestuous fathers who are hypersexual.36 As a man of only thirty-eight in 1879, he was still likely to have had a vigorous sexual appetite, but he was separated from his wife for long periods of time.

  Lillie’s desperate attempts to end the incestuous relationship with her father are also in keeping with what clinicians have discovered. In Herman’s study no such relationship was ended by the father.37

  One aspect of Orleman’s treatment of his daughter seems at first glance unusual. Whereas daughters involved in incestuous relationships in our society are often made to feel special by their fathers and are wooed with presents and privileges, Orleman apparently employed little ceremony with Lillie. In the conversation allegedly overheard by Michael Houston, when Lillie upbraided her father for using her like a woman of the street rather than a daughter, Orleman appeared unmoved. Geddes reported that Lillie had told him that her father had often compared sleeping with her to sleeping with a side of bacon, “her father saying to her that he would as soon sleep with a side of bacon with a hole in it as with her.” This coarse remark is of a piece with his commenting on the size of her leg in front of Friedlander and with the rest of the overheard conversation in which Orleman used crude language to assail Lillie about other men.

  Such behavior could have been more of the same patriarchal attitude of female commodification that made it possible for Orleman to commit incest in the first place. It might also have reflected a particular hostility toward women. Some clinical studies have found that incestuous fathers come from a background of childhood maternal abandonment or neglect with a consequent negative reaction that in adult life settles first upon the wife and then upon the daughter.38

  Had Andrew Geddes followed the Stowe-Byron scandal of 1869–70, he might have concluded, ominously for his own case, that the Anglo-American world regarded publicity about incest as worse than the crime itself. The most extreme view of that case expressed disbelief that incest had been committed at all and condemned both Lady Byron and Harriet Beecher Stowe for their parts in disseminating such a monstrous charge.

  Although countless books and articles have now been written about it, and all states have statutes against it, at the beginning of a new millennium incest still remains relatively unpunished, not because penalties do not exist but because victims often refuse to testify, or the crime is uncovered long after it has been committed. In 1879, Lieutenant Orleman was vindicated by the military judicial system and remained a member of the Army in good standing. His accuser’s career and reputation were irrevocably ruined.

  Officers were by definition gentlemen, a concept that yoked together a buried class marker and an overt ideal of behavior. The gentleman supposedly followed the code of behavior o
f the “gently born,” but beneath the accretion of class lay a principle of gender. A man behaved in a certain way, summed up by the popular nineteenth-century adjective manly. When Judge Advocate Clous accused stage driver Michael Houston of receiving money for his testimony, Houston responded in language that invoked this principle: “I am not that kind of a man, to be bribed by Mr. Friedlander or any other man.” At the other end of the scale, when Lillie told Geddes that she feared her father would kill her and himself, Geddes replied, “He is not that kind of a man—a man that would act towards his own daughter as he has done towards you has not the courage or manliness enough to shoot anybody.”

  The trial of Andrew Geddes centered on the question of who was guilty of ungentlemanly acts: was Geddes a would-be seducer and abductor of a fellow officer’s daughter or was that officer an incestuous father? The court answered the question one way; history, I believe, must render another judgment. It must also cast a colder eye on the concept of the officer and gentleman than the military writer who identified it with all the virtues—generosity, unselfishness, works of chivalry. As officers and gentlemen, one man sexually abused his daughter, another seduced other men’s wives, and many others closed their minds to evidence and reason. General Sherman, the Army’s most powerful officer and gentleman, threw aside the scrupulous review of his institution’s highest judge in order to pursue Geddes relentlessly. Sherman’s example belies his ringing defense of the Constitution, which serves as this book’s epigraph, and reminds us that any governing document or code of justice is only as good as the human beings who administer it.