Ungentlemanly Acts

by Louise Barnett

  The office had been established in 1862, and General Dunn had become the second Judge Advocate General after an apprenticeship as assistant judge advocate general and a career as a congressman. His picture reveals an earnest countenance; his review of the Geddes trial is a long and thoughtful document.

  First of all, General Dunn observed, the charges rested almost entirely on the testimony of Lieutenant Orleman and his daughter, whereas the testimony of Captain Geddes in defense was “supported by that of a considerable number of witnesses.”2 Such an imbalance in the two sides would not necessarily be relevant to guilt or innocence, but Dunn followed up this observation with his own doubts about the Orlemans’ testimony. The notes from Lillie to Geddes had struck him as an honest outpouring of feeling, while her later recantation rang false. Dunn pointed to a number of passages in the notes that Lillie had not adequately explained. He concluded that “without a better explanation of the letters in question than that given by Miss Orleman in the replies quoted, they retain unaltered their fatal significance.”

  The trial materials simply did not persuade Dunn that Geddes would have invented the charge of incest

  of all others within his reach, and … confront[ed] Lieutenant Orleman and his daughter with such a charge, he knowing the same to be false. A single instance of harsh reprimand from a father to his daughter, to whom he never before uttered a harsh word, cannot be accepted as a sufficient occasion for a subordinate officer to denounce the offender to his Post Commander.ai Nor can a solitary rebuke privately administered by that kind father be rightly designated as a “secret,” the father was trying to keep, an offense which the community would shun him for if known, and on account of which he talks of taking his life if exposed. An indignant father does not go crazy when detected in privately scolding an erring daughter. Nor does that daughter for such a trivial cause iterate and reiterate her appeals to the discoverer to “swear” never to divulge it.

  Dunn found Orleman’s testimony suspiciously similar to that of his daughter: it was “nearly if not exactly similar, word for word, with Miss Orleman’s.” He had in mind a particular passage:

  Orleman: I told my daughter that Captain Geddes had accused me of being too intimate with her and of having had crimi nal intercourse with her. She answered, “Papa, I do not know what criminal intercourse is.” Captain Geddes then spoke up and said, “Miss Lillie, you know your father is not treating you right, is that not so?”

  Lillie: [Quoting her father] “Lillie, Captain Geddes has just accused me of being too intimate and of having had criminal intercourse with you.” I then answered my father that I did not know what criminal intercourse meant. Captain Geddes sat opposite me and said, “Miss Lillie, you know that your father is not treating you right.”

  Like the members of the court, Dunn was fascinated and preoccupied with the testimony on Lillie Orleman’s virginity. Unlike the court, however, the Judge Advocate General was skeptical. Referring only to the actual examination of Lillie, he pronounced the medical testimony favorable to her innocence, “so far as it goes.” But he had further thoughts:

  It seems not unreasonable to suggest that the virginal appearance to which Dr. Taylor testified, and which seems to have greatly influenced the Court, may be due to a deliberate care and moderation exhibited by the father of the girl in the gratification of his appetites, or to some unnatural act of coition not involving penetration, with the express purpose of preventing those physical changes which as a rule, it would seem, take place when no precautions are deemed necessary and nature is unchecked. This suggestion, for which some slight foundation may be found in Cap. Geddes’ testimony, would seem to reconcile in a large measure the difficulties existing in the case, while it does not diminish in any degree the criminality of the act.

  At the end of his review Dunn appended a long note on an article that had come to his attention only after his report was completed. Dr. T. Gaillard Thomas had gathered up some “interesting cases” and published them in the New York Journal of Medicine. These cases, which Dunn summarized in detail, raised issues about virginity much like those that had claimed so much of the court’s attention:

  Parent Duchatelet in his celebrated work on prostitution, tells of public prostitutes who had for years followed their degrading profession in the streets of Paris, with the hymen so perfect as to leave even the most acute and experienced examiner in doubt as to their chastity.3

  Prostitutes with perfect hymens! Such extreme cases titillated and baffled the male desire to know and control the sexuality of women—and, much like incest itself, presented a situation that Victorian American society preferred not to confront. The black-and-white nature of Captain Patterson’s assertion that a medical examination finding Lillie a virgin would demolish the charge of incest was a more comfortable state of affairs.

  Turning to the charge that Geddes had accused Orleman of incest in order to abduct Lillie, Dunn saw the sequence in reverse: “It was necessary to prove him a seducer in order to furnish a motive for his desire to abduct, just as his determination to abduct was the suggested motive for his accusation of incest against her father.” But Geddes’s notes to Lillie were not “strong enough” to prove the motive of seduction, and he had been acquitted of the charge of attempted abduction.

  Just as he rejected the prosecution’s portrayal of Geddes as a seducer, Dunn also rejected its portrayal of Orleman as an outraged father:

  It does not appear that Lt. Orleman’s conduct was in any sense that of a man of honor, who, conscious of the falsity of the infamous charge, is accused in the presence of an innocent daughter of the shameful crime of incest. He listens in silence to the foul accusation; shows his accuser to the door; visits him fifteen minutes afterwards; borrows money of him; repeatedly asks him to his house; renews his request, after the charge of incest has been made, to serve as his daughter’s escort to her home; sends down her trunk that there may be no delay, and ends by asking him to pay her fare. Such conduct as this … strengthens greatly, in my judgment, the inferences I have been compelled to draw from the falsehoods with which his testimony appears to be studded. A father who finds a libertine pressing his innocent daughter’s knees between his own does not deliberately give her insulter every opportunity to repeat his outrage. Yet this is what, according to his own evidence, Lt. Orleman did … . The story is not credible; and with this falsehood, if it be a falsehood, at the opening of his tale, his entire testimony tumbles to the ground.

  Dunn imagined that if Orleman had actually discovered Geddes pressing his daughter’s legs between his own, at the very least he would have insisted on a different seating arrangement on the trip back to Fort Stockton, placing himself, rather than his daughter, opposite the libidinous captain.

  Dunn had similar doubts about Lillie’s own description of her conduct with Geddes: “I have found it hard indeed to reconcile such conduct as this with the intuitive modesty of a pure and virgin nature.” These words indicate that, like most Americans, he shared the Victorian American view of maidenly innocence. He simply did not find that ideal embodied in Lillie Orleman. Lieutenant Bigelow, when faced with a similar contradiction, had continued to believe in Lillie’s innocence. As her friend, and a despiser of Geddes, he lacked Dunn’s objectivity.

  The court had believed the Orlemans too readily, and in Dunn’s opinion it had disregarded the testimony of a large number of defense witnesses

  of whom no attempt was made to impeach and among whom were several officers of the accused’s own regiment, for that of two parties [the Orlemans], each of whom is interested beyond all others in the conviction of the accused, and whose statements seem to me to be not only incredible in themselves, but in numberless points to be contradicted by irrefragable proof. To me it seems more reasonable to hold that Lt. Orleman is unworthy of belief, and that he has forced his unhappy daughter to sacrifice the truth in his defense.

  Dunn believed that there was sufficient proof that the statements made by Geddes
in his deposition were neither malicious nor untrue, and that the deposition to General Ord should have been treated as a privileged communication.

  On the matter of witnesses, limiting the number of character witnesses for the defense to two must “be acknowledged to have been needlessly harsh and unjust, and highly injurious to the accused.” Dunn referred to a favorable letter from C. K. Breneman, a San Antonio lawyer, to the Honorable W. B. Allison, “in which the writer speaks of the character of Capt. Geddes from personal knowledge in the strongest terms.” As the trial drew to its close, Geddes had also received a letter of support signed “Gray” (Captain C. A. Gray of the Twenty-fifth Infantry) accompanying a petition dated September 7, 1879:

  We the undersigned Officers of the Twenty-Fifth Regiment of Infantry and citizens of Fort Davis, Texas, certify that we have had an acquaintance of long standing with Captain Andrew Geddes, Twenty-Fifth Infantry, extending in some cases over a period of from seven to twelve years; that we are well acquainted with his character both as an Officer and a gentleman; that we have always looked upon him as a man of undoubted integrity and ability, and an officer whose services did honor to himself and reflected credit on the Twenty-Fifth Infantry.

  Among other signatories were two men of local reputation: G. M. Frazer, the County Judge of Pecos County; and Francis Rooney, an early settler and now county commissioner.

  Of other witnesses the court had refused to call for Geddes, Dunn singled out for mention the most flagrant instance, that of Private Sweat, who had taken care of Lieutenant Orleman’s quarters. Dunn could find no reason for the court’s refusal to summon this witness: “The application was in proper form and sworn to by the accused.”

  The court may have suppressed important witnesses, but Dunn felt he had more than enough evidence to reach the conclusion that the outcome of the Geddes trial was a miscarriage of justice. He wrote that in recommending disapproval of the conviction and sentence he had been “necessarily governed by a variety of considerations outside of the many irreconcilable discrepancies in the testimony offered to sustain the charges”:

  The first of these is—and to me it seems entitled to much weight—the relative degree of temptation to perjury [to] which the accuser and the accused are respectively exposed. On the one hand, while it may be admitted that Capt. Geddes’ temptation to forswear himself is great, it cannot be said to be so manifestly overpowering as, almost of necessity, to lead him to see in perjury a venial mode of saving himself from the consequences of a conviction. The accused is shown to have applied for certain witnesses to his character for veracity, who were refused by the court because the judge advocate admitted that their testimony would be favorable to the accused, and that they would all testify that his reputation for veracity was good, and that they would believe him under oath.4

  Since these officers were all in the Twenty-fifth Infantry, it could be assumed that they were “acquainted in a greater or less degree of intimacy with the accused.”

  Wielding Ockham’s razor once again, Dunn could find insufficient reason for Geddes to lie, whereas “to one accused of incest, who knows the accusation to be true, the temptation to rebut such a charge even by perjury must needs be so great as with the vast majority of men to be irresistible.”

  The Judge Advocate General’s exceptionally detailed review of the Geddes court-martial was forwarded by Secretary of War George McCrary to President Hayes.

  The man who had the power to change the verdict of Andrew Geddes’s court-martial had received the Republican Party’s nomination in 1876, in the aftermath of the Grant Administration’s corruption scandals, because he was considered to be a man “whose very name is … conclusive evidence of the most uncompromising determination of the American people to make this a pure government once more.”5 But he had won the disputed election by electoral college politicking. He was, in short, a man of principle and politics. Although, as President, Hayes regarded ending Reconstruction as his first order of business, what he thought of as his “great work” was reforming the civil service.6 It was a laudable aim of great consequence to government but less than inspiring, reflective of Hayes himself. As a candidate for the presidency, he had announced that he would run for only one term. As that term drew to an end, his party did not attempt to alter his decision.

  Hayes was consistently portrayed in the press as an austere reformer whose wife, a teetotaler, brought Puritanism to the social life of the White House. Still, he had a soft spot for the military. As a young man he had burned to go to war against Mexico but was secretly thwarted by an uncle. Already forty at the beginning of the Civil War, he served with distinction, beginning as a major and finishing the war as a brevet major general. In spite of being wounded five times, once seriously, he looked back on 1861—65 as the best four years of his life. From the battlefield he had expressed his feeling with the simple words, “It is living.” In 1861, not long into the war, Hayes was already anticipating nostalgia. “These marches and campaigns in the hills of western Virginia,” he wrote to his wife, Lucy, “will always be among the pleasantest things I can remember.”7

  This attitude may have been responsible for Hayes’s leniency as President in setting aside the deliberations of army courts-martial. During his term he mitigated forty-one out of sixty sentences of officers who had been found guilty of “drunkenness on duty, misuse of public property, selling pay accounts to different individuals, conduct unbecoming an officer and gentleman too gross, vulgar and profane for republication, of cruelty to enlisted men,” and other offenses. In the critical words of the New York Herald, “Mr. Hayes might justly be called the promoter of intemperance in the Army and the friend and defender of wrongdoers.”8

  The charge described as “too gross, vulgar, and profane for republication” referred to the Geddes trial. On December 3, 1879, President Hayes followed the Judge Advocate General’s recommendation to disallow the verdict and sentence: Andrew Geddes would be released from prison and restored to his unit.

  Read today in conjunction with the trial transcript, Dunn’s report is a model of sense and balance. Errors of procedure attributable to prejudice against the defendant were notable in the court-martial, as Dunn rightly pointed out, and on that basis alone, the trial decision merited reversal. About the presence of the obviously prejudiced Patterson on the court, the Judge Advocate General stated that Patterson should have been removed.

  But the Judge Advocate General was not without his own prejudices. He seemed to regard character testimony as compelling when it came from fellow officers, the group most likely to close ranks around one of their own. Speculating on the relative probability of a disposition to commit perjury is also questionable. Simply because Orleman had a stronger motive to lie, or had more at stake than Geddes, did not automatically mean that he had lied and Geddes had not. The possible loss of a valued career could well have been sufficient motive for the captain to commit perjury, even though it appears a less compelling motive than being accused of a heinous act. Both men, it might be said, had motive enough to lie.

  Dunn is most persuasive in his critique of the trial when he analyzes the evidence itself. The desperate notes that Lillie sent Geddes do have the ring of truth—and they were never adequately explained by the prosecution. On the contrary: the prosecution’s effort to account for them was so weak that it enhanced the letters’ credibility. Dunn found the Orlemans’ statements “incredible in themselves,” and beyond that “in numberless points to be contradicted by irrefragable proof.” His meticulous, dispassionate review stands as an example of the process at its best.

  There were other matters not addressed by Dunn. In finding Andrew Geddes guilty except for the attempt to abduct Lillie Orleman, the court failed to realize that it had entirely pulled the rug out from under the other Orleman charges. It accepted what was patently clear from testimony, that the little world of Fort Stockton had known that Lieutenant Orleman’s daughter was taking the stage in the company of Captain Geddes, not
as a secret project but as a convenience approved by her father. But if Geddes had no need to abduct Lillie, or to gain her affection—since she had admitted an infatuation with him—he had no motive to charge Orleman with incest. According to Orleman, Geddes had brandished the accusation as a club to coerce the reluctant father into allowing Lillie to leave with him. If there was no need for such coercion, where was Geddes’s motive to level such a scandalous charge?

  This was only one of the inconsistencies in the Orlemans’ story. Lillie’s testimony was extremely weak. For the most compelling evidence, her notes to Geddes, she had only implausible explanations, but she was saved by the mores of the times from a blistering cross-examination that might have completely destroyed her credibility. Whenever she was asked an uncomfortable question, a member of the court was sure to object, and the objection would invariably be sustained.9 Gallantry toward women was part of the code of conduct of an officer and a gentleman, not to be suspended for a judicial procedure. A young woman like Lillie who appeared before a group of male officers in such a vulnerable posture must have brought out the court’s protective instincts.

  The inexperienced Paschal had more than one moment of frustration as he was repeatedly prevented from questioning Lillie fully. After obtaining her admission that she had allowed Geddes to press her knees on the trip to Fort Davis, Paschal tried to elicit her own assessment of what was going on. When he posed the question, she readily agreed with him that the conduct she had accepted was “very ungentlemanly.” He tried to follow up on this.