Ungentlemanly Acts: The Army's Notorious Incest Trial - Hardcover

Barnett, Louise K.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0809073978 ISBN 13: 9780809073979

Publisher: Hill & Wang Pub, 2000

Synopsis

A fascinating chronicle of an 1879 Texas courtmartial, in which Captain Andrew Geddes was tried and convicted for accusing a fellow officer of committing incest, offers revealing insights into attitudes toward sex, parental rights, and privacy in the postCivil War era.

About this title

About the Author

Louise Barnett, professor of English at Rutgers University, is the author, most recently, of Touched by Fire: The Life, Death, and Mythic Afterlife of George Armstrong Custer. She lives in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

Reviews

How do you accuse someone of an unspeakable sin? In post-Civil War America, you did not, if you were smart, for speaking of an unspeakable sin was unpardonable. In 1879, in west Texas, Captain Andrew Geddes accused a fellow officer, Louis Orleman, of having incestuous relations with his (Orleman's) daughter. Orleman countercharged that Geddes had seduced his daughter and planned to abduct her, and that the incest charge was merely an attempt to deflect responsibility from his own devious actions. The result was a court-martial of Geddes; no person in a position of authority seriously considered the possibility that Orleman could be guilty of incest, for Americans of the time, according to Barnett, "preferred to believe--regardless of evidence--that it [incest] simply did not occur...." Barnett, a professor of English at Rutgers, carefully chronicles the trial. Her thesis is that while Geddes was no saint, his trial was a mockery of justice and the unprosecuted charges against Orleman probably contained more truth than those pressed against Geddes. A guilty verdict was set aside by the army's highest judicial officer, the judge advocate general, but the continued hostility toward Geddes within the army led to his ultimate dismissal. The greatest strength of this volume is the way events are placed within historical and cultural context. A real sense of army life on the frontier and how the larger values of society shaped the proceedings are skillfully woven into the narrative. Through a relatively unknown incident, Barnett presents a morality play showcasing late-19th-century social values that have evolved but are still in effect. 24 b&w photos not seen by PW. (Feb.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Rutgers English professor Barnett (Touched By Fire, 1996), an artfully reconstructed chronicle of a notorious US Army incest-accusation trial that sheds remarkable clarity upon the emerging military and moral climate of the post-Reconstruction Southwest. In 1879, Capt. Andrew Geddes of the Armys Department of Texas filed a complaint against Lt. Louis Orleman, his neighboring officer at remote Fort Stockton, alleging criminal intercourse between the officer and his daughter, Lillie. The Army moved swiftlyby trying Geddes, ostensibly on Orlemans countercharge of attempted seduction of Lillie, but evidently more to punish Geddess violation of both Victorian morality and military frontier codes of silent manliness. Barnett recreates the trial, its aftermath, and the harsh, complex social environment of Fort Stockton (which won notoriety for these events and for related violence and corruption), emphasizing the dramatic ambiguities and human failings wrought in the crucible of the militarized Texas frontier. For example, though the author finds Geddess account plausible and Orlemans less so (as did the militarys appellate review, overturning Geddess conviction), she explores how Geddess reputation as a seamy lothario provoked top generals Ord and Sherman essentially to order an otherwise exemplary soldiers destruction. And she sets the narrative in a generous context of contemporaneous events, ranging from the 1869 H.B. StoweLord Byron incest scandal to the depredations of 1870s Texasrife with sliding scales of hatred among Mexicans, African-American soldiers whod been refused billets nearer civilization, white settlers, and the displaced, despised, and still-threatening Comanche and other tribesreminiscent of Cormac McCarthys Blood Meridian. Such detail evokes the paranoia, clannishness, and artificial moralities that, focused by the trial, would long remain in American military and civic life. Barnett brings intellectual fervor to potentially dry material, particularly in her portrait of the long-suffering Lillie Orleman, offering subtle interpretations of gender and racial volatility and finding startling metaphors within this singularly perverse interlude in the dissipated postCivil War military. (24 b&w photos) -- Copyright ©2000, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Barnett (English, Rutgers; Touched by Fire) examines the army's court-martial of Captain Andrew Geddes and contemporary novels such as Infelice to illuminate late 19th-century American thought on incest. Her book stages the conflict that sent Geddes to trial: he had accused fellow officer Louis Orleman of incest with his teenage daughter, Lillie; but Orleman accused Geddes of attempting to seduce and abduct Lillie. Barnett argues that the army court-martialed Geddes largely because public scrutiny of incest uncomfortably forced Americans to question their views of family, sexuality, and gender roles. She also places the trial in the context of life on a western Texas military fort staffed mainly by black soldiers surrounded by white civilians, Mexican Americans, and Native Americans. This is an absorbing, well-documented book, although more discussion of 19th-century laws and attitudes about incest might have enriched it. Recommended for public and academic libraries with military, gender, or American West history collections.
-Charles L. Lumpkins, Pennsylvania State Univ., State College
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Hill & Wang Pub
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0809073978
• ISBN 13: 9780809073979
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 287