Book Review

In 1879, Captain Andrew Geddes underwent a court-martial on two counts of conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman, and one count of libel. Geddes was accused of attempting to abduct and seduce Lillie Orleman, the eighteen-year-old daughter of a fellow officer, First Lieutenant Louis H. Orleman, and of defaming Orleman by accusing him of an incestuous relationship with Lillie. Geddes, in defending himself, insisted that he only made his charge of incest public when he heard Orleman was planning to accuse him of improprieties with Lillie. The army never investigated Orleman's relationship with his daughter and instead indicted Geddes for acts declared "not fit to be specified" (3). Although the court-martial found Geddes guilty, superior officers overturned the verdict. Geddes was not, however, out of the woods. General William T. Sherman took it upon himself to order further investigation of Geddes in an attempt to uncover some reason to drum Geddes out of the army. Though Sherman attempted to build a case around Geddes's affair with another officer's wife, he was unsuccessful. Geddes was finally expelled from the army in 1882 on charges of being drunk while on duty.	1
Louise Barnett's retelling of this tale transports the reader to the world of an isolated army outpost. She recounts the gritty life army officers and their families faced on the Texas frontier, reconstructs from testimony the construction and layout of Fort Stockton, and analyzes the complicated relationships between various officers and their friends and families. She also examines the prurient testimony at Geddes's trial, including several doctors' opinions about the physical manifestations of female virginity and an analysis of the romance novel Geddes allegedly loaned to Lillie Orleman. This case is important, Barnett argues, because it illuminates nineteenth-century attitudes regarding social and sexual relationships and, more importantly, documents Victorian Americans' unwillingness to confront the taboo of incest. As a whole, Barnett offers a compelling narrative of an interesting case and supplements the specific events of the case with detailed background information about the participants, the setting, and the legal and social context in which it occurred.	2
In recounting the details of the trial, Barnett is quite successful. Her book, however, has flaws. For instance, Barnett interprets the relationship between Orleman and his daughter using modern psychological concepts regarding the victims and perpetrators of incest. While it is possible that the psychosocial dynamics of incest have remained constant for more than one hundred years, it is equally likely that Victorian mores construed incest and its effects in ways unrecognizable to a modern therapist. Similarly, Barnett muses about the motivations of participants in ways that are difficult to document. For example, she argues that part of General Sherman's zeal to oust Geddes from the army may have stemmed from the general's ambivalence about the propriety of his own intimate relationship with a younger woman he initially treated as a daughter. Perhaps, but how could we ever know? Barnett, a professor of English, is comfortable with such speculation; this reviewer, a historian, Finds it unsubstantiated and problematic.	3
Barnett's book also founders on the problem of using a single case to illuminate more general social issues. The case is significant, Barnett states, because the failure of the army to try Orleman for incest, despite what she believes is compelling evidence of his guilt, demonstrates the existence of a code of silence surrounding incest. Substantiating Orleman's accusations against Geddes preserved nineteenth-century Americans' "idea of fatherhood as beneficent and incest as both unspeakable and unimaginable" (225). One army trial, supplemented by a discussion of the public's response to Harriet Beecher Stowe's Lady Byron Vindicated (in which Beecher recounted Byron's incestuous relationship with his half-sister), is a slender thread on which to suspend such a sweeping, and perhaps banal, judgment. Certainly, nineteenth-century Americans rarely discussed incest openly in newspapers or casual conversation and were loathe to acknowledge its occurrence, but they may have addressed incest in other, less obvious, ways. Barnett might have supplemented her argument by examining civilian court records to determine if their inaction substantiates her suspicion about the widespread aversion to addressing incest. These records might reveal that men faced other charges such as statutory rape when accused of sexual relationships with female relatives. Thirty years later in Virginia, many incest cases masqueraded under these less shocking charges. More importantly, Geddes's court-martial trial reveals that this particular group of nineteenth-century Americans were willing to discuss incest. If addressing incest was so taboo, why did much of the trial testimony center upon Orleman's physical contact with his daughter? Did he fondle her breast in a carriage? Could Geddes have heard the Orlemans engaging in sexual relations? Could medical doctors determine whether Lillie Orleman was a virgin? Was the secret Lillie Orleman asked Geddes to keep a reference to her forced sexual relationship with her father? Charging Geddes at all, and then including a charge of libel, ensured that testimony about incest would be central to the trial and suggests that the army was not as loathe to discuss the issue as Barnett insists.	4
The court's guilty verdict suggests, as Barnett shows, that Orleman's claim that Geddes, a known philanderer, had tried to seduce his daughter carried far more explanatory power than the idea that Orleman would commit incest. And here the case is instructive. Geddes's court-martial reveals the importance of local context in the public resolution of disputes. Wider cultural attitudes and taboos regarding sexuality and parental roles certainly played a role in shaping the outcome of the trial. But the relationships among the participants, cloistered on the Texas frontier and in the rigid hierarchy of the army, also played a significant part. Simmering hostilities toward Geddes for his extramarital affairs with other officers' wives made Geddes a more attractive target for punishment than Orleman. A court-martial became the vehicle through which the officers of Fort Stockton and the wider army, both isolated subsets of society, worked out their other disagreements.	5
Lisa Lindquist Dorr University of Alabama

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