Ungentlemanly Acts

Dates Covered: 1860 - 1890
ISBN: 0809073978
HH Rating:

Our Take

In 1869, Harriet Beecher Stowe (of Uncle Tom's Cabin fame) let loose the unsavory accusation that the late poet Lord Byron had left his wife (the wife was a friend of Stowe's) to shack up with his half-sister. Stowe published a whole book about it: Lady Byron Vindicated: A History of the Byron Controversy from Its Beginning in 1816 to the Present Time. This naughty rumor turned out to be true, but everyone at the time considered incest to be a crime against humanity; it was thought worse than murder or rape or drunkenness. It was even worse to talk about it, and Stowe got publicly pilloried.

Against this background of puritans unwilling to discuss the taboo, a sensational incest trial began on a rural west Texas army base. The gist is that an eighteen-year-old girl was stuck between her father's accusation of kidnapping by her suitor, and the suitor's counteraccusation that the father had been committing incest with the girl for the past five years. Unfortunately for him, the suitor, named Geddes, had been a notorious womanizer on base. He had slept with a number of officer's wives (at one dodging a shotgun blast from a cuckold) and made the mistake seducing the wife of the base commander. These misadventures weighed heavily against Geddes at trial time.

Barnett takes this trial, in the context of public perception of incest in 1879, details the trial, its outcome, and eventual reversal. She takes slightly long detours through nineteenth century Texas army life (miserable) and relays an undue fascination with gynecological exams (morbid, but we can blame the army guys for the interminable interest here).

As might be expected from the setup, the courtroom narrative is snappy. For sleeping with the former base commander's wife, Geddes makes enemies with General William Tecumseh Sherman (of Sherman's march fame), then head of the U.S. Army. Oops. For all that trouble, Barnett has the candor to tell us this wife wasn't even very good-looking. However, the book falls into some trouble because Barnett feels as though it needs to be a certain length. The trial proper could probably fill no more than a hundred-page book; the extra hundred pages here are interesting details and sidebars but not directly relevant. We couldn't help but get the feeling Ms. Barnett was looking for a little filler.

That said, it's still quite good. Her discussions, if seemingly disconnected, still cover excellent ground. Besides, how can we not love extensive descriptions of suffering in Texas? We do it every day.

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