Iowa infantry officer dismissed from the Army for drunkenness and sleeping with a freed slave woman

After nine months of appeals, the War Department ruled that the trial of First Lieutenant Thomas C. Baldwin of the 7th Iowa Volunteers at Camp Montgomery, near Corinth, Mississippi, for "conduct unbecoming" had been "fatally defective" but since Baldwin had admitted his guilt, he was to be dismissed from the service, anyway, effective June 16, 1863. Baldwin had been convicted of being twice drunk in camp and drunkenly taking an African-American woman into his tent bed on the night of September 2, 1862, "with his tent doors open."  (By John Osborne)