Albert D. J. Cashier (1843–1915)
BY JILL MCDONOUGH
Private Albert D. J. Cashier was the smallest recruit in the Illinois 95th Volunteer Infantry Regiment, just nineteen when he joined the Union Army in 1862. It was August, after Shiloh, and little guys were welcome; there were plenty of boys lying about their ages and names, signing up for the cause, or to prove how tough they were, or to get the forty-dollar advance, or all of the above. The boy they called Al or Chub was only five feet tall and didn’t shave yet. He couldn’t read or write. But he had worked on a farm and as a shepherd; he was strong, and he seemed willing enough. At the end of his life he shrugged off enlisting, telling the newspapers, “They needed men and I needed excitement.”
He got it: Al served three years, leaving the army only when the war was over. Decades later, at his pension hearing, fellow soldiers remembered he was “selected whenever dependable men were absolutely needed.” They described the nearly ten thousand miles they marched, and how he good-naturedly posed for pictures with the tallest soldier in the regiment, using their contrasting five-foot and six-foot bodies to show how the pup tents were okay for Al but pretty much everybody else needed either more tent or less body. In photographs, he’s serious, gazing straight at the camera, a boyish face on a soft-looking body in a rumpled uniform.
A few of Al’s comrades also remembered a day they were outnumbered, cut off from the rest of the troops by sudden rebel gunfire. The line in front of them ran on ahead, marching double time. But they dove for cover behind some fallen trees, a lucky natural barricade. Bullets zinged around them, hitting branches, ticking into the bark. Splinters rained down while they peered out, trying to see what the enemy was up to, where they were shooting from. It was tense, and the men of the 95th were tired and hungry, frustrated and afraid, in their dirty wool uniforms. No one knew how long they’d be stuck there, how many outnumbered them, how far ahead the rest of the column was getting. Al waited for a while before he’d had enough. He scrambled up on top of the barricade and hollered, “Hey! You darn rebels, why don’t you get up where we can see you?”
His fellow soldiers loved him. He was old when he died, but his comrades still regretted his death, the year he spent in decline in the Watertown, Illinois, state mental hospital, committed there for being “loud” and “distracted.” Long after his death they were still writing to each other about Al, still putting it all together, remembering the time he climbed a tall tree to tie the Union flag back onto a branch after it was shot down by rebels, remembering how he kept to himself, didn’t play poker, baseball, or dominoes like everybody else.
His commanding officer told the Omaha Bee, years later, “I left Cashier, the fearless boy of 22, at the end of the Vicksburg campaign.” The next time that officer would see him, almost five decades had passed, and Albert looked very different. It wasn’t so much the wrinkles or missing teeth, the liver spots and thinning hair, all the inescapable signs of aging. Albert was now a woman, a frail old woman of seventy.
It turned out Private Albert D. J. Cashier was born Jennie Irene Hodgers in County Louth, Ireland, in 1843.
SO. THERE’S A lot to say about that. There is naturally the how of it all: how did he manage to fool so many people for so many years? Then there is the why of it—what did he do it for? Specific to Al’s story—as opposed to our more contemporary understanding of transgenderism and cross-dressing—the circumstances here include not just what gender looked like in the nineteenth century but what the Great Hunger felt like to the Irish poor, what a new country offered up to fleeing immigrants, and what the Civil War meant to the soldiers who fought in it.
I love Jennie/Albert’s crazy, brave story. I’m Irish, and I’m a homo. Jennie Hodgers looks like every girl I wanted to sleep with in college. I can’t believe people thought she was a man: I see breasts and a woman’s face in those few surviving photos. As for the how and the why? I can only speculate, against the backdrop of a particular time and place. But I will say, for the purposes of this essay, I have chosen to refer to Albert as “he” throughout. I realize there’s a lot of thinking and conversation surrounding gender pronouns these days, but to me this seems most likely to be what Albert would have wanted. And even his Civil War comrades who fought alongside him in the early 1860s allowed him the dignity of his chosen pronoun. As one of his fellow soldiers wrote in a letter after Albert’s sex was discovered, “they found out he was a woman.”
LET’S SAY ALBERT CASHIER grew up in County Louth, from 1843 to 1856, as he offered in one version of his past. This gave him an unenviable view of the famine that killed a fifth of the people around him. Primary sources from those years include stories of whole fields gone so rotten the stench drove people away. Sheriffs report on the number of corpses found on the side of the road. Newspapers describe a family found living with bodies stacked around their shack like sandbags against a flood. Accounts from that place, that time, read like The Walking Dead, some zombie apocalypse from our nightmares. The word unspeakable gets used a lot.
In County Louth in the 1840s and 1850s, when you lost your home and had nowhere else to go, you could go to the workhouse. These were like big dorms where you were able to trade work for food and a place to sleep. Men spent their days breaking rocks for roads, women and kids walked in a circle together pushing a huge wheel to grind corn, old people picked apart old ropes to make them into new ones. But the workhouses were quickly patched together and were just as quickly overwhelmed, and soon they had to turn people away. So you’d walk to the nearest one, hear it was full, and walk on to the next. Help was there, you heard, you hoped, if you could keep walking.
If Albert Cashier ever spoke of these scenes, it was never recorded. Maybe for him it was unspeakable to survive when so many around him had died. Though surviving was certainly better than falling down dead by a turf rick, or of famine fever, or having pigs eat your legs while you were maybe dead or maybe still working on dying. Is it any wonder he set off for America? After all, how scary could America be? Even for a young girl, a teenager more or less, alone in the world. How scary could it be?
So maybe Jennie’s passing as a man isn’t the most remarkable thing here. Maybe it’s his coming from open trenches filled with victims of the great hunger and cholera and all the other diseases that came with it. Stowing away on a ship likely filled with immigrants—your great-great-great-grandmother, my grandfather’s grandfather—whose landlords found it was cheaper to book passage for their tenants than to keep them alive in Ireland. A million Irish poured off the island in droves, heading into the unknown, leaving behind everything familiar, their families, their loved ones, living and dead. They left their homes, their language. They ran away from death and into a new world, a new life. It’s getting from there, from all that, to a time and place so safe and tame that gender, something so frivolous, can become the most remarkable thing about your safe, well-fed, miraculous life.
AMERICA WAS A clean slate, a do-over, a place to become a new person. America, for Jennie Hodgers and for so many others, was a land of reinvention. And Jennie made the most of it. We don’t know when Jennie used the name Albert for the first time, when he cut his hair and put on pants instead of skirts, petticoats, bodices, those shoes that called for a buttonhook. Illinois was still the frontier when Albert went west from New York; jobs there offered higher wages to bring people out to help, and back then, like now, men made more money than women. Irish immigrants went there in waves, looking for a safe and fertile place to use their hands, to do the kind of work they knew how to do—often the only kind of work they knew how to do. So Albert Cashier ended up in Illinois, working as a farmhand for a year.
Rolling fields green as those in Ireland. Planting corn and tomatoes, weeding, feeding chickens, milking cows. Birdsong, wind brushing across meadows, a richly bruised sunrise, day after day after day. I think of this as a sort of recovery period from the horrors of the famine and the uncertainty of immigration. A quiet routine on a farm, regular meals, a safe place to sleep. Waking up before dawn to plant or weed a patch before the sun got up too high in summer. Chopping wood to warm yourself twice in winter. A lot of solitude, plenty of food, sleeping safe and alone in a bed. With enough time and quiet it might occur to you that you’re pretty lucky, getting away with this whole dressing-up-like-a-man thing. But by then you’re already in it, and you see that even if you had some desire to go back to being a woman, you’d be crazy to give up the higher wages and other perks. Would you rather work as a farmhand, be outside all day, or start up with the laundering, work just as hard for a lot less money, with the ever-present risk of people messing with you. No way. You’ve got ladies doing your laundry, man!
AS FOR THE army—there were lots of good reasons to sign up for the army: adventure, patriotism, money. Perhaps the most likely reason Albert enlisted is that it is just what men did.
He signed up on August 6, 1862, in Belvidere, Boone County, Illinois. On the records, someone wrote “Albert D. J. Cashier” in nice, big handwriting. Description: nineteen years old, five feet three inches, light complexion, blue eyes, auburn hair. Where born? New York City. Look at him, reinventing himself! Adding a couple inches, using the name that’s been working for him for a while, making himself not just an American but a New Yorker.
So he signed up for a training camp on how to be an American man. All the guys were doing it. And some of those people ended up nicknaming Albert “Chub.” His fellow soldiers saw that smooth round face, those soft breasts, but they couldn’t see them for what they were. To them, Albert’s body read as fat, not female. Chub! Not bad for someone who lived through the famine.
WHEN YOU READ about the hundreds—hundreds!—of women who have disguised themselves as men and become soldiers, every author eventually gets to the wonder of how they hid their breasts and dealt with their periods. The books on lady soldiers spend more time on this than on the military physicals that these recruits apparently passed without revealing their sex. Mostly, it seems like all they had to do was show their working hands and feet; if you could march and pull a trigger, you were good to go. Also, no one would ever have suspected it—why on earth would a lady sign up for that? Anyone who wanted to be a soldier must be a man, at least according to the definitions of gender they were working with.
Wartime was probably an easier than usual time to deal with your period on the road: throwing bloody rags on the fire was part of the routine, and everybody’s clothes were wrecked. Everyone was also starving and overworked, walking hundreds of miles, experiencing the kinds of conditions that stop menstruation anyway, that make you skinny and muscled, that make your breasts shrink.
The volunteers cobbled together what military experience they had, looking at the books they were given on how to be a soldier. They read “Revised Army Regulations” and “Tactics” and tried that stuff out. They stuck around Illinois drilling and prepping for two and a half months, learning how to march in formation, how to load and fire their muskets, where to stick a rebel with a bayonet. Then they took off for Kentucky to join the Army of the Tennessee under Ulysses S. Grant. It was a great time to fake being a man. How does a man march fifteen miles with a heavy knapsack in new country? How did he crowd into a freight car or board a steamer in the middle of the night with his new friends? None of the men had done anything like this before. There wasn’t ever anything like this to do. Like Al, they came forward when Lincoln called for more troops. They got cash money, new uniforms, knapsacks full of coffee and hardtack, and a musket. They also got a chance to learn from each other, to meet other soldiers from other states, other countries. Not just to study how to be an American man but to define what American manhood was going to be going forward.
AS FOR THE 95th Regiment, the men spent a lot of time on steamers, positioning themselves up and down the Mississippi. Steamers moved troops to wherever they were needed throughout the war. They’d spend whole days standing around waiting to board these cavernous, wooden riverboats. Or they’d rush the dock late at night, trying to keep rebel spies in the dark about troop movements. They’d fill the underdecks with horses and mules and wagons and artillery, then fill in the top with themselves, often with just enough room to stand. The regimental history recalled one late-night boarding like this: “Everything was in an uproar, everybody was mad, and somebody must have been drunk.” This may be my favorite observation on the Civil War.
During Al’s three years of fighting, passing through dangerous country on steamers with names like Universe, Meteor, Dacotah, or White Cloud, the men of the 95th would line the decks with hay bales and crates of hardtack to protect themselves from Confederate musket fire. The sharpshooters in the 95th, the snipers, scanned the banks and picked off rebels with “admirable coolness,” often so near to the enemy that Confederate shots and shells went over the boat. It was too close to get hit.
Of the 983 men who signed up with Al in Illinois in 1862, only about half made it to the end of their three-year tour, mustering out together in Mississippi: 190 were discharged early for disability and disease; 83 died from wounds received in action; and 177 died of disease. So these men needed to be brave, needed to cultivate fearlessness. Good hygiene would have been a plus, but they didn’t often have the information or means to make that a reality. Maybe Al’s need for privacy kept him cleaner, exposed him to fewer germs and risks than those unlucky 190, 83, and 177.
The ones who made it through needed loyalty, connection, things to fight for. They loved most of their leaders and told and retold stories about why: when rebels suggested Major McKee surrender, he replied, “I don’t scare worth a damn. We are ready for you.” They loved General Smith for drawing his saber on men from another regiment when they cut in line at a pontoon bridge. They loved him for drinking and swearing, getting his men on the steamers by arguing “in his effective, though profane phraseology, that ‘These boats, sir, by G-d, sir, can carry these troops, sir, and five thousand more, by G-d, sir.’ ”
These men needed a sense of humor. When the 95th gathered for reunions later, they’d pass around that photo of Cashier, the littlest man in the regiment, under a pup tent with Gleason, the tallest. Men gave each other shit and didn’t grumble.
In Mobile once, the Union commanders tried using the regimental bands to trick the Confederates. The plan was for the bands to play three different reveilles each, so they sounded like twelve regiments coming rather than four. But one band was so famously crappy, a last-minute band of guys who couldn’t actually play, that they couldn’t pull it off. After three other bands played nine distinct versions of reveille, the drum corps from the Missouri 44th produced their usual discordant, horrible effort. And then they tried to do another version, and it came out the same pathetic way. All of the men, thousands, spread out camping in the woods for miles around, cracked up at once with “irrepressible laughter, making the woods ring for a long distance around. Thus this event, which furnished the men with so much merriment, may possibly have disclosed to the rebels the real character of the present expedition.” They didn’t care.
They made fun of themselves, of their troubles. And they loved making fun of soft people, civilians who couldn’t hack it. Outside Nashville, needing some defensive structures built in a hurry, the general conscripted locals to pitch in. “To see the clerks and city dandies, and other non-combatants, provided with haversacks well filled with hard bread, and marched out to the front where an opportunity was afforded of developing their soft muscles by work upon the forts and other defenses, was the cause of much merriment among the boys in blue.” Being an American man, a soldier, was better than being a city-dandy civilian. You belonged. Imagine how much better that was than being a lady civilian—a poor lady civilian, no less! Albert was not some loser Irish immigrant girl. He was a fighting infantryman who was proud of his service.
OF COURSE, STAYING strong and healthy was crucial. They came to see the constant marching as a sort of tonic rather than a chore; stuck in camp, disease was a killer. More men died of dysentery, typhoid, pneumonia, measles, TB, and malaria than the minié balls. Al had only one bout of dysentery bad enough to put him in the hospital—he was there less than a day. He was part of a group prized for its snipers and known for its bravery and over-the-top attention to detail with dress parades. He seemed to specialize in the new American manhood they were inventing together: staying alive and healthy while messing stuff up for your enemies. American ingenuity and flexibility, an early draft of “by any means necessary.”
Being a man in the Union Army meant doing the things that needed doing, starting with Vicksburg, which Lincoln called the “key”: “The war can never be brought to a close until that key is in our pocket.” It took forever, but the Union finally did it. Grant’s plan meant dredging canals through the swamp around the city, making it possible for big boats full of soldiers to slip quietly behind rebel lines. Al’s battalion provided details of men day and night to do that sloppy, swampy digging and clearing—horrible work. And they MacGyvered their way through the muck, coming up with new steam-driven underwater saws to cut cypress trees at the base, going through whatever they couldn’t go around.
On May 22, 1863, moving on Vicksburg, they slithered through their network of ravines filled with logs and branches while their snipers covered them, or tried: most casualties occurred within those first hours. Driven back to just outside the city, they waited for more than a month while the citizens of Vicksburg dug caves, starved, ended up eating even their mules. One time, doing a little recon in the area, Albert got captured. But don’t worry: he grabbed a guard’s gun, knocked him down, got away. No problem. How cool is that?
On the day of Vicksburg’s surrender, July 4, 1863, Al’s regiment was one of the first to go in. “With the victorious stars and stripes unfurled, and with music playing the national airs, these dusty, scarred, and war-worn battalions, keeping step to the music of the Union, marched through the streets of Vicksburg.”
But ultimately, the history of the 95th Regiment speaks less about glory like that and a lot more about drinking, carousing, and pillaging. Early on, they were encouraged to “supply the men” using those very skills. They got started with Grant’s notion of feeding his army on the fly, taking hams and chickens and pickled vegetables and whatever else they could carry from the plantations they passed. These enemy plantations, they discovered, were surprisingly well stocked, which gave Grant the idea to keep going with the steal-the-food plan. Grant was making it up as he went along too.
When winter supplies dwindled, and they had to eat the horses’ corn, they made corncakes and popcorn, joked that next they’d get harnessed and eat rations of hay. In April 1865, on the two-hundred-mile march from Mobile to Montgomery, a lot of them ended up barefoot, the hard road having worn right through their soles. So they cheered each other on with joking signs posted on trees en route: “To Selma, one hundred and fifty miles, sore feet or no sore feet.” “To good living, one hundred and ten miles.”
They had gotten so accustomed to “gleaning” meals from Confederate homes that when they came across some unoccupied country, where they couldn’t easily rustle up supper, they remarked on it. On the way to Montgomery they caught and ate a snake: “a monstrous reptile, fat, sleek, and scaly, and its appearance demonstrated fully that if human beings could not find enough in that barren country to grow fat on, rattlesnakes could.” It was delicious, but they didn’t often need to resort to snake-tasting. They usually had better luck, though by the end of the war they were boasting about their abilities as scroungers, not giving credit just to luck. Both armies were depending on stolen civilian supplies at that point, but the Union soldiers of the 95th prided themselves on being better. “Though the rebel army had been through this section twice within a short time, and nearly drained the country of supplies, yet the Union soldiers, by the exercise of their characteristic inquisitiveness, succeeded in securing from the neighboring plantations plenty of fowls and rasters, which, in connection with hard-tack and coffee, furnished the officers and privates with respectable Christmas dinners.”
The officers saw what side their bread was buttered on. After the rules changed and called for restraint, if ever the men were caught red-handed with stolen goods for “a sumptuous evening meal,” Colonel Avery protected them. Oh, that chicken? Colonel Avery would say. That one over there? Nah, they picked that chicken up in Brownsville. They’ve been carrying that chicken a hundred miles. “For this cunning manner in which the colonel shielded his men from accusations of foraging which, if traced up, would, in many instances have been found true: they called him Colonel Pap.”
It makes me very happy to think of Albert leaving the famine of his childhood behind and having so many new friends to kick through plantations with, so many of the enemy’s hams and chickens and lush gardens and liberated bottles of wine. The reporter Charles Dana wrote of the Union experience of Vicksburg,
We were in an incomparable position for a siege as regard the health and comfort of our men. The high wooded hills afforded pure air and shade, and the deep ravines abounded in springs of excellent water, and if they failed it was easy to bring it from the Mississippi. Our line of supplies was beyond the reach of the enemy, and there was an abundance of fruit all about us. I frequently met soldiers coming into camp with buckets full of mulberries, blackberries and red and yellow plums.
The confederates were down to eating rats and songbirds, but Albert could have all the berries he could eat.
Scrounging is a hard habit to break. On one long steamer journey to New Orleans, commanders couldn’t keep men on the boats. Every time they stopped for fuel or fresh orders, “a few mischievous and unruly soldiers scoured the area for food and goods to take.” When they arrived in New Orleans just after St. Patrick’s Day, they saw rebel forts made entirely of oyster shells. This delighted them almost as much as the oyster beds they were camping by at Cedar Point, where, according to one account, “the surf was alive with wading soldiers, skirmishing not with rebels, but after oysters, of which they brought skiffs-full to the shore, and furnished the camps with large supplies of this luxurious article of food.” Can’t you smell the wood fire and the water, the roasted oysters and beer I hope they had? I love knowing about this night for Albert, loving this sweet dinner at a journey’s end, all the careless laughter and sandy hair.
Right after Vicksburg they took Natchez, no problem, and quickly understood that there were a ton of Texas cattle nearby on their way to becoming delicious rebel soldier meals. So they found some horses, ran off the Confederate guards on cow-duty, and drove the cattle back to Natchez. While they had the horses, they decided to chase down a train. They were soldiers, gleaners, thieves, architects, builders, engineers, diggers, prison guards, reinventors of siege warfare, inventors of trench warfare, even oystermen. And now they were train robbers. America! Why not? What’s next?
They took 150 wagons of rebel ammo, 5,000 Texas cattle, 312 new Austrian muskets, 3,000 rounds of cartridges, 11 boxes of ammo. And they blew up a bunch more, it being just too heavy to carry. (Plus, blowing shit up? Men love that.) They exploded and destroyed 207 rounds of infantry ammo they found hidden in a gully, 56 boxes of artillery ammunition, 17 hogsheads of sugar, 150 saddles, 1 artillery carriage, 1 government wagon, 50 stands of small arms, a cotton factory with 40 looms that made rebel army cloth, 2 locomotives, 14 freight cars, 2 passenger cars, 250 barrels of molasses, a French six-pounder gun. And bale upon bale upon bale of Confederate cotton. And that’s just the stuff they wrote down.
They destroyed a fort with explosives, almost killing themselves in the process. The air was filled with timbers, great clumps of red clay, everything that had been the fort and the ground beneath it suddenly flying around. They tore up railroad communications and arsenals, found and raided Confederate stores.
All through the war they got better and better at playing it by ear, figuring out problems and solving them with whatever was at hand, without worrying much about things like who owned what. They traveled all over the known country by boat and train and on foot, saw Spanish moss and crocodiles and oyster forts and butterflies and strange new birds and freed slaves training as soldiers and season after season of horrors: piles of amputated hands and feet, rotting in the sun. You get shot in the hand, you cut the hand off. You get stuck under a corpse, you stay there till dark. You make a way through the swamp out of no way, you clear the steamers’ decks of wild animals none of you has ever seen before. You get caught by the enemy, you tip your hat and run like hell the other way.
What could be more American, under these circumstances, than pretending to be a man? Pretending to be a man is exactly the kind of thing a man would do.
THESE MEN DIED, in great numbers. There are instances of women who signed up for the Civil War and saw death and rot and explosions and turned tail and fled. But Albert Cashier made a life out of survival.
Sometimes survival for women is about putting up with it when your boss hits on you. Being coerced to concede that actually, maybe that wasn’t rape, after all. Quitting your waitress job in Lubbock so you can drive all night to the clinic in El Paso. Having ten miscarriages and only five babies. But sometimes, at least for Al, it’s about years of serving with men you quickly come to love. And then it’s about watching those men die, in horrible ways—torn in half by cannon fire, wasting away in camp. Like the famine, so much was unspeakable.
After the fall of Vicksburg, one of the greatest Union victories, Al marched on with his fellow soldiers, and he survived one of the greatest Union defeats. Near Guntown, Mississippi, exhausted after a long, hot march and in no shape to fight, they met Lieutenant General Nathan Bedford Forrest. And Forrest had them right where he wanted them: close to the Confederate supply and far from the Union’s. The Union called it Guntown. The Confederates, who won, called it Brice’s Crossroads. There’s a monument.
Forrest had 4,787 men against Union Brigadier General Sturgis’s 8,100. In Ken Burns’s beautiful documentary about the Civil War, historian Shelby Foote talks about Forrest being one of that war’s two geniuses—Lincoln and Forrest, Foote thinks. He cites this battle as his favorite example of Forrest’s abilities. Forrest knew the Union forces coming to attack him were double the number of his own men. But it had been raining for six days, and the roads were a muddy mess. He figured the Union cavalry would arrive way ahead of the infantrymen. So he took his time, beat the shit out of the cavalry, waited around for the rest of the exhausted northerners to show up on foot, and whipped them too. The Confederates lost 492 men. The Union lost 740, and 1,500 were taken prisoner.
Al made it out alive and free. When the 95th was told they needed to pick up the pace, cover five or six miles to help out their cavalry, they were lucky: their commander, Colonel Humphrey, was one of the few leaders that didn’t tell his men to march double time; he just told them to be quick. So they were somewhat less exhausted than many of the soldiers from the other regiments when they showed up for the fight, though they still lost men to heatstroke before they’d even arrived.
Humphrey was shot dead on arrival and was replaced by Captain Stewart. Then Stewart was shot through both thighs and carried off the field. Captain Bush took over and was shot dead, and then Captain Schellenger was in charge, while the fighting “continued with indescribable desperation.” Enlisted men and officers “were falling thick and fast from right to left of the regimental line; the ammunition was fast giving out, and none arrived from the rear to replete the empty cartridge-boxes.” They ran away, those who weren’t captured, and kept running from June 11 to June 13. “[W]hen the knapsack became too onerous, the men unslung and abandoned it, and around many a tree did they bend and break their faithful guns to prevent capture both of themselves and firearms by the enemy.”
The 95th had never been beaten before. They’d had hard times and long marches and dirty work and death and disease, but they’d never marched right into getting their asses handed to them. When they loved their leaders they let them know it, but when leadership failed they weren’t afraid to call it out, either: “The true cause of the great misfortune was plainly incompetency and lack of courage on the part of one who should have been the leading spirit of the occasion.” During the war, the men of the 95th defined themselves, made themselves men of courage, men who weren’t afraid to call out hypocrites and cowards, men happy to throw a bad leader under the bus.
After the war, waiting to muster out, they ran through their flawless dress parades again and again, showing off their freshly cleaned blue uniforms, sunlight glinting off the rows of buttons and crisp turns of bayonets. Their last camp, in Opelika, Alabama, had plenty of fresh air and clean water, so nobody got sick, or was even scared of getting sick.
On the Fourth of July, 1865, the soldiers slipped out before sunrise and fired a God-knows-how-many-gun salute without getting it cleared by anybody. It startled their commanders, scared the bejesus out of the locals, and made the men so happy they no doubt told and retold the story at their reunions for the next fifty years.
They deserved that salute. Albert had arrived on our shores with hundreds of thousands of other Irish immigrants, without food, clothes, money. And there he was five years later, a Union hero, a fighting man who helped keep our country together, helped define it.
When they finally got their orders to muster out, they were told they’d be marching from Opelika, Alabama, to Vicksburg, Mississippi, to end their service. Marching 350 miles in Alabama and Mississippi in the heat of July. Al and his buddies got together and said no way, forget that mess. They chartered a train, orders or no orders, and rode into Vicksburg, the site of their greatest victory, ending their war together.
THE MEN OF the 95th Volunteer Infantry went back to Illinois, and Albert returned to the life he was living before the war started. He was twenty-two. For a while he grew and sold plants with a war buddy, and he had a lot of other jobs—lamplighter for the little town of Saunemin, farmhand, handyman and laborer for the Chesbro family. There he had dinner with Mr. Chesbro, who was a farmer, his wife, and their two daughters most nights. Eventually they bought him a house and gave him a spot in their family cemetery. He lived alone and still got teased for being so small; neighbors remembered that boys in town would call him little drummer boy, and Albert would lose it and yell, “I was a fighting infantryman!”
In 1890 a lawyer in town helped him get his veteran’s pension, increasing it once he was fifty-five and couldn’t work so hard anymore. In 1900, when he was fifty-seven, Albert’s doctor told the Pension Bureau that he was totally disabled. Years came and years went and nobody found out Albert was a woman until 1911. At the time he was working for Illinois State Senator Ira Lish as a chauffeur. Lish needed a driver: one of the few times he was behind the wheel he managed to hit poor Albert, breaking his leg. Albert begged his boss to leave him alone, not to call a doctor. But the doctor came and soon discovered Al was born a woman. Lish’s interest in keeping the story out of the papers probably helped keep Albert male for the next couple of years. The only people the senator and doctor told were the Chesbro sisters, who came out to help Albert get well again, and they promised not to tell.
Some while later, Senator Lish and the doctor worked to get Albert into the Illinois Soldiers and Sailors Home. The home either was told or discovered he was a woman, but they let him in anyway, on April 11, 1911. He kept wearing men’s clothes and received visitors from his regiment, remembering together what they’d been through.
ROBERT HORAN, A corporal in the 95th, corresponded with his former sergeant, Charles Ives; we still have those letters. His spelling is terrible, but I love it too much to fix it for you. When word got out about Albert’s being born a female, Horan told Ives, “I supose I have resived from defereon ones some 10 or 12 clipping of pappers & no to alike.” No two articles alike: nobody could get this story straight, and Albert wasn’t much help. He told so many different stories about his motivation. But what he decided to tell each person gives you a sense of the kind of calculating intelligence it took to live that life.
He told Charles Ives, his commanding officer, that he dressed like a boy from childhood, that he had a twin brother, and their mother always dressed the two of them the same. He was used to wearing pants “and later found it easier to get work that way.” There is no evidence that Albert had a twin brother, but it’s a terrific story to tell a commanding officer. You’re an old lady, and he may be looking at you like you’re crazy, freaked out you were a girl the whole time. But then you give him a sort of blurred double vision of a young male twin, the young boy that was, according to Ives’s own memories. After all, Albert Cashier was a good man to have around in the tough spots they found themselves in during the war. In this twin version Al was never female-acting, always looked the part. And at a simpler time, when wearing pants and carrying a gun was enough to make you a man, this version might have been the kindest way to let Ives keep his vision of Al intact.
Albert gave a very different explanation to the Chesbro sisters, the two neighbor women he ate dinner with most of his life. In this story Jennie Hodgers had a gallant and handsome boyfriend, and put on a uniform so they could enlist together and never be apart. The unnamed boyfriend gets shot early in the war, someplace, and pulls Jennie to his deathbed. He loves her, he says, and his dying wish is that she be true to him forever, even after he’s gone. He wants her to stay in the army, dress as a man forever, to forever be not just true to him but unavailable to all other men. So Jennie honors his dying wish and lives the rest of her life as a man. So romantic! Nobody else got this version, but it’s not the only time Albert talked about romantic interests to help people see him in the way he needed to be seen.
Albert was illiterate, so any letters he exchanged during the war, someone helped him to write. It looks like he spent two years of the war talking about having a girlfriend whenever he wrote to the Morey family, neighbors back in Illinois. Three of their letters to him ask if he’s going to bring his sweetheart back to Illinois when the war’s over. If I were running with a bunch of Union soldiers who were teasing me about not shaving and never going to the brothels with them, inventing a sweetheart and letting word get around by talking about her in the letters I’ve asked someone else to write wouldn’t be such a bad idea. But there’s no other proof to support this idea of an early sweetheart, and there don’t appear to have been any boyfriends or girlfriends later back home in Illinois over the next fifty years.
When a psychiatrist talked to him about it, Albert said he was born a bastard in Clogherhead, Ireland, and worked as a shepherd with his uncle. When his mom married Somebody Cashier, they all immigrated to New York together as a family. The stepfather— with no first name and a made-up-sounding last name, who never appears later in Albert’s life—dressed Albert up like a boy and got them both jobs in a shoe factory. Albert’s mom died, so he got the hell out of there and came west.
Okay. What a great story to tell a psychiatrist! By 1913, even podunk psychiatrists in Nowhere, Illinois, would have been influenced by Freud, right? Nobody else gets all these details about a single mom and shadowy older male relatives telling little Jennie what to do. Look at Albert helping each of these people find a little of themselves in his life: He tells his commanding officer a story of brotherly love and maternal devotion. He tells the sisters a love story, a story that will connect them to Jennie Hodgers, believing they too would have made the same romantic choices. Maybe when you are illiterate, you develop strengths to help make up for that deficit—reading people like a book, telling them what they want to hear. Maybe when you are a woman trying to make it as a man, you make fun of yourself for being short, compensate for being short by being brave. The bottom line, though, is that the sheer variety of the stories Albert told, each seemingly tailored to its audience, makes it hard to believe in any one over another.
ON MAY 20, 1913, the Omaha World-Herald published a story titled “Ives Identifies the Woman Veteran of War.” “She is Albert D. J. Cashier all right,” said Mr. Ives. “Of course time has made a big change in her appearance, just as it has in mine, but I recognized her, and she also knew me. She is considerably broken, and her mind is rather weak. She rambles in her talk, but at times her memory seems very keen.” Albert didn’t recognize Charles Ives at first—Ives and the folks around Albert seemed to take that as further evidence of how crazy Albert had become—but then Albert pointed out that Charles had gotten new teeth.
“Cashier is still wearing men’s clothes and will remain at the home. Her old comrades regard her with even more honor than before they knew she was a woman,” the paper reported. “She has never shaved, but has considerable hair on her upper lip and some on her face, about the same as is found occasionally on a woman.”
In March 1914, Albert was among the small group of soldiers who were transferred to an insane asylum in Watertown, Illinois. Our bad speller, Horan, wrote to Ives that
a Cathlick Preast had been coming in to see him, and it was through him he was taken to Watertown in Rock Island County. He says he think the[y] can keep him cheaper. Cashier has some money in his old home and it In care of J. M. Lish, the man he worked for & who broke his Leg with his auto & took care of him & then took him to the Home. The Preast have heard of him having some Money they don’t care of Cashier. It his money thare after.
I know that’s hard to read: A priest had been visiting Al and learned that Al had some money saved up. Horan thought the sneaky priest was putting Al into an asylum to get his hands on Al’s savings.
Albert’s condition was the same as ever, but he was sent to the asylum anyway. The commitment papers give his name as Jennie Hodgers, say he’d lost his memory, was weak and loud, had trouble sleeping. All of the transferred soldiers were described as “distracted.” This does indeed seem like some sneaky shit. DeAnne Blanton is one of the authors of They Fought Like Demons: Women Soldiers in the American Civil War and works at the National Archives. Check out this “neither confirm nor deny” statement she put in the endnotes of her book: “The State of Illinois refuses to release the Watertown State Hospital’s case file on Cashier and will not even verify whether such a file still exists (Joseph R. Buckles, Rules/Records Administrator, Illinois Department of Mental Health and Developmental Disabilities, to DeAnne Blanton, 19 Nov. 1991).”
I figured it’s been a long time since 1991, so I tried to contact the State of Illinois about the Watertown file, but they didn’t give me any information either. So I couldn’t find out what was up with the “Preast,” but if Horan thought it was fishy, and they still don’t want to talk about it, what kind of place could it have been? In the home, he was allowed to wear pants, but in the asylum, they made him bunk with the female patients and wear skirts. Albert couldn’t stand it; he kept trying to fasten the skirts together somehow, fashion some pinned-up sort-of pants. He tripped over the skirts and broke his hip, a painfully typical end event for an old woman. The broken hip never properly healed and led to an infection—and Albert D. J. Cashier, living at the end as Jennie Hodgers and hating every second of it, died on October 10, 1915.
Albert’s fellow soldiers got permission to give him full military honors at his funeral. He was buried in uniform in the Chesbro family plot, a flag draped over his coffin, a standard veterans’ marble marker for a stone. In the 1970s, the local women’s club and historical society started collecting money and working on doing more for Albert, to better acknowledge the range of his extraordinary life. Clearly, the debate about just who he was, at least in regard to something as frivolous as gender, still continued. They started with this gravestone, dedicated on Memorial Day, 1977, and placed next to the military marker he was buried under:
ALBERT D. J. CASHIER
CO. G 95 ILL. INF. CIVIL WAR
BORN
JENNIE HODGERS
IN CLOGHERHEAD, IRELAND
1843–1915