Jennie Hodgers was a real person. The men she fought with in the 95th Illinois Infantry, Company G, were real people too, as were the officers, her parents, her brother, the Belvidere Clearys, the Lannons, and the Lishes.
Frank Moore is based on the 95th Illinois's historian Wales Wood. Mr. Wood survived the war. His A History of the Ninety-fifth Regiment, Illinois Infantry Volunteers is the definitive book on this regiment. Although Albert and Frank's attachment is fiction, Wales Wood and Albert Cashier were the best of friends. Albert is on almost every page of Mr. Wood's book.
After Albert Cashier was hit by State Senator Ira Lish's car, Jennie Hodgers was transferred to the Illinois Soldiers' & Sailors' Home in Quincy, Illinois, for long-term convalescence. She told the doctors and nurses there that she'd been born near Belfast, Ireland. She remembered collecting sea-shells on the Island Magee with her older brother. Jennie Hodgers started wearing pants in Ireland, when she worked as a shepherd.
She must have been born in the mid-1840s, but there was no record of her birth in her local parish.
Albert Cashier fought in many more battles than Vicksburg, Bryson's Crossroads at the Tishomingo Creek Bridge, and the Siege of Fort Spanish on Dauphin Island. Albert fought in a guerrilla campaign on the Red River in Louisiana, at the siege of Montgomery in Alabama, and at the siege of Greenwood in Mississippi. Space did not allow me to write about these battles.
Albert Cashier volunteered to work as a courier many times during the war. Private Cashier was taken prisoner, briefly, during the siege of Vicksburg. She got into a fistfight with her captors and escaped.
The Confederate States of America's president, Jefferson Davis, called Vicksburg "the nail that holds the two pieces of the Confederacy together." The Union was as determined to take Vicksburg as the Confederacy was determined to keep it. It took eighteen months for the small town to fall to the Union.
Over 26,000 prisoners were sent to Camp Douglas, 12,000 in December 1864 alone. At least 8,000 died there. Others were sent to other prisoner-of-war camps, including Johnson's Island, Ohio, in San-dusky Bay; Lake Erie; and Rock Island, Illinois, in the middle of the Mississippi River. The harsh Great Lakes winters killed them by the thousands. The swell of prisoners overburdened the supply of goodwill, blankets, medicine, and food. Only 2,000 prisoners were sent home after signing the loyalty oath to the United States.
At the Illinois Soldiers' & Sailors' Home in Quincy, Illinois, both Robbie Horan and Charlie Ives testified under oath that Jennie Hodgers was indeed Albert Cashier so she could keep her pension after her true sex was known. She was the only woman on either side of the war known to have received a Civil War pension.
Jennie Hodgers died in the Watertown State Hospital for the Insane in East Moline, Illinois, on October 10, 1915. At her death she was suffering from what we now call Alzheimer's disease.
Her true sex was common knowledge before she died. Nevertheless, her body was dressed in her Grand Army of the Republic uniform. She was given a full military burial, including an American flag draped over her coffin. Her marker in Sunny-slope Cemetery in Saunemin, Illinois, is simple and says nothing of her complicated life.
It reads: Albert Cashier, Co. G 95 Ill. Inf.
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What would it have been like to be Jennie Hodgers? To worry that the slightest gesture, the smallest slip of the tongue, the simplest glitch in her routine, might reveal her true identity? Could she have second-guessed everything she ever did, everything she ever thought? She must have lived such a lonely life.
To us, what Jennie Hodgers did seems unbelievable. How could she have fooled everyone, in both war and peacetime, for more than fifty years?
She grew up in a world without birth certificates, without immigration and naturalization papers, without passports or social security numbers or photo ID's, without fingerprinting or driver's licenses or DNA testing, without federal and state withholding taxes. There was no proof to say she was or wasn't who she said she was.
She left $418.46 in a bank account. That doesn't sound like much by today's standards, but in 1911 a brand-new Model T Ford cost $600.
The town of Saunemin tried to find a beneficiary in Ireland for the money. They wrote to the city government of Belfast and to the local parishes. Plenty of Hodgerses came forward, but none could place her as a relative to the satisfaction of the town.
In 1924 the town of Saunemin gave the money to Jennie Hodgers's local parish of Ballynure, near Belfast, Ireland.
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