by Mark Bailey
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 inf
antryman!”
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).”
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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
THE MUCKRAKER
Samuel S. McClure (1857–1949)
