Contemplating Albert Cashier

[wuzreb]

It is my honor to present herewith a possibly over-long set of contemplations.

Lately I've been digging into an esoteric little corner of Civil War history; women soldiers who joined the ranks and fought. Numerically there were not many of them. They represent a percent of a percent, out of the millions who served. But the point remains, they also served.

The individual I'm taking a deep dive on now is perhaps the best known of these, Private Albert D.J. Cashier. At least that's the name he gave. Nobody really knows a lot about him - or her - because Albert never told the same story twice.

What is known is that an 18 or 19 year old Irish immigrant walked out of the shadows of history and down a dusty road in Illinois in early 1862. This solitary "boy" found a recruiting station in Belvidere and said, in a notable Irish accent, "Is this where we sign up to go for a soldier?"

If she had once been Jennie Hodgers, as later investigation seemed to reveal, that person disappeared forever.

According to enlistment records, the new recruit stood only about 5 ft 3, a sturdy kid who could neither read nor write. But somehow, quite probably due to an early life of working hard in other physical labor, Albert fit in and Albert kept up. Accounts by fellow soldiers many years later never once indicated he weakened or failed in any way. On the contrary.

I don't know how many people have picked up a Civil War musket, but they measure about 55 inches long and weigh approximately 10 lbs. Any of us can pick up a 10 lb bag of cat food and carry it around without effort. Now machine that out the length of a shovel or broom, with most of the weight in wood and steel, hanging out there on the end of your arms. That dang thing is heavy. And as a soldier, you're going to live with it. You're going to handle that more than you do your toothbrush.

That's only part of what these women Civil War soldiers had to deal with. They were subject to everything their male counterparts were. Which is words on paper, but think about it.

You live outside now. You don't get to go in the house. You don't even get to go wash your hands and take a pee indoors. Heat, rain, snow, slush, mud, bugs. You're in it. You live there. If you're lucky, you might have a tent or a shelter half shared with a buddy, to keep the weather off at night. If you're in garrison, maybe you and a few pals will cobble sticks and logs together into a half-assed shebang that only leaks part of the time. And when it comes to the calls of nature, you either go to the stinky, nasty, company latrine or you find a convenient spot out in the woods. With the guys.

And by the way, you have to make sure nobody ever sees you pee. For like 3 or 4 years. Among other things.

You're a single female amongst all these dudes, who are doing dude things. They belch, they fart, they tell crude jokes, they make disparaging remarks about whoever displeases them, they are profane, they are pious, they are crude, they are kind. They are dudes in their complete dudeness, with absolutely no thought towards tempering their words or behaviors to favor a female presence.

Most of us don't really think about that. Most men tend to alter or somewhat moderate their behaviors when around women. There's none of that in the Civil War armies. And these women soldiers had to just suck it up and dude it out along with them.

Or not. A large part of the documentation consists of women who failed in their disguise, either by giving it up, or doing something that got them caught. Which is what makes the few like Albert Cashier so extraordinary. Most of the evidence is found in letters from other soldiers, occasionally from officers, only sparingly in any official accounts, and occasionally in somewhat garbled newspaper reports.

The old newspapers can make tracking this stuff difficult, because you could have five different newspapers at the same time, trying to report on the same thing, but each of them has a different slant or set of details. Victorian fancy loved a romantic story, so it was common for reporters to spin things in a flowery or romanticized way. And a lot of untruths or speculations get perpetuated.

Fortunately we have authors and researchers like Shelby Harriel -Hidlebaugh who do the collating and compiling for us. I just finished her book, "Behind the Rifle," which does a prodigious job of covering women soldiers known and reported during the campaigns in Mississippi, and particularly the Vicksburg campaign. My next read is "They Fought Like Demons: Women Soldiers in the American Civil War," by DeAnne Blanton and Lauren M. Cook. I read it years ago but lost my old copy.

It almost feels like women are coming out of the woodwork, there. Again, numerically minut compared to the greater scope of tens of thousands of soldiers. But the stories are intriguing and compelling.

Albert Cashier was there. That little soldier, slogging in the mud and the crud and the swamps, along with everyone else. If one reads of the brutal assaults on Vicksburg, or Sturgis's cock-up at Guntown, it gives one pause to realize that wee Irish lass was right there, slugging it out with with her brothers in arms.

There were other women soldiers in other units. There were other stories of other women, that may or may not carry the whole truth; some may be fabricated. Some are tantalizingly legit, like mention of someone the papers called Soldier Tom, giving realistic details - but then the trail goes cold. We never know what happened to the people later, or even who they truly were.

And some of them are only found when their bodies were discovered in the field. Others died in hospital of illness or wounds. There are accounts from nurses saying they found women soldiers, but kept their secrets and buried the women undisclosed.

Right now, it's the physicality of these women soldiers that amazes me. We can read the great, sweeping battlefield accounts of armies doing this and brigades and battalions doing that, and commanders and generals doing something else. But when you get down to regiment and company levels, when you read regimental histories, or letters from the soldiers, you're in the trenches.

When you're listening to .58 caliber musket balls whiz past your head, like swarms of really ticked off 1.14 ounce, bone-cracking lead wasps, or watching the guy next to you vaporize due to a close range blast of canister fire, or your regiment rises up in one great terrible moment and charges into a firestorm of shot and shell, because you're brothers and that's what you do ... that physicality starts getting real.

The women who fought were not many. But those who did, the few we know of and the greater numbers we don't, like the two dead women at Gettysburg, the dead girl at Antietam, the female body found after the Crater at Petersburg ... I'm in awe.

Those women could, and some few did, just call it quits and say oh hell no, I'm not cut out for this. There's a story of two female soldiers who heard their company was about to go up against Nathan Bedford Forrest, and they turned themselves in. We're out. And who can blame them?

But these few others did not. In my mind, although numerically inferior, they share, deservedly, in the leonine accolades earned by their male counterparts.

Albert is notable because that was a d@mned long game. She lived as a man until senility and disability took over. Speculation as to why has required the deployment of thousands if not millions of words. Personally, I think a poor, illiterate, familyless Irish kid could find better employment and freedom of opportunity wearing the britches of a male. Nowhere in the course of years did that change.

What I'm grateful for is that, at the end of life, when Albert's secret became the play thing of the national press, her old comrades in arms closed ranks. Okay, Albert is a woman, that's a little weird. But that's still our Albert, who never faltered from beginning to end.

Her old comrade Robert Horan probably said it best;

"She was a soldier with us, doing faithfully and well."

 

[wuzreb]

PS
Yes, I have enhanced both the newspaper photo and the image of Albert with an unknown pal.

 

[Nathan Stuart]

Some of these biologically-born female CW soldiers may have identified as being of the male gender (ie. transgender in modern parlance), as distinct from merely disguising themselves as males in order to participate in the fighting. In other words, the former cohort could be described as being more than just tomboys.

 

[wuzreb]

Some of these biologically-born female CW soldiers may have identified as being of the male gender (ie. transgender in modern parlance), as distinct from merely disguising themselves as males in order to participate in the fighting. In other words, the former cohort could be described as being more than just tomboys.

It's certainly possible. That is among the many speculations put forward.

Lyons Wakeman, or Rosetta Wakeman, is an interesting character because she was a woman soldier who wrote letters home. They were discovered in an attic in the 1970s. She had no thought of being a man, she even signed her letters as Rosetta for a long time.

But she was outspokenly adamant about enjoying the freedoms of living as a man. Sometimes she wrote that she had no intentions of ever going back to the old life.

Even more curiously, there were two soldiers in other regiments, one a cousin and one friend from home, who knew exactly who she was. One of them corresponded with her, and I believe she visited the other in his camp at one point.

Nobody who knew her gave her up. She continued living with one foot in each world. And she died as a soldier, due to disease, and was buried under her male name. It would be intriguing to imagine what she might have done had she survived the war. I don't think putting skirts back on would have been part of it.

Albert I think is a good deal more complex. It's super hard to parse her history because it only came out in pieces, when she was deep in the grips of senility. We have to cobble it all together from different interviews and articles about her, because she couldn't write.

But the pieces we do get suggest that adult figures in her early life dressed her in male clothes, perhaps from quite a young age, the better to put her to work. A boy child could earn more working out of the home than a girl.

She may not have thought she was supposed to be male, so much as there was no profit or reason to try to be a female, now. Lyons Wakeman enlisted because there was a nice enlistment bounty, and she would be making more money per month than she had ever seen. Maybe Albert was no different.

I do think Albert is distinct, however, not just for the fact she kept up the charade lifelong, but because being female may have been fundamentally out of reach. If she had been raised to work and act as a boy from childhood, when it came to being a girl ... maybe she just didn't know how. And then there was no longer a point.

 

[Nathan Stuart]

she kept up the charade lifelong

Judging by the viewed photographic images (1864 & 1913) and the read given descriptions of living postwar life as a male person for as long a time as there was mental capacity, thought these were solid indications that Cashier identified as male, and was thereby probably transgender. If that's the case, then the pronouns to use to correctly refer to this person would be 'he', 'him' or 'his'. Just saying.

 

[7thWisconsin]

Some of the women who soldiered were poor or from poor families, where hard work and dressing as men in order to get the job done were the only route out of poverty. We won't ever really know, because the "short and simple annals of the poor" simply weren't being documented at the time. There was a famous hell-for-leather stagecoach driver who was discovered to be a biological woman only after her death. I'm convinced that some of the ruddy-cheeked boys in the ranks, as well as those doing manual labor in other civilian fields, were the younger daughters of poor families who really had limited opportunities. In many cases, they escaped detection because they were hiding in plain sight. The cultural norm that those were not things women do literally blinded men to the possibility that they really were things women do. On the other hand, I suspect that some of the more successful cases, like Albert Cashier, - I suspect their comrades knew and accomodated. All Albert's comrades spoke highly of the service with which Pvt Cashier served. I wonder how many times some sort of knowing glance followed words like "Well, you know Al..." In Albert Cashier's case, I think today we would genuinely describe them as transgender. They continued dressing and acting the male role for decades after the War. You don't do that just to collect a government pension. In fact, when forced to dress as a woman in old age, Cashier pinned the center of their dresses down the middle to simulate trousers. This led to a fatal fall down the stairs, a cruel end for an elderly soldier, and, from all accounts, truly decent human being. (Note: I realize gender-neutral pronouns aren't mid-19th century in any way, but seem to be a respectful way to discuss Albert Cashier.)

 

[wuzreb]

Judging by the viewed photographic images (1864 & 1913) and the read given descriptions of living postwar life as a male person for as long a time as there was mental capacity, thought these were solid indications that Cashier identified as male, and was thereby probably transgender. If that's the case, then the pronouns to use to correctly refer to this person would be 'he', 'him' or 'his'. Just saying.

I agree, I lean towards the masculine pronouns. Occasionally I wobble a bit, the same as comrades later. They would sometimes use both he and she in the same paragraph. But Albert lived male and I respect that.

Whether Albert was transgender is probably an extremely fluid definition, which is why the conversation in that regard is endless. How does the speaker define being transgender?

I confess I have very little exposure to the transgender community. I've known a couple people who are trans, I just treat them as what they present themselves to be. It ain't no thing.

But whether Albert thought he was or should be male is an answerable question. My hunch is that the choice may have been limited, if Albert was raised from childhood to act like a boy. If anything, maybe Albert felt asexual, neither here nor there.

When asked one time why the men's clothes, Albert was quoted as saying simply, it was the most practical thing for herding sheep. I get that. Victorian full length skirts and dresses would not be the handiest thing on an Irish hillside.

And again, if adults put Albert in pants from an early age ... you gotta know how to wear a dress. Lieutenant Ives later told how the insane asylum put Albert in a dress, and Albert tied the skirt up and suffered a fall. That fall contributed to an infection that caused his death.

Whether or not Albert genuinely thought he should be or was a man, by the time we meet him, I suspect he didn't know how to live as anything else. Gender neutral might be a good descriptor.

Lyons Rosetta Wakeman would have been an interesting study, had she survived the war. Her switch to male garb and a male persona was her own choice, done to find work to help support her family. She was working as a canal boatman before she enlisted. But the way she wrote, she might have never fully returned to a woman's role. Albert may have made the same kind of choice, only without the benefit of family support.

We can't know. Albert could never speak for himself without the ability to write. One thing I am confident of, however, is that Albert identified as a soldier. Beyond gender, beyond pronouns, Albert was a soldier. That was the definition that mattered most.

 

[wuzreb]

Some of the women who soldiered were poor or from poor families, where hard work and dressing as men in order to get the job done were the only route out of poverty. We won't ever really know, because the "short and simple annals of the poor" simply weren't being documented at the time. There was a famous hell-for-leather stagecoach driver who was discovered to be a biological woman only after her death. I'm convinced that some of the ruddy-cheeked boys in the ranks, as well as those doing manual labor in other civilian fields, were the younger daughters of poor families who really had limited opportunities. In many cases, they escaped detection because they were hiding in plain sight. The cultural norm that those were not things women do literally blinded men to the possibility that they really were things women do. On the other hand, I suspect that some of the more successful cases, like Albert Cashier, - I suspect their comrades knew and accomodated. All Albert's comrades spoke highly of the service with which Pvt Cashier served. I wonder how many times some sort of knowing glance followed words like "Well, you know Al..." In Albert Cashier's case, I think today we would genuinely describe them as transgender. They continued dressing and acting the male role for decades after the War. You don't do that just to collect a government pension. In fact, when forced to dress as a woman in old age, Cashier pinned the center of their dresses down the middle to simulate trousers. This led to a fatal fall down the stairs, a cruel end for an elderly soldier, and, from all accounts, truly decent human being. (Note: I realize gender-neutral pronouns aren't mid-19th century in any way, but seem to be a respectful way to discuss Albert Cashier.)

Very well said and you echo much of what I have thought.

I think debate over the word transgender, as I just said to Nathan, really depends on how one views the word. I have very little exposure to the trans community, if you I've known ferment we're just good human beings. However they want to be addressed or perceived is fine by me.

What I question, as I've already written, is whether Albert truly felt he was or should be a man, or if early treatment by adults, being put in boy's clothes and put to boy's work, might have skewed his ability to act or live as a girl. The skirts being a perfect example. I would argue that much of gender behaviors are learned, not intrinsic. Society and family play a great deal into how gender is manifest.

Lyons Rosetta Wakeman is an interesting look through the same window because one, she could write, and two , she chose to defy gender morms as a young adult. She left home, took work as a canal boatman, and well doing so in the guys of a man, other guys convinced her to enlist. Which she did, with the promise of good wages being her main driver.

I suspect money was behind Albert's choices, too, whether guided by adults when a child or later on his own. Rosetta wrote that she made better money acting as a man. She did not identify as male, she signed her letters as Rosetta and she even maintained contact with two soldiers in other regiments who knew her back home. But in her letters, she spoke with open defiance about maybe never returning to living a woman again. She would have been an interesting study, had she lived. Maybe another female coach driver!

 

[wuzreb]

Some of the women who soldiered were poor or from poor families, where hard work and dressing as men in order to get the job done were the only route out of poverty. We won't ever really know, because the "short and simple annals of the poor" simply weren't being documented at the time. There was a famous hell-for-leather stagecoach driver who was discovered to be a biological woman only after her death. I'm convinced that some of the ruddy-cheeked boys in the ranks, as well as those doing manual labor in other civilian fields, were the younger daughters of poor families who really had limited opportunities. In many cases, they escaped detection because they were hiding in plain sight. The cultural norm that those were not things women do literally blinded men to the possibility that they really were things women do. On the other hand, I suspect that some of the more successful cases, like Albert Cashier, - I suspect their comrades knew and accomodated. All Albert's comrades spoke highly of the service with which Pvt Cashier served. I wonder how many times some sort of knowing glance followed words like "Well, you know Al..." In Albert Cashier's case, I think today we would genuinely describe them as transgender. They continued dressing and acting the male role for decades after the War. You don't do that just to collect a government pension. In fact, when forced to dress as a woman in old age, Cashier pinned the center of their dresses down the middle to simulate trousers. This led to a fatal fall down the stairs, a cruel end for an elderly soldier, and, from all accounts, truly decent human being. (Note: I realize gender-neutral pronouns aren't mid-19th century in any way, but seem to be a respectful way to discuss Albert Cashier.)

To add, in later pension investigation depositions from old comrades and people who knew Albert, the tone of the investigation was basically geared towards the question, "Did you notice anything odd about Albert?"

Pretty much universally everybody said Albert was a little odd. Observations included that Albert was kind of hard to get to know, didn't take part in games and rough housing amongst the company, but rather sat on the sidelines, and nobody could remember Albert having a bunk mate. Lieutenant Ives remembered Albert one time expressing a preference for a single bunk.

And apparently Albert would do laundry for the boys, there's a letter I'm trying to track down where evidently Albert and one Samuel Pepper had a little laundry business for the company. Sam Pepper was interesting in that he and Albert maintained a friendship for a little while after the war, apparently going into a nursery business back home in Belvidere. However, that apparently broke up within a year or two after coming home.

So looking in hindsight, people did recall that Albert was a little different. However, if you stick that many diverse people together in a company or a regiment, oddity becomes normal. And as you say, the culture of the times blinded people to what was in front of them. A 5'3 Irish kid in trousers and short hair was a boy. The end.

I'm with you that there were more male-passing women in the army than we will ever know. All we have are the ones that were discovered - alive or dead. I've known young women who were quite gender-neutral in voice and appearance. Not wholly masculine but neither wholly feminine. Especially when engaged with work that involves hard labor or livestock, as many poor girls in the 1800s would have. They wouldn't raise an eyebrow in 1860.

Albert was a woman who chose to continue living as a man. Part of it may have been financial; I can make a whole lot more money as a man. Part of it may have been a sense of identity; I feel like a guy not a girl. But also I think we can't overlook the identity Albert settled into as a soldier.

Albert identified as a soldier for the rest of his life. That alone may have precluded any sense of having the option of life as female. There would be no reason or incentive to live as a woman. Doing so would mean the loss of everything he earned or gained, as a soldier amongst comrades in arms. We can't know if the boys of company G in 1865 would have been as embracing and understanding as the old soldiers of 1913.

My thoughts anyhow.

It's fascinating to discuss and contemplate, particularly because the answer is, ultimately, unknowable. Albert was one very brave little soul, in a time that was not always kind to either women or people who didn't quite fit societal molds.

 

[7thWisconsin]

You will enjoy They Fought Like Demons. It"s the definitive single volume on women soldiers of the Civil War. The 7th Wisconsin also had Rebecca Peterman, who began as a musician and moved to the ranks. Again, we will never know the true numbers of women soldiers, and im inclined to accept the low-ball estimates of numbers. However, ive spent a lifetime studying the thousand or so Black Hats who made up the 7th Wisconsin. Its worthwhile and informative to study those unknown number of women who stepped into harm's way, for whatever reason. (Btw - I'm related to Deborah Sampson, the best documented woman soldier of the Revolution.)

 

[Nathan Stuart]

much of gender behaviors are learned, not intrinsic. Society and family play a great deal into how gender is manifest.

Agree. Gender, as distinct from biological sex, is largely a social construct that is a function of (shaped by) culture.

I suspect money was behind Albert's choices, too, whether guided by adults when a child or later on his own. Rosetta wrote that she made better money acting as a man.

After a cursory review of Cashier's life history, thought there was enough indicia present in the read postwar period to support a reasonable finding that Cashier identified as a male - as the chosen gender.

But there is also the possibility in this same period that Cashier could have been economically motivated to appear as male, for all intents and purposes, so as to secure employment opportunities and to apply for the veteran's pension (the soldier pension payments apparently started in 1907).

To resolve this issue perhaps depends on the depth of intensity that Cashier felt identifying as a male. This is unknown and likely indeterminable. So the question will probably remain unresolved.

 

[HistoryBob]

Some of these biologically-born female CW soldiers may have identified as being of the male gender (ie. transgender in modern parlance), as distinct from merely disguising themselves as males in order to participate in the fighting. In other words, the former cohort could be described as being more than just tomboys.

I think Albert Cashier was transgender, as were some of the other women who served as men in uniform. Cashier wasn't alone in joining the military to become one of the boys. Annie Wittenmyer gives an account of a soldier whose biological identity was revealed only after they were wounded, taken prisoner, and treated by Confederate surgeons. When asked, the soldier said they didn't join up because of any man, but simply because "I thought I'd like camp life, and I did."

 

[wuzreb]

I think Albert Cashier was transgender, as were some of the other women who served as men in uniform. Cashier wasn't alone in joining the military to become one of the boys. Annie Wittenmyer gives an account of a soldier whose biological identity was revealed only after they were wounded, taken prisoner, and treated by Confederate surgeons. When asked, the soldier said they didn't join up because of any man, but simply because "I thought I'd like camp life, and I did."

He certainly fit the definition of transgender in his actions and behaviors, both in joining the Army and in later life. To me the complexity lies in how he got there.

I tend to look at Lyons Rosetta Wakeman as one possible interpretation. She never gave up being female. She just chose to live as a guy. She left home, put on male clothes, and went to work as a canal boatman. After joining the army, she still signed letters home as Rosetta, while at the same time occasionally poking at her family with the assertion that maybe she wasn't going to go ever go back to normal society.

Wakeman didn't think she was a man, she was just happy living like one. And she pointed towards the financial and personal freedom of it. She didn't survive the war, so we can't know what she would have done in the long term.

The unanswerable question with Albert Cashier is when he started living as male. I don't think it was something he picked up for the purpose of being a soldier. I think he was already proficient at living and acting as a guy before enlistment.

He's quoted as saying he was already working as farm labor. The question we can't know is, when did this start?

Nobody asked any questions, or at least none on record, until Albert was an old soldier struggling with senility and dementia. However, there are suggestions that he began dressing and working as a boy in early youth. Possibly under the influence of adults, such as a parent or step parent.

(The two main he's quoted as telling are, A. that he herded sheep for an uncle in Ireland, and B. that a stepfather put him to work in a shoe factory in New York. Neither story is verifiable, but both suggest Albert worked as a boy while young.)

The intriguing questions with Albert are, was his transgenderism from the genuine feeling he was supposed to be male?
Or was he groomed and shaped from childhood to work/act as a boy, to the point he lost the ability - or the desire - to live female?

In other words, was it nature or nurture?

That's the question we can't answer and that's the one that intrigues.

Albert could not, or did not, really tell us what his childhood was like, who his influences were. Explanations as recorded are fragmentary, inconsistent and contradictory. At times it almost feels like little-old-man Albert told tales just to please the person talking to him.

I think hints are strong that nurture played a powerful part. But we can't know how much, or even if. And so the conversation continues.

 

[7thWisconsin]

This is the unique part of Albert Cashier's story. There have been other women who impersonated men in order to be soldiers, but I can only think of a few documented cases where the transformation was a lifelong persona. Deborah Sampson lived as a woman after the Revolution. Kit Davies was given a gown as a present when she left the British Army in the 17th century. (Her comrades called her "the pretty dragoon." You think they knew?) Albert Cashier remained Albert Cashier for a lifetime. I'm not sure Victorian culture provided the vocabulary for Cashier to adequately articulate that part of the story either. A time before psychology and all.

 

[HistoryBob]

He certainly fit the definition of transgender in his actions and behaviors, both in joining the Army and in later life. To me the complexity lies in how he got there.

I tend to look at Lyons Rosetta Wakeman as one possible interpretation. She never gave up being female. She just chose to live as a guy. She left home, put on male clothes, and went to work as a canal boatman. After joining the army, she still signed letters home as Rosetta, while at the same time occasionally poking at her family with the assertion that maybe she wasn't going to go ever go back to normal society.

Wakeman didn't think she was a man, she was just happy living like one. And she pointed towards the financial and personal freedom of it. She didn't survive the war, so we can't know what she would have done in the long term.

The unanswerable question with Albert Cashier is when he started living as male. I don't think it was something he picked up for the purpose of being a soldier. I think he was already proficient at living and acting as a guy before enlistment.

He's quoted as saying he was already working as farm labor. The question we can't know is, when did this start?

Nobody asked any questions, or at least none on record, until Albert was an old soldier struggling with senility and dementia. However, there are suggestions that he began dressing and working as a boy in early youth. Possibly under the influence of adults, such as a parent or step parent.

(The two main he's quoted as telling are, A. that he herded sheep for an uncle in Ireland, and B. that a stepfather put him to work in a shoe factory in New York. Neither story is verifiable, but both suggest Albert worked as a boy while young.)

The intriguing questions with Albert are, was his transgenderism from the genuine feeling he was supposed to be male?
Or was he groomed and shaped from childhood to work/act as a boy, to the point he lost the ability - or the desire - to live female?

In other words, was it nature or nurture?

That's the question we can't answer and that's the one that intrigues.

Albert could not, or did not, really tell us what his childhood was like, who his influences were. Explanations as recorded are fragmentary, inconsistent and contradictory. At times it almost feels like little-old-man Albert told tales just to please the person talking to him.

I think hints are strong that nurture played a powerful part. But we can't know how much, or even if. And so the conversation continues.

The "why" of the matter certainly is the intriguing part to any story, though I've found its one nearly impossible to answer for most historical figures. Even in cases where they left written accounts of their life, one still must determine how reliable a narrator they are.

For me, what I find intriguing is how unusual or representative Cashier's story is, and how many other transgender people lived in nineteenth-century U.S. From what I've been able to find, it doesn't seem like there's been much research or publication on the Civil War era through the LGBTQ lens.

 

[HistoryBob]

This is the unique part of Albert Cashier's story. There have been other women who impersonated men in order to be soldiers, but I can only think of a few documented cases where the transformation was a lifelong persona. Deborah Sampson lived as a woman after the Revolution. Kit Davies was given a gown as a present when she left the British Army in the 17th century. (Her comrades called her "the pretty dragoon." You think they knew?) Albert Cashier remained Albert Cashier's for a lifetime. I'm not sure Victorian culture provided the vocabulary for Cashier's to adequately articulate that part of the story either. A time before psychology and all.

But is it unique because we know of it, or because it was unusual at the time? I wonder how many other people had similar stories but weren't recorded as they managed to successfully keep it quiet.

 

[7thWisconsin]

But is it unique because we know of it, or because it was unusual at the time? I wonder how many other people had similar stories but weren't recorded as they managed to successfully keep it quiet.

That is kind of a chicken and egg kind of quandary isn't it? Did we superimpose an outline on the story a long time ago because it better fit our expectations, i.e. "they just impersonated men in order to get ahead economically?" Are we doing the same thing from the other pole when we say "there is something more than economics going on in these stories?" In the inevitable absence of evidence, I'm going to be cautious and say we just don't know, do we.
I knew a woman in one of my congregations who was then in early middle age. Lived at home. Never married. Always wore jeans and androgenous attire and a short sensible haircut. I do not ever remember seeing her wear a dress. She came from a farming family and worked outside doing farm stuff. At the same time, deeply and passionately professing Christian. Did needlepoint and quilted, though. We still have things she made. She wasn't an activist. She just was. And all of us, including family, were cool with that. I think of her when conversations like this come up.

 

[wuzreb]

This is the unique part of Albert Cashier's story. There have been other women who impersonated men in order to be soldiers, but I can only think of a few documented cases where the transformation was a lifelong persona. Deborah Sampson lived as a woman after the Revolution. Kit Davies was given a gown as a present when she left the British Army in the 17th century. (Her comrades called her "the pretty dragoon." You think they knew?) Albert Cashier remained Albert Cashier for a lifetime. I'm not sure Victorian culture provided the vocabulary for Cashier to adequately articulate that part of the story either. A time before psychology and all.

I think you've raised a major point. There was simply no definition for someone like Albert Cashier. People like Albert weren't supposed to exist.

And one has to wonder if there were others like Albert, whose story was never found out. During newspaper research, I came across a blurb telling of a homesteader in Kansas, who had been killed when lightning struck his cabin. Everybody knew the old guy as a veteran. But when they went to collect the body, they discovered he was a woman! And of course nobody would ever know who he really was.

Unfortunately there was nothing to follow up on regarding the story. It could have been truth, it could have been a fabrication. But it suggests there may have been a few other Alberts out there, quietly living in the shadows. With no language or social constructs to define them.

It is worth noting that I did find two or three mentions of women arrested during the Civil war, wearing soldiers clothes, although not necessarily in ranks, who were thrown in jail for being in public in male attire. In those municipalities, you did not dress in drag.

 

[wuzreb]

The "why" of the matter certainly is the intriguing part to any story, though I've found its one nearly impossible to answer for most historical figures. Even in cases where they left written accounts of their life, one still must determine how reliable a narrator they are.

For me, what I find intriguing is how unusual or representative Cashier's story is, and how many other transgender people lived in nineteenth-century U.S. From what I've been able to find, it doesn't seem like there's been much research or publication on the Civil War era through the LGBTQ lens.

There has been attention, but it mainly focuses on Albert Cashier. I think what makes it difficult or problematic to do research on that topic is there's so much rubbish out there.

The military said almost nothing. Soldiers letters tended to repeat gossip that may or may not be true. And newspapers were wildly unreliable. You can get three newspapers talking about the same incident, and they say three different things.

And finally, there were so many different motives and reasons women might throw on a uniform. People who have researched women soldiers find everything from prostitutes to girls maybe looking for a little adventure, a couple that probably really did follow a loved one into ranks, and then people like Rosetta Wakeman, who was in it for the money.

There are stories of women bouncing from one regiment to another, relisting several times, and they may have done it simply for the bounty money. If indeed the stories are true.

Albert is unique on many levels and it's almost impossible to trace or track anyone else like it. I think given how much people did not talk about anything to do with deviation from sexual or gender norms, it becomes very difficult to pursue from any scholarly perspective.

 

[wuzreb]

That is kind of a chicken and egg kind of quandary isn't it? Did we superimpose an outline on the story a long time ago because it better fit our expectations, i.e. "they just impersonated men in order to get ahead economically?" Are we doing the same thing from the other pole when we say "there is something more than economics going on in these stories?" In the inevitable absence of evidence, I'm going to be cautious and say we just don't know, do we.
I knew a woman in one of my congregations who was then in early middle age. Lived at home. Never married. Always wore jeans and androgenous attire and a short sensible haircut. I do not ever remember seeing her wear a dress. She came from a farming family and worked outside doing farm stuff. At the same time, deeply and passionately professing Christian. Did needlepoint and quilted, though. We still have things she made. She wasn't an activist. She just was. And all of us, including family, were cool with that. I think of her when conversations like this come up.

You may have hit on one of the most salient points, there. Everybody wants to define Albert. Everybody wants to find out why he did it, what made him tick, what made Albert Albert?

But maybe Albert just was. Maybe from an earlier age it became convenient to wear trousers and work like a boy, and that was all there was to it. No big examinations of identity one way or another.

Rosetta Wakeman didn't present any particular identity angst, she just wanted to do what she wanted to do. Perhaps Albert was the illiterate version of the same.

Of course, Victorian sensibilities being what they were, Albert had to build habits and mannerisms that would serve him. Don't want to be arrested or humiliated for wearing pants. But again, maybe that's just who he was.

Perhaps, besides pondering how gender identity defined Albert, maybe we can also consider whether, at some point, gender ceased being part of his identity.

Maybe Albert was just being Albert, quietly doing whatever his Albertism allowed him to do. Food for thought, anyhow!