Shapeshifters
READ ABOUT THE STORIES & FACES BEHIND THE ARTWORK BELOW:
Albert Cashier aka Jennie Hodgers
Cashier was born on December 25, 1843 in Clogherhead, County Louth, Ireland. Not much is known about his early life, as the only account available was given by Cashier when he was suffering from dementia in 1913. The case of Albert Cashier, born "Jennie Hodgers" with a female sex assignment, is one of the most famous because Cashier continued to live as a man after the war and was not discovered until a couple of years before his death. His consistent and nearly life-long commitment to a male identity has prompted some contemporary scholars to think of Cashier as a transgender man.
This much is certain—on August 6, 1862, Albert Cashier, a resident of Belvidere, Illinois, enlisted in the 95th Illinois Infantry. Although he was the shortest soldier in the regiment, and kept mostly to himself, Cashier was accepted as “one of the boys” and considered to be a good soldier.
Cashier’s regiment was part of the Army of the Tennessee and fought in over 40 engagements, including the siege of Vicksburg, the Battle of Nashville, the Red River Campaign, and the battles at Kennesaw Mountain and Jonesborough, Georgia. There is an account of Cashier being captured and escaping by overpowering a prison guard, but no further details of this event exist.
Cashier served a full three year enlistment with his regiment until they were all mustered out on August 17, 1865 after losing a total of 289 soldiers to death and disease.
After the war, Cashier returned to Illinois where he settled in Saunemin. He continued his identity as a man, and held many different jobs, including farmhand, church janitor, cemetery worker, and street lamplighter. Cashier also voted in elections at a time when women did not have the right to vote and collected his veteran’s pension.
In November of 1910, Cashier was hit by a car and broke his leg, at which time his sex assigned at birth was discovered. The local hospital agreed not to divulge his sex assignment, and he was sent to the Soldiers and Sailors Home in Quincy, Illinois to recover. Cashier remained a resident of the home until March of 1913, when due to the onset of dementia, he was sent to a state hospital for the insane. Attendants there discovered his sex assignment and forced him to wear a dress. The press got a hold of the story and soon everyone knew that Private Albert Cashier had been born as Jennie Hodgers.
Many of his former comrades, although initially surprised at this revelation, were supportive of Cashier, and protested his treatment at the state hospital. When Cashier died on October 10, 1915, he was buried in his full uniform and given a tombstone inscribed with his male identity and military service.
Source: American Battlefield Trust
Pauline Cushman
In April 1863, Pauline Cushman was performing in the play The Seven Sisters at a theater in Louisville, Kentucky, when she was approached by two paroled Confederate officers. These officers asked her to make a toast to the Confederacy during the performance. They even offered her $300. Cushman, unsure about the proposal, went to Colonel Orlando Hurley Moore, the U.S. Provost Marshal, in Louisville for his advice. In response, he told her to accept the proposition and report back to his office the next day. Perplexed, she agreed, offered the toast, and was promptly fired from the theater. When she returned, Moore offered her the job as a Union spy.
As a Union Spy, Cushman used her acting skills to pose as a Confederate sympathizer in both feminine and masculine dress in order to gain information. Posed as Southern woman in a boarding house, Cushman was able to stop the poisoning of Union soldiers by the boardinghouse’s mistress. The mistress revealed to Cushman that she had purchased powdered poison and planned to sprinkle it in the Union soldier’s food and drink. Cushman was able to transfer the soldiers to a different boardinghouse and eventually get the mistress arrested. Dressed as a man, Cushman convinced a Southern woman that she was an undercover Confederate official in route from Canada to Richmond with important, time-sensitive information. The woman, who was setting off to bring medical supplies and important documents to the South, invited Cushman to join her and helped facilitate her travel. Cushman was able to notify Union forces and have the woman arrested and her contraband confiscated.
For her biggest mission, Cushman was sent to Nashville, Tennessee in summer of 1863. Col. William Truesdail, under the command of Maj. Gen. William Rosecrans assigned her to gather intel. Under the guise of “searching for a lost brother,” she was to gain access to Confederate camps in Tennessee. Once there, she was charged with ascertaining the size of the Confederate forces, how well they were supplied, and if they were building any fortification. Rosecrans needed this information to launch the Tullahoma Campaign, also known as the Middle Tennessee Campaign in June and July of 1863. This campaign’s aim was to gain control of Tennessee and threaten the Confederate-occupied Chattanooga, which was captured later that year in November.
While on mission she met a young officer drawing up fortification plans. She was faced with the decision to follow through with the mission and continue onto the other camps or to steal the plans and immediately go back to the Union lines. She chooses the latter. Unfortunately, she was captured by Confederate soldiers. She escaped captivity once, but was recaptured and tried in Shelbyville, TN on espionage charges. She was found guilty and sentenced to be hanged. Ironically, her luck turned when she contracted typhoid fever. The decision was made to wait until she recovered to execute her. Meanwhile, Rosecrans launched his Tullahoma Campaign. Too ill to be moved, Cushman remained in Shelbyville as the Confederates retreated and the Union army marched in. She made a full recovery.
While in Nashville, she received the title “Major of Calvary” for her espionage work and became known as Miss “Major” Pauline Cushman. The Union Ladies of Nashville presented her with a military uniform, which she wore as she travelled throughout the Union. In 1864, she performed a one-woman show under the circus-manager P.T. Barnum about her espionage exploits and was billed as the “Spy of the Cumberland” and the “the greatest heroine of the age.”
Source: The Library of Congress & "Women Who Wear the Breeches: The Representation of Female Civil War Soldiers in Mid-Nineteenth Century Newspapers” by Army Reserve Lt. Col. Danni Leone
FRank Miller AKA Frances Hook
Frances E. Hook was was 14 years old when her brother announced that he was going to enlist in the Union Army. Since her brother was her only living relative, and she did not want to be left alone, Frances decided to disguise herself as a man and follow him to war.
Frances cut her hair short and told the recruiting officer she was 22 years old. On April 30 1861, she enlisted in the 11th Illinois Infantry Regiment as Private Frank Miller. She and her brother served their 90-day enlistment without her gender being discovered.
They then re-enlisted in the 11th Illinois for 3 more years on July 30, 1861. Their regiment fought at Fort Henry and Fort Donelson. Her brother was killed during the Battle of Shiloh, and his death had such a devastating effect on Frances that she could not continue serving with the 11th Illinois, where everything reminded her of her brother.
But Frances Hook was determined to continue her service with the Union Army. She assumed a new alias, Frank Henderson, and enlisted in the 33rd Illinois Infantry. She had served only a few months when she was wounded in the shoulder at the Battle of Frederickstown, Missouri. It was not a life-threatening wound, but one that needed immediate medical attention.
While she was being cared for in the regimental hospital, the doctor discovered that she was a woman, more accurately, a teenager. Union officials discharged her and made her promise to go home, but she had no home nor any living relatives. Army life was all she knew.
Hook soon enlisted in the 90th Illinois Infantry, a new regiment that had not yet seen battle. In the summer of 1863, while marching through Alabama, she got permission to enter an empty house to look for food and medicine. She found several items and began to pack them in her bag when two Confederate soldiers came out of hiding and took her prisoner.
She was imprisoned in Atlanta, Georgia. Soon thereafter, she made a desperate attempt to escape. A guard saw her and ordered her to stop, but she kept running. He fired at her, wounding her in the thigh. She was carried into the prison hospital, where the doctor dressing her wound discovered her gender.
She was assigned a separate room at the prison, and authorities put her on the list of prisoners to be exchanged. On February 17, 1864, Frances was one of 27 Union prisoners who were transferred at Graysville, Georgia. She was then transported to a Nashville hospital, where this picture was taken. She remained there until she had recovered from her wound.
Frances Hook was discharged and sent home to Illinois but speculation remains that with nowhere else to go she reenlisted and continued to serve until the end of the war. She married in 1908, and her daughter later applied for a military pension based on her mother’s Civil War military service.
Contemporary authors of social history and those focusing on women’s studies have put the number of female soldiers serving in Northern and Southern armies as high as several thousand, but the true identities of only a handful are actually known.
Source: The Library of Congress & American Battlefield Trust
Sarah Emma Edwards AKA Pvt Franklin Thompson
Sarah grew up working in the fields with her family and was usually wearing boys’ clothing doing so. She left home to avoid a marriage instigated by her father. Eventually, she began dressing as a man, selling Bibles, and calling herself Franklin Thompson. She moved to Flint, Michigan as part of her job, and there she decided to join Company F of the Second Michigan Regiment of Volunteer Infantry, still as Franklin Thompson.
She successfully evading detection as a woman for a year, though some fellow soldiers seem to have suspected. She participated in the Battle of Blackburn's Ford, First Bull Run/Manassas, the Peninsular Campaign, Antietam, and Fredericksburg. Sometimes, she served in the capacity of a nurse, and sometimes more actively in the campaign. According to her memoirs, she sometimes served as a spy, "disguised" as a woman (Bridget O'Shea), a boy, a Black woman or a Black man. She may have made 11 trips behind Confederate lines. At Antietam, treating one soldier, she realized that it was another woman in disguise, and agreed to bury the soldier so that none would discover her real identity.
She deserted in Lebanon in April 1863. There’s been some speculation that her desertion was to join James Reid, another soldier who left, giving as a reason that his wife was sick. After deserting, she worked — as Sarah Edmonds — as a nurse for the U.S. Christian Commission. Edmonds published her version of her service — with many embellishments — in 1865 as Nurse and Spy in the Union Army. She donated proceeds from her book to societies founded to help veterans of the war.
At Harper's Ferry, while nursing, she met Linus Seelye, and they married in 1867, first living in Cleveland, later moving around to other states including Michigan, Louisiana, Illinois, and Texas. Their three children died young and they adopted two sons.
In 1882 she began to petition for a pension as a veteran, asking for assistance in her pursuit from many who had served in the army with her. She was granted one in 1884 under her new married name, Sarah E. E. Seelye, including back pay and including removing the designation of deserter from Franklin Thomas’ records.
She moved to Texas, where she was admitted into the GAR (Grand Army of the Republic), the only woman to be admitted. Sarah died a few years later in Texas on September 5, 1898.
We know of Sarah Emma Edmonds primarily through her own book, through records assembled to defend her pension claim, and through diaries of two men with whom she served.
Source: The Library of Congress & "Women Who Wear the Breeches: The Representation of Female Civil War Soldiers in Mid-Nineteenth Century Newspapers” by Army Reserve Lt. Col. Danni Leone
Frances Louis Clayton aka Frances Clalin or Jack Williams
In 1863, Frances sought help to receive back pay and bounty money owed to her and her deceased husband. She traveled around the Midwest as she headed from Missouri to Minnesota; from Minnesota to Grand Rapids, Michigan; from Grand Rapids to Quincy, Illinois; and from Illinois to, presumably, Washington, D.C. to locate someone with the authority to grant her request. Along the way, she spoke to reporters about her previous double life as a Union soldier.
Before the Civil War, Frances lived with her husband in Minnesota. When the fighting began, the couple set off to Missouri to enlist, hoping that enlisting a state away could help disguise Frances’s identity. Her husband enlisted under his real name, which has been recorded as “John” or Elmer” in different sources, and she donned the name “Jack Williams.”
They joined a Missouri regiment that was mustered in St. Paul and for another twenty-two months fought side by side. At the Battle of Stones River from December 31, 1862 to January 2, 1863 their service came to an end. In this assault, General William Rosecrans helped win Union control on Central Tennessee while Frances’s husband succumbed to a bullet on the front lines. Forced by the ensuing battle, Frances told reporters that she had to step over his corpse during the conflict.
Shortly after this fateful day, she reported her deception and was discharged from the army. Even though she was injured three times during the eighteen battles she fought in, she notes that her identity was never revealed.
Source: American Battlefield Trust