How Women Enlisted as Men to Fight in the Civil War

In April 1861, just three days after the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter, President Abraham Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers to fill the ranks of the Union Army and end the rebellion in the South. Albert Cashier, an Irish immigrant who came to America sometime before the Civil War, watched the 15th Illinois Infantry Regiment march off to join Ulysses S. Grant and what would soon be called the Army of the Tennessee. In less than a year, Cashier would enlist as well.

By 1864, Lincoln had called for 300,000 more to help tend to the wounded and fill shortages in the Union Army and Navy. At its height, the Union had more than 600,000 troops in uniform, almost 3.25% of the Union population. But while both sides of the war needed bodies to fill the ranks, they were still limiting who could enlist, barring Black men for most of the conflict and women for the entirety of it.

Albert Cashier was a Union soldier that would not be deterred from enlisting for any reason -- even if that reason was because he was really Jennie Hodgers, born a woman. The National Museum of the U.S. Army refers to him as a man because of "his desire to be known as a man" and his "dedicated service to his country in its most trying hour."

American women would not be welcome as full-time military members until 1948, but those who really, really wanted to fight for the cause (Union or Confederate) weren't about to be held back by something like "the law." Cashier was not the only woman to hide her identity to join one of the Civil War's belligerents. Historians estimate as few as 400 or as many as 1,000 women hid their gender to fight the war as men.

Cashier not only fought the Civil War, but a lot of it. Assigned to Company G, the unit recorded him as 5 feet, 3 inches tall, short for a man (according to Ken Burns), but about the average height of a woman at the time. Despite not wanting to share a tent and bathing alone, Cashier was regarded as "one of the boys" by his fellow troops, fighting in some 40 battles, including the 1863 Siege of Vicksburg, where he was captured during a reconnaissance patrol (but managed to escape).

At 110 pounds, the 19-year-old enlistee didn't raise any eyebrows during the medical examination, mostly because there was barely any examination at all. Joining today's U.S. military requires a series of eye exams, blood and urine tests and the infamous naked duck walk. If you had all your limbs during the Civil War, the sky was (apparently) the limit.

"If you had enough teeth in your head and could hold a musket, you were fine," Bonnie Tsui, the author of "She Went to the Field: Women Soldiers in the Civil War," told Smithsonian Magazine in 2011. "The funny thing is, in this scenario, a lot of women didn't seem any less manly than, for example, the teenage boys who were enlisting. At the time, I believe the Union had an official cutoff age of 18 for soldiers, but that was often flouted and people often lied. They had a lot of young guys and their voices hadn't changed and their faces were smooth. The Confederacy never actually established an age requirement."

"So [women] bound their breasts if they had to," Tsui added. "And just kind of layered on clothes, wore loose clothing, cut their hair short and rubbed dirt on their faces. They also kind of kept to themselves. The evidence that survived often describes them as aloof. Keeping to themselves certainly helped maintain the secret."

There were numerous opportunities for Cashier's secret to get out. According to Tsui's book, Cashier was sent to the infirmary for a prolonged bout of diarrhea, a common ailment for Civil War soldiers. Most women who were discovered posing as men during the war were found out after getting sick or wounded. Usually they were simply mustered out of the service and sent home, but a handful were imprisoned or institutionalized.

The need for manpower combined with the simplest of medical exams for new recruits allowed many women to serve unnoticed throughout the entirety of the war. Once in, bulky clothing and Victorian-level modesty standards for bathing and latrines allowed them to keep their secrets. Cashier completed his term of enlistment, was drummed out of the Army and received a veterans pension.

He continued life as Albert Cashier, even after being discovered at the Soldiers and Sailors home in 1911, where he was sent after breaking a leg in an accident. He began to suffer from dementia and was sent to an insane asylum three years later, where they discovered the secret and forced him to wear dresses as a woman. The government even investigated Cashier for fraud in receiving the pension.

Cashier's battle buddies from the 95th Illinois, however, stood up for him and testified that he fought honorably by their side. Because of their testimony, when Cashier died of an infection in the asylum in 1915, he was buried with full military honors in his Union Army uniform.

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