Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.

In the spring of 1914, a Civil War veteran named Albert Cashier arrived at the Illinois state hospital for the insane with symptoms of advanced dementia. As a young private, Cashier had fought at the siege of Vicksburg, where he and his comrades broke the spine of the Confederacy, and his name was inscribed on the Illinois victory monument there. He had lived out the intervening years in modest circumstances, working as a farm hand, a laborer and, on occasion, a street lamplighter, one of the many former soldiers whose civilian lives never achieve the glory of their wartime service. He was destined for the same obscurity in death, had it not been for a secret that the state hospital made public: Albert Cashier was actually a woman named Jennie Hodgers.

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Little is known of Hodgers’s early life; she was born in Ireland and came to the United States while still a young girl. No one knows exactly when or why she began to dress as a boy, but long before the first shots were fired on Fort Sumter, she had abandoned skirts for trousers. On Aug. 6, 1862, she joined the 95th Illinois Infantry after a cursory medical examination that required recruits only to show their hands and feet.

Though the shortest soldier in her company, she was also one of the bravest. At Vicksburg, she was captured while on a reconnaissance mission, but escaped by attacking a guard, seizing his gun and outrunning her captors till she reached her comrades. On another occasion, when her company’s flag was taken down by enemy fire, she climbed a tree and attached the tattered flag to a high branch, while snipers’ bullets soared past her.

Jennie – or Albert, as she was called most of her life – was not the only Civil War soldier who spent much of her time hiding her sex, finding ways to bathe and dress alone in that least private of environments, the military encampment. Indeed, historians have uncovered accounts of hundreds of women who passed as men to fight, some of whom, like Jennie/Albert, had been passing long before the fighting started.

Hodgers’s fellow soldiers recalled her as a modest young man who kept his shirt buttoned to the chin, hiding the place where an Adam’s apple should be. Her comrades teased her because she had no beard, but this was an army of boys as well as men, and she was not the only beardless recruit in her company. She resisted sharing a tent with anyone, but made close friends among her fellow soldiers; with one of them, she briefly owned a business after the war. Despite her diminutive size, she could “do as much work as anyone in the Company.”

Hodgers served in Gen. Nathaniel P. Banks’s Red River campaign in the spring of 1864, marching for miles in the Louisiana heat; by December of that year, she was in Nashville, fighting with the Army of the Cumberland in its hard-won victory over John Bell Hood’s forces. Her final combat experience came during the siege of Mobile, Ala., a fight that did not end until after Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Courthouse.

By all accounts, Hodgers never avoided danger – indeed, at times she seemed to court it – but despite her frequent participation in combat, she was never wounded severely enough to require medical treatment. A combination of good luck, good health and skillful soldiering kept Hodgers from the attention of those who might penetrate her disguise. Indeed, Hodgers served an entire three-year enlistment without anyone guessing her sex.

“Albert Cashier” mustered out of the service with the rest of her regiment on Aug. 17, 1865, and went back to Illinois. Acting as a man was now an ingrained habit, and it eased the return to civilian life. Hodgers could not read or write, and the jobs available for an illiterate woman would have sunk her into poverty, or even prostitution. But as a man, she could get by as she had in the Army, working steadily and honestly, and she made an adequate – if hardly affluent – living as a handyman, a farm laborer and a janitor, turning her work-worn hands to whatever came her way, supplementing her income with a veteran’s pension.

People in the town of Saunemin, where Hodgers eventually settled, may have wondered why the shy young veteran never married, but no one thought it strange for a man to live alone and make a living at any job he could find.

It all came crashing down when Hodgers, elderly and enfeebled, entered the state hospital for the insane. There, once discovered, she was required to abandon the masquerade that had been her lifeline and live in the narrow hallway that early 20th-century America had designed for women.

Officials at the Illinois state hospital forced her to wear skirts for the first time in over 50 years; she found the garb restrictive and humiliating and perhaps more dangerous than the sniper fire she had outwitted so many years before. Unused to walking in the long, cumbersome garments deemed appropriate for her sex, she tripped and fell, breaking a hip that never properly healed. Bedridden and depressed, her health continued to decline, and she died on Oct. 11, 1915, less than two years before women gained the right to serve openly – if minimally – in the Armed Forces.

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By the time of Hodgers’s death, the presence of female soldiers on both sides of the Civil War was well known and well documented. Their exact number is unknown, because their service had to be clandestine, but the ones whose stories we know offer a fascinating glimpse of women who pushed against the boundaries of their Victorian confinement at a time when American women could not vote, serve on juries, attend most colleges or practice most professions, and who, when they married, lost all property rights in most states. Some women were discovered when they were wounded, others when they gave birth, still others when they were taken prisoner. Some women soldiers were discovered only when their bodies were being dressed for burial, and some were discovered years after the fighting stopped.

The female Civil War soldiers were not the first American women to fight on the battlefield; Deborah Sampson of Massachusetts served for nearly two years during the Revolution before her sex was discovered in a military hospital. (After being honorably discharged, Sampson received a veteran’s pension for her Revolutionary service, which went to her children upon her death.) Nor would they be the last. But their service came at a crucial time – when the foundation of the Republic had shifted to allow an expansion of individual rights, when the very nature of freedom was being questioned and the bonds of restricted servitude were being broken, and when the unfulfilled promise that “all men are created equal” was tentatively held out to an expectant generation of American women who, almost 20 years earlier at Seneca Falls, had inscribed their gender onto Thomas Jefferson’s ringing prose.

It would be many years before their sisters-in-arms would reap the benefit of their fledgling feminist agitation – in a world where the word “feminist” did not even exist. Like many pioneers, they sowed the seeds that they would not live to see burst into flower.

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Sources: DeAnne Blanton, “Women Soldiers of the Civil War,” parts 2 and 3, Prologue Magazine, Vol. 25, No. 1 (Spring 1993); DeAnne Blanton and Lauren M. Cook, “They Fought like Demons: Women Soldiers in the American Civil War”; Rodney O. Davis, “Private Albert Cashier As Regarded by His/Her Comrades,” Illinois Historical Journal 82 (1989); Ellen Carol DuBois and Lynn Dumenil, “Through Women’s Eyes: an American History with Documents”; Genealogical and Historical Research Service in Ireland, County Louth, Jennie Hodgers, accessed Jan. 9, 2014; Medical record of Albert Cashier, 95th Illinois Infantry, National Archives; Pension application file of Albert D.J. Cashier, National Archives; Service record of Albert D.J. Cashier, Company G, 95th Illinois Infantry, National Archives.

Jean R. Freedman teaches history and women’s studies at Montgomery College.